Product: Application Manager

Employers are the lifeblood of our platform. They’re Casting Directors, Production Assistants, Producers, Brand Marketers, and other creators that need to find talent for a project. The jobs they post attract the talent that pay for subscriptions to apply to those jobs. And the types of jobs they post run the gamut from a single-role project like an online commercial, to a full-length feature film with a dozen roles. Depending on the scope of the project, the needs of employers can vary greatly, and thus the tools they need to find and hire the right talent.

↑ A typical employer workflow might look something like this, but can also involve many more steps.

In the casting industry, hiring can be complex. Finding multiple actors for a feature film can be a much lengthier and involved process than hiring a video editor for a commercial, for example. The latter is much more like a typical hiring workflow you might find on a platform like LinkedIn or Upwork, whereas the former may require things like reviewing self-taped media reels, working with collaborators, and scheduling multiple rounds of live auditions.

The first version of the primary product for employers, the Application Manager (shipped in 2014) was very basic and didn't offer the advanced organizational tools to make Backstage appealing to more established professionals casting for large projects with complex hiring needs. We talked to several of them to learn about their workflows and needs.

Key user research takeaways for Application Manager MVP

• Workflow inclusivity: Most existing casting tools did only one or a couple things well, forcing casting directors to segment their workflows into multiple products or platforms, both digital and manual.
• Flexibility: No one casting platform offered the required flexibility, specifically around audition scheduling.
• Intuitive UX/UI: Nearly all our competitors had products that, while powerful, looked dated, were hard to navigate, and not built with good user experiences in mind.
• Quality talent: One of the biggest complaints from employers has always been about getting too many applications from talent that don’t match the job description.

Market evolution

Over the past few years there has been a significant shift in the types of jobs we see posted on Backstage. While more traditional jobs for actors (films, TV shows, etc.) remain the most common type, we’re seeing a lot more jobs for things like voiceover work, crew/staff positions, and user-generated content.

This shift was in large part brought on by Covid-19 and the industry-wide need to place more focus on jobs that could be done remotely. But it’s also part of the overall evolution of media consumption. Things like social media ads, podcasts, influencers, and the emergence of TikTok have meant an increased need for these new kinds of jobs, and the talent to fill them.

Adapting the product for the market

The second version we shipped had all the tools someone hiring for a big project might need. However, as the recent shift in job type I just described started to happen, it became clear that is was a bit too robust for many of these new types of smaller, faster-turnaround projects with simpler hiring needs (e.g. I need an influencer to film a 30 second ad for Instagram and I need it in a week). Many people would try us out once and then not use us again—bad for business.

To ensure we have a product that these users will continue to use for their hiring needs, we've needed to do some serious refactoring so our platform better serves their projects without losing the more complex tools that so many other users have relied on for years. The challenge is in introducing simplicity while retaining flexibility.

With the third major release of the Application Manager, here are some of things we focused on to reduce the learning curve and increase retention of our new, growing user base:

1. A simplified, more intuitive UI that outlines the steps in a typical hiring workflow.
2. Applicant "cards" optimized to highlight the most important talent details and common actions the employer might want to take.
3. Improved filtering and discoverability of higher-quality talent that better match the role description.
4. Revealing advanced functionality based on specific user needs.

Let's take a look at some of the things we've built related to the above items.

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First, we addressed the number one complaint: an overwhelming interface that's confusing to navigate. Imagine you want to hire a content creator for a short social media spot. Does this interface, designed with the flexibility to cast a multi-role feature film, look well-suited for trying to hire one person for a single job?

Before: flexible but complex

↑ A UI that became bloated with high-level functionality made it hard for first-time users to know where to go.

While that experience did work well for those large projects, it was way too much to parse through for the smaller ones. We started by restructuring the IA and designing a simpler, more intuitive experience that provides easy toggling between roles, folders that help better define the user's workflow and guide their journey, and filters moved into a modal—cleaning up the UI even more.

After: simplified while retaining flexibility

↑ This part of the updated UI makes it easier to navigate your workflow and sort through all the incoming applications to find the best matches.

