Improving Recruiting Conversion

Our goal for this project was to improve recruiting conversion. We noticed that college coaches were evaluating athlete profiles but not moving forward with following their profiles or recruiting them. Our team investigated multiple causes for this poor conversion rate: poor match, insufficient video, or missing own coach evaluation. But when we called and surveyed college coaches, we discovered a lack of trust & increased skepticism in the athlete's own coach's evaluation of the profile. We realized that we were asking college coaches to "trust" the opinion of a random coach that they have never met and know nothing about. In our user feedback calls, we began to map out how two coaches build a relationship and start to trust one another. We learned that one of the most significant factors in building trust early on is understanding each other's track record for coaching and placing athletes. If we could surface a coach's track record to a college coach while evaluating an athlete, they would be more inclined to recruit the athlete.

Add Alumni Experiment

The design issue we faced involved getting coaches to backfill their placement history, especially when we already have an automated athlete placement process. When a coach's athlete commits on FieldLevel, they count towards their FieldLevel alumni count. This issue is that a coach wants a way to represent their entire athlete placement history, which usually pre-dates their time at FieldLevel. We started testing an MVP solution for a feature that allowed coaches to manually backfill their entire coach placement history to represent themselves to other coaches on the system accurately. After a few iterations and prototypes, we landed on an MVP solution that we were happy with and began to build for the test. We launched our test and began pushing segments of users to backfill their placement history. We learned a few things from the test: 1) coaches were willing and excited to backfill their alums, and 2) there needed to be a practical way to get this information in front of relevant coaches. We made a call for success in the MVP feature. We knew we needed to run our next experiment on the awareness piece of this project.

Connection Highlight Visibility Experiment

We decided to run our next experiment on getting "connection highlights" in front of the right coaches with the right messaging. We identified a couple of areas in the journey for college coaches that would be an excellent place to insert these connection highlights 1) athlete evaluation sections, 2) coach network connections, and 3) athlete promotions. We also began holding user feedback sessions and running surveys to understand what coaches felt were the most valuable pieces of information to be presented. We learned that when a coach views an athlete, they are more inclined to want to know the athlete's coach's track record with placing athletes. When a coach connects with another coach, they are more interested in mutual connections and if they are recruited in the same parts of the country. We decided to place the connection highlights on the athlete's own coach evaluation sections and the coach's profile. We launch the change.

We ran an A/B test with the new feature versus the old one and let the experiment run for two weeks. The results were overwhelmingly positive! We had seen a 50% increase in the following rate of college coaches to athletes. Surprisingly, we also saw an increase in coach network connection requests and accepted requests. We also sent out a “trust” survey, the same one we sent in the beginning of the project, so document any changes. Almost every coach stated that they felt more trust in the athlete evaluation from seeing the athlete’s coaches placement history. Overall, we increased the conversion rate of college coaches recruiting athletes because we had increased trust.