Optimizing a Talent Acquisition Funnel

Runwayz exists to connect emerging talent with the people who hire and train them. For the skilled trades, that "hiring" entity is a Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee (JATC), a training trust co-governed by a local union and its signatory contractors. The JATC owns recruitment, the aptitude test, the interview panel, and the ranked list that decides who gets indentured.

When I looked closely at how that recruiting process actually works, I found the same structural failure on both sides of our market.

For the JATC, the funnel is one-shot. Application windows open at odd times — some annually, some semi-annually, some on a rolling basis, and the program has almost no visibility into qualified talent until an application lands inside that narrow window. Outreach today is analog and relationship-driven: career fairs, CTE partnerships, demo days, literature for guidance counselors, and a heavy reliance on word-of-mouth and family connections that nobody measures.

For the talent, missing the window by a few days is one of the most common ways a qualified applicant never becomes an apprentice. They have no visibility into when to apply, no sense of how a panel will read them, and no way to demonstrate the exact traits the panel is actually grading: reliability, work ethic, willingness to learn. They show up to a ten-minute interview as a stranger, judged on a transcript and an aptitude score.

The real problem is a visibility-and-conversion gap that hurts both parties at the same time. Programs can't see or evaluate talent before the window, and talent can't see or prepare for the window before it closes. Everything valuable that could happen before an application (discovery, evaluation, warming, preparation) simply doesn't happen.

I ran a discovery-stage research plan built around one question: how do trade unions actually recruit early-career talent today, and where does the funnel break down? The plan combined research across published JATC application processes with a live-interview design anchored on insights derived directly from Runwayz' key stakeholders. Four findings reshaped how I understood the opportunity.

Recruitment is owned by the JATC, and selection is mostly soft signal. The official rubric scores education, ability, work experience, reliability, interest, attitude, judgment, and cooperation. Underneath that, though, our stakeholders told me what they're really listening for is work ethic, willingness to learn, and reliability. The decision is a behavioral read made with almost no prior data on the candidate. That's a measurement problem Runwayz is unusually well-positioned to solve.

The highest-leverage moment is before the application. The clearest wedge in the research was the dead zone: the stretch of time when qualified talent is in the market but invisible to the program, and the stretch when ranked candidates go cold between interview and indenture. Nobody keeps talent warm. Pair that with narrow, oddly-timed windows where qualified applicants are routinely lost to timing and admin friction, and a pattern emerges: the program's biggest conversion losses happen in the months when no tool is present or available.

Work-Based Learning is the strongest evidence a candidate can bring, and it changes the application itself. WBL in its most structured form of an apprenticeship. A 200-hour pre-apprenticeship completion is far stronger panel evidence than a transcript. This told me the rubric should surface behavioral evidence over time, the exact thing WBL produces and the exact thing a short interview can't capture.

The business problem is existential, and I learned that the buyer is not our user. Density is at a record-low ~10.7%, the trades face a demographic cliff, and training is funded by member dues plus contractor contributions. That makes a bigger, better-converted top of funnel a core means for survival. But the research also surfaced a buying reality I had to design around: the buyer, the daily user, and the beneficiary are three different people. The product had to deliver visible value to the user while making the ROI legible to the buyer.

I went in assuming the problem was top-of-funnel volume. The research moved me to a sharper thesis: the problem is the absence of any structured discovery-and-evaluation layer in the pre-application window.

The research pointed at one product: a place where a JATC can collect and evaluate talent before the application window opens, and where talent can be discovered and evaluated long before they ever apply. The feature is anchored on three major design decisions.

Decision 1: Make the rubric the foundation of the feature. The panel decision is soft-signal with no prior data, so the most valuable thing Runwayz can hand a JATC is evidence against the traits they grade. The talent profile is structured as a three-layer architecture from the rubric brainstorm: hard credentials, soft-signal evidence, and fit indicators. Every score should link out to the underlying evidence, whether a mentor note, an attendance streak, or a 200-hour completion, so a panel can audit it thoroughly.

Decision 2: Open the pool with a consent moment. A talent pool that simply exists feels untrustworthy to a program and exploitative to talent. So the pipeline starts at Step 0: the employer opts in, turning on a pre-application pool from the opportunity-edit panel. On the talent side, candidates join the pool and declare intent, a high-signal commitment that turns a cold list into an opted-in audience on both sides.

Decision 3: Close the loop and convert pre-application to live candidates. The current funnel is one-shot. The pipeline replaces it with a triggered loop: employer-to-talent actions, talent-to-employer actions, and system triggers all contextually connect to the other side. The result is a single employer talent pool surface where a Training Director can see matched talent per opportunity, evaluate them by a configurable rubric, send cohort outreach that prepares people to apply on day one, and see who's interested in the opportunity, all before the application window opens.

The goal is to have our JATC partners pressure-test this feature through a pilot program. I'm targeting my two key failed assumptions, visibility and conversion, at highest-leverage moments from my research:

Top-of-funnel timing: Today, qualified applicants are lost because windows are narrow and outreach is analog. A pre-application pool of opted-in candidates who are notified the moment a window opens converts at a far higher rate than cold word-of-mouth. The pipeline targets a ~30–40% increase in qualified applications per window, recovering talent that previously missed it entirely.

The evaluation problem: A panel today walks into a ten-minute interview with a transcript and an aptitude score, effectively no prior behavioral signal on the traits it grades. The rubric layer takes evidence coverage from 0% to the majority of ranked candidates, giving panels 2–3× the actionable signal before the interview starts. Better signal earlier means a better-ranked list, and fewer wasted slots.

Beyond the projections, the user journey is clear and research-backed. All of our potential stakeholders are being accounted for and I am creating a strong feedback loop with measurable insights. I started assuming the job was generating more top-of-funnel volume. Research informed me that the leverage isn't more outreach, it's building the structured discovery-and-evaluation layer that simply doesn't exist in the weeks before an application opens. I'm excited to see how this feature performs in the market.