Product: Agent Tools

Talent Agents are the third user type our platform serves. They underwrite and represent talent on our platform, submitting applications on their behalf, acting as a trusted liaison between talent and employer, and taking a cut if their talent gets hired. Generally, agents convey a level of professionalism that appeals to both employers and talent, making their presence on our platform an important marketing tool.

↑ A typical agent workflow looks something like this.

During the research phase we talked to several working agents to get an idea of what kinds of features they need the most that are currently lacking in the digital tools they use, but we also reached out to employers to try and validate certain assumptions we had around why they might want agent integration into our platform. Two important metrics stood out to us:

• 80% said unvetted talent/talent quality is a concern on Backstage.
• 76% cited “trust and accountability” as the biggest benefit of working with an agent.

Agent-represented talent are typically of a higher quality, and the agents spend more tailoring applications to help ensure employers receive higher quality submissions. Additionally, they put pressure on their talent to show up on time to auditions and shoots (talent no-shows are a significant problem).

An agent's workflow consist of three main tasks: 1. finding talent for their roster, 2. finding jobs suitable for their talent, and 3. submitting their talent for work. Regarding #1, some agents come to Backstage having an established roster of clients. Most however, are newer to the industry and need to build a roster from scratch. This can be a very drawn-out process, so it needs to be clearly visualized for the user on each side of the transaction. An important detail around item #3 is that agents (especially those with large rosters) frequently submit applications for several people for the same role at once. For this they need a very tailored version of the product that talent use to self-submit.

Our agent tools, and therefore this entire user base, are relatively new to the platform, with the initial product offerings having been shipped in April 2024.

Scouting talent

Building a talent roster can involve a lot of communication with a lot of different people. For the talent in particular it's important to be guided with specific, clearly defined steps and actions so they don't just jump at the first offer they receive. We do our best to vet agents that join the platform, but some opportunists can slip by, so safety and security are super important here. We convey this to talent through education in messaging with each step. Additionally, the interface we built lays out every part of the process and piece of communication so both parties have a record of the transaction.

A brand new product like this typically involves much more time in the ideation phase. This one in particular required significant wireframing as we really tried to nail down the best way to visually represent all the potential steps of an agent scouting request.

↑ We went through several rounds of wireframes for the agent scouting UI before landing on the design below.

↑ A main goal with the MVP scouting request interface was to make the process of securing new talent easy to follow.

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Submitting applications

We were able to use a lot of the UX from the existing talent flow and tweak the UI for this agent-specific use case of multi-application submission. For instance, on the application screen we added a new toolbar for the agent to manage all talent they want to submit to one role. On this customized application UI they can easily filter through application statuses, see issues that need to be addressed before submission, customize individual applications, and submit them either one at a time or in bulk.

↑ A status toolbar on the application screen makes it easy to see, navigate, and submit all the talent an agent has selected for a role.

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Application and roster management

Between scouting and submitting applications, and agent might be performing a number of smaller tasks, like:

• Communicating and negotiating with employers.
• Checking the statuses of submitted applications.
• Updating applications with new assets, or based on new role requirements.
• Managing/evaluating their roster to determine what gaps might exist and the kind of talent needed to fill them.

Fortunately, the above are all tasks that either the other users on our platform were already doing, or that were similar enough to existing tasks that we were able to fairly easily adopt and iterate on existing products to suit the needs of agents. All in all, getting these users integrated into our platform was a relatively smooth endeavor.

Our agent tools are very new and their launch happened at a point when we had really built up our data team and analytics capabilities. Because of this, we have a ton of metrics around product adoption—and it's been very exciting to see! The agent market is small compared to employers, and especially talent, so these numbers are great to see. They've certainly surpassed our expectations.

For the 6 months since launch in April 2024 we've seen:

• Over 5k agent sign-ups
• 34% of sign-ups have been completely organic
• 2k scouting requests sent
• 52% roster invites accepted by talent
• 85k applications submitted

Additionally, because of the novelty around this product and the fact that our team came into this project rather clueless around the specifics of agent workflows, we conducted a lot of interviews. We've been able to leverage those relationships to conduct post-launch interviews with those same folks to see how they've used the product so far, what we did right, and what still needs improvement. Overall the response has been overwhelmingly positive, and the excitement we've seen around agent integration has been very validating.

On the talent side, we definitely want to increase that roster acceptance rate. We've been reaching out to find out more about why they chose to not accept an agent's invite. So far the biggest takeaway is that lot of the hesitance comes from the fear of being scammed. We think there are some easy wins around providing talent with not only reassurance, but also hard data (now that we have some) around how having an agent on Backstage can help them get more work.