Maud Vorstenbosch
More and better matches for YoungOnes: no sitting around but growth
Customers
Marketplaces
Temp & flex
Dec 22, 2022
YoungOnes has been growing steadily for years. If this flexible platform were called OldOnes, then now would be a perfect moment to retire behind the geraniums. But YoungOnes sees more clearly than ever where opportunities lie to grow and improve even further. With predictive data models, they ensure that the existing freelancers find more and better matches. Result so far: 10,000 extra matches per year. Super interesting!
With more than 85,000 freelancers and over 5,000 clients, the need for YoungOnes is more than proven. You can imagine that by now a huge amount of data is available. And YoungOnes now uses that data to improve and personalize the experience of current users. How do you ensure that users keep coming back? How do freelancers quickly find the next job that suits them? YoungOnes, Freshheads, and Building Blocks joined forces to come to concrete improvements.
Experiment 1: personalized suggestions
There is only one way to find out which adjustments have the greatest effect: experimenting. Not just randomly trying things, but making very targeted adjustments based on all available data. One of the first experiments we conducted together was personalizing the job list that freelancers see when they open the app. And that personalization is not just random; cue the AI specialists from Building Blocks. Based on the behavior of freelancers, they built a data model that predicts which jobs match the personal preferences of freelancers. Thus, the number of responses to jobs increased by 3.06% in less than 3 months, and the number of matches per freelancer increased by 1.47%. That may not sound like much, but in absolute numbers, we are already talking about over 10,000 extra matches per year.
Experiment 2: personal push notification
Next, we chose a new experiment that nicely aligns with personalization. We noticed that a fairly large group of freelancers does not respond to a new job every week. Could it be because they don't have time? Or because they just don't think about it? We decided to help this group be more active by reminding them of a relevant job with a weekly push notification. And what we found: freelancers were truly happy with a personalized - and thus relevant - push notification. We saw an average increase of 3.05% in responses in the test group and a 7.33% increase in the number of matches. Enough reason to roll out this experiment live for all users.
And now?
In the coming months, we will continue experimenting to make the user experience in the YoungOnes app even more personal and bring freelancers to their next job as easily as possible. For instance, we want to help freelancers quickly find another job if they are not matched or if a job is retracted. It is interesting to see whether time or the type of job plays a more important role in freelancers' choices for certain jobs. We will investigate this with push notifications.
By continually referencing the entire funnel, we monitor whether an experiment is successful and decide when to implement it permanently. Or not. Of course, that is the downside of experimenting. But we learn much more from everything that doesn't work than from what does work.