Overview

Growing companies identify hiring as their most significant pain point, while independent talent spend “too much time” searching for jobs.

With an estimated 34 percent of the American workforce currently in freelance or independent contractor jobs, with as many as 40 percent forecasted at the time by Intuit to be in those jobs by 2020, a massive opportunity existed for revolutionizing how professionals match and get hired.

LiquidTalent was a NYC-based marketplace for hiring developers and designers through their social connections, raising $1.2m from Apollo Management.

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LiquidTalent’s founders were referred to Blood & Treasure by another customer of ours. The brief was to create an MVP for a hiring platform on iOS and Web.

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With starter screens from an external designer, we worked closely with the founders to flesh out the UI design and craft the UX, prior to going into development.

A fun challenge was the payment model. Originally we integrated Stripe only to find that Stripe cancelled the client’s account without explanation so we quickly switched to Balanced, which was very soon after acquired by Stripe, so we switched back to Stripe.

Other things we learned included making User Creation much more lightweight (e-mail address and password/FB auth token) and then having a separate resource for all of the other user metadata (name, location, etc) because that info may be entered in bit by bit by the user. We also broke it out into its own endpoint (like /signup) because User Creation is a heavy-duty operation with significant side-effects.

All swipes/votes - both yay and nay - were tracked as endpoints that supported POST rather than REST because each vote would trigger a series of downstream actions, and there were no take-backsies or modifications.

Also in anticipating many-to-one or many-to-many relationships in the future, we baked them into the data model/API even though the UI exposed it as a one-to-one relationship.

With the MVP that Blood & Treasure built, LiquidTalent secured $1.2 million in seed funding from Apollo Management in NYC.

We placed one of our Senior iOS Developers on site in LiquidTalent’s NYC office to build Version 2 of the platform.

We are proud to have contributed to building a community of excellence that made it super easy for exceptional talent to connect with high quality jobs from some of the world’s best- loved brands.