Snagajob: Iterating Through Small Opportunities for Big Impact

At Snagajob, an hourly work marketplace, Product Manager Amy O’Callaghan and Product Designer Jenn Atkins were always trying to solve one core problem: How could they connect people who need work with the people who need workers in a satisfying way for both parties?

In an attempt to answer that question, Amy and Jenn were working on improving their net promoter score (NPS) as their desired outcome. They dove into NPS comments and interview feedback and identified several opportunities. Two of these opportunities were already very familiar: “I don’t have enough applications” and “I don’t have the right applications.” But they were surprised to uncover a brand-new opportunity: “I can’t get in touch with my candidates.” As they spoke with hiring managers, Amy and Jenn discovered that they could rarely connect with candidates on the phone. Only about one in ten candidates answered the phone when a hiring manager called, and hardly any of them returned the call after receiving a voicemail message from a hiring manager.

Through their customer interviews, Amy and Jenn learned that this was an issue with every applicant from all hiring platforms—not just Snagajob. This meant they had a “big, hairy problem that no one understood, which would be a major, multi-faceted win for us if we solved it.”

But the challenge with a “big, hairy problem,” as Amy and Jenn describe it, is that it can be difficult to address. Where do you even start?

The way Amy and Jenn approached it was by going on “walkabouts” to nearby retail stores and restaurants and asking to speak to the hiring manager. Through these conversations, they started establishing relationships with local business owners, asking about their hiring needs and offering to be their unpaid, personal hiring assistants, typically for a 30-day period. Describing this experience, they say, “It was exhausting, illuminating, and amazing.”

Through their in-depth research, Amy and Jenn discovered a number of smaller sub-opportunities that helped them better understand why hiring managers were struggling to get in touch with candidates. One of their first big discoveries was that calling candidates was ineffective. Amy and Jenn ran a quick test that proved that, even when a candidate said they preferred phone calls, they were unlikely to answer a call from a hiring manager. Through experimentation, they realized that the applicant’s persona had fundamentally changed. They were mobile first. They preferred texting to talking on the phone. Many of them didn’t even have their voicemail set up properly.

When Amy and Jenn pivoted to texting candidates, they saw an immediate improvement in response rate. First, they would text to ask if it was a good time to call before calling a candidate. When that went well, they began exploring other ways to communicate via text—most often attempting to ask follow-up questions and schedule interviews. They tried sending texts both as people and as bots, but quickly realized this was only a temporary solution, since most hiring managers would not want to use their personal devices to text candidates.

They knew that, to solve this problem, it had to work for both the candidates and the hiring manager. So, they started looking for mobile-first, web-accessible tools that allowed managers to communicate via text and candidates to answer from a phone. They would send a text asking candidates if they’d be willing to answer a few follow-up questions on their application. If they answered “Yes,” they would send them a link to a SurveyMonkey form. This was easy to set up and fill out on a mobile device. This small tweak allowed them to connect with candidates in a way that simply wasn’t happening before.

Once they were able to successfully connect hiring managers with candidates, they discovered the next problem: Finding a time to schedule interviews required a lot of back and forth. Amy and Jenn continued making small iterations and improvements like these until, finally, they had a well-oiled interview-scheduling machine. And once they tackled that, they learned about the next hurdle: Interview no-shows. But they continued to chip away at one opportunity at a time. Looking back, they can’t say that one single opportunity was responsible for their success, but marching across their tree one opportunity at a time is what allowed them to deliver on their desired outcome.

Amy’s and Jenn’s story illustrates how iteratively tackling small opportunities can add up to have a large impact on an outcome. When first getting started, it can be hard to see how starting with a small problem will ever amount to anything. But if you keep at it and work the cycles, small changes start to snowball, and you start to see the collective impact of working across your tree. Addressing sub-opportunities over time eventually addresses parent opportunities. And addressing parent opportunities is your path to consistently driving product outcomes.