Untapped’s AutoSource helps you connect with qualified, pre-vetted candidates sooner - reducing time to hire

Project Summary

Context

Untapped’s mission is to broaden access to transformative careers by connecting early-in-career talent with recruiters. In 2022, layoffs and budget cuts left recruiters with fewer resources while job seekers grew more urgent. We needed a faster way to connect candidates and companies.

Problem

Recruiters had to source great, diverse talent with less time and fewer tools. Candidates—especially those without strong networks or traditional backgrounds—just wanted face time with employers. Our sourcing product was strong, but the next step was clear: personalization and recommendations.

Solution

We built AutoSource, a feature that:

  1. Matched candidates to open roles

  2. Pre-vetted interest, ensuring high intent

  3. Presented recruiters with ready-to-engage talent

Outcomes

📈 80% candidate response rate (4x higher than cold sourcing)
💪 70% recruiter engagement with presented candidates
✨ 20% increase in product adoption
📝 60% candidate interaction with recommended roles

Team

2x Engineering Pods; 2x Senior PMs; 1x Staff Product Designer; 1x Senior Product Designer

Role

Senior Director, Head of Product and Design

Right to Win

By Q2 2023, Untapped’s marketplace had 680K+ candidates, 10–15% MAU, and 3–5K weekly signups.

Recruiters valued our sourcing tools but lacked time to engage thousands of qualified candidates. As competitors launched manual sourcing programs, we needed a scalable, repeatable way for recruiters to stay active on Untapped with fewer resources.

The existing Untapped sourcing product allowed recruiters full control to discover candidates

We had the opportunity to help recruiters bypass the most painful part of sourcing for new candidates…
…and we would do it the Untapped way.
🌈 Prioritize underrepresented talent

Candidates who have self-identified with a traditionally underrepresented group by presenting them to recruiters first.

💎 Surface hidden gems

Candidates who come from an non-traditional educational background and are traditionally overlooked. These could be bootcamp / certificate grads or career-switchers.

“Anything that saves time would be helpful – we are working with very lean teams and high volume recruiting... and don’t have time to go through thousands of resumes”

Customer quote from Untapped Customer Advisory Board

Defining MVP

In order to ensure enough volume of high quality matches, the initial feature set was scoped for recruiters hiring junior software engineers in the US.
45% of active candidates were junior engineers
60% of customers were hiring junior engineers

Step 1: Recruiters Enable AutoSource

The team explored a variety of UX patterns to balance introducing a brand new feature to recruiters while balancing ease of use.

Step 2: Candidates Express Interest in Jobs

We ran a high volume of unmoderated user tests with job seekers. Since we were introducing a new mental model onto the platform, we wanted to test both copy and UX patterns.
💡 Key Insight

Job seekers understand the concept of Untapped “referring” them for specific jobs…... but they are confused by what happens next.

Job seekers are shown relevant and fresh jobs on multiple surfaces. The highest visibility surface was on their dashboard upon login.

Step 3: Recruiters review then message candidates

After exploring different approaches, we ran several user tests to validate each step of the recruiter flow.

The goal was to incentivize immediate action so that the algorithm would learn and so candidates would hear back immediately as well.

Recruiters were notified of available matches on multiple surfaces - on the job detail page, through weekly emails, and when doing a generic search.
Recruiters were given a focused space to review candidate matches. They could provide feedback on the matches and bulk message candidates within this one screen.

Impact

We started with a two-phase beta before launching to the entire customer base.
📈
80% Response Rate

Recruiters saw 4x more responses compared to the standard cold sourcing experience

✅
70% Recruiter Activation

Recruiters took action on 7/10 weekly candidate matches

✨
+20% Adoption

Recruiters who had at least 1 AutoSource role turned on, adopted the product at a higher rate

🎉
60% Candidate Activation

Candidates interacted with at least 60% of the roles they were shown