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Surfacing higher-quality applicants

To help ensure employers get higher quality, better matching applicants, we built two important features: relevance sorting and pre-screen questionnaires. Relevance sorting takes talent application and profile data and surfaces the best matches first (vs the previous default sort of newest submissions shown first), and pre-screen questionnaires allow them to filter out poorly-matched talent by requiring them to answer customizable questions as part of their application. The latter is a newly launched feature that has long been requested by our users.

↑ Advanced pre-screen filters help employers more quickly sort through and vet incoming applicants. Moving all filters to a new modal UI has also increased filter discovery and usage overall.

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A UI optimized for finding the right match

For each role in their project the employer will see applicants displayed in a minimal grid view that makes it easy to quickly scan through headshots. Most employers hiring for acting gigs have told us they make their first pass on applicants based on headshots alone (for better or worse), so this view is meant to enhance that workflow.

↑ A simplified UI that focuses on the applicant's headshots and the most common next action in a typical workflow—deciding whether you like them or not.

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But for many non-traditional acting roles, (e.g. voiceover, crew), employers also like to see key details about the applicants, as well as have easy access to all their media (headshots yes, but also video and audio reels). For that they can easily expand the detail view that displays more useful details about the applicant.

↑ The grid card can expand into the detail card, which better serves users needing more than just a headshot.

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The typical starting point of a hiring workflow is for a user to review their applicants and shortlist the ones they might want to audition or hire. Those shortlisted candidates get moved to the next bucket in the workflow UI. Often, further sorting is needed, especially for projects with many roles and applicants, and sometimes multiple collaborators helping with the hiring process. One heavily-requested feature was the ability to create custom shortlists, which can either be specific to a project and role, or added to the user's general talent database for a future project.

↑ Talent can be added to project-specific shortlists or saved to a general talent database for potential future hiring needs. All lists can be shared with collaborators, who can be granted various permission levels.

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Progressive onboarding to guide the user

To make shortlists and other features easily discoverable, we've started displaying simple onboarding alerts to smartly guide and introduce users to new features they might find useful at various stages of their workflow. In this way, features can be revealed progressively, when the user might need them, which means less initial clutter in the UI if they don't need that specific functionality for their project.

↑ Helpful onboarding alerts appear at the bottom of the screen after users perform specific actions.

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Product customization based on project scope

Despite all the recent changes to make our employer products more suitable for smaller jobs, we still need the tools for larger projects, like feature films, to schedule and hold multiple rounds of auditions—sometimes with dozens of time slots of varying length spread out over multiple hours or days.

Because audition scheduling can be surprisingly complex and would really need its own case study, I won't go into too much detail here. Mainly, I wanted to mention it because our scheduling tools are something we recently decided to exclude from the redesigned version of the Application Manager. We now ask users at the beginning of the job posting process if they'll need to hold auditions, and only if they say yes do we include these tools in the interface they see. This is one of the key ways we've been able to create a more simplified and intuitive experience for those users who don't need the complexity that was once included by default.

And just to give you a small taste of the scheduling tools and the potential complexity...

↑ Traditional audition schedules are often several hours long, broken down into time slots of only a few minutes each.

↑ The audition schedule editor was designed for larger projects with more complex scheduling needs.

The Casting Application Manager has been instrumental in growing the business by making Backstage a platform that serves casting professionals as much as performers. In the first year after launch, the number of jobs posted tripled. Today that number has increased by 500%. The first year jump makes sense given this product didn't exist at all before. As we iterate on it to work better for some of the new, smaller, non-acting types of projects we've been seeing the last few years, we do expect to attract more of those job posters and start seeing more exponential adoption again.

For example, since 2020 crew/staff jobs went from 2% to 8% of total jobs, and social media ads had nearly identical growth. This has been an important lesson in adapting to the market. For years we were almost entirely focused on making the platform more attractive to the bigger players in the game—the movie studios and streaming networks.

While the more established brands continue to be extremely important to our business (we'll get thousands of subscriptions from one Netflix or HBO job alone), those jobs are much more infrequent compared to the recent uptick in voiceover, crew, and UGC jobs. And those latter jobs are quick to hire and pay relatively well given the time commitment needed.

More than anything, the diverse pool of talent on our platform wants to get paid, and by making our employer tools more accessible to a greater variety of job posters, we’ve gotten more paid jobs. With more paid jobs come more paying subscribers (the talent), and those subscriptions make up our primary KPI and provide Backstage with its main source of revenue.