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Brigad enables self-employed professionals and businesses in the hospitality and healthcare industries to connect for short-term or temporary roles – aka ‘missions’. This case study explores the transformative impact of TravelTime on Brigad's operations, focusing on improved connection rates, reduced mismatches, and enhanced satisfaction for both employers and freelancers.
Across France and the UK, Brigad aims to transform these less digitally native industries through an app that harnesses innovative technologies which are often reserved for more digital industries.
Independent freelance ‘talents’ sign up to Brigad and are sent jobs from businesses that meet their preferences – such as the type of work, available days, skills, etc.
By integrating TravelTime API, Brigad has significantly improved its offering, leading to tangible business benefits.
Reduced poor matches by 18%
Increased talent-mission connection rate by 12%
Reduced late withdrawals by 3X
“Until we started working with TravelTime, all we showed was kilometres and straight-line distance, but it made people leave the app.”
Grisha Ghukasyan
VP of Engineering at Brigad
Commute times most important after salary
Last year, Brigad set a challenging but important goal: to improve the connection rate between their businesses and freelancers. This is the number of missions that a company creates which are then successfully matched to a freelance worker – a number that is critical for Brigad’s revenue and long-term success.
Grisha Ghukasyan, VP of Engineering at Brigad highlighted that “in order for us to make more money, we have to increase the connection rate.”
To understand where they could optimise, Brigad conducted research with their live users to discover how they used the app and how they prioritise when choosing a role.
Grisha Ghukasyan, VP of Engineering at Brigad says: “The highest priority is salary, of course. After the salary, the second priority is the journey time. Until we started working with TravelTime, all we showed was kilometres and straight-line distance, and it was making people leave the app.”
To check how long it would take them to reach a job by their preferred mode of transport, freelance talent would have to drop from the Brigad app to search for the address on an external site like Google Maps. However, this led to a disruptive user experience.
It was clear to Brigad that this was an area of the app that could be improved. The team hypothesised that including commute times on the app would help the company meet its goal of improving the connection rate.
Since implementing TravelTime Distance Matrix API, Brigad has achieved a 12% increase in the connection rate in less than a year. This has a direct impact on Brigad’s revenue because only connected and completed missions make Brigad money.
TravelTime and Brigad deliver innovative commute time solution
Using the TravelTime API, Brigad now delivers an innovative solution for businesses to find the perfect freelance workers for their needs.
There are a number of ways Brigad has implemented the TravelTime API:
Commute Time Listings
When a person looks at the missions shared with them, they can then see the journey time for each listing. After salary, this is deemed the most important factor in their decision to take on a job and has directly impacted the matching quality, connection rate, noise, and withdrawal or dropout rate.
With TravelTime, Brigad has improved its talent matching algorithms and reports that the amount of ‘noise’ – jobs that are shown to talent but not accepted – has decreased by 18%.
Travel Preferences
Freelancers can set both their preferred mode of transport and maximum travel time for jobs. This gives the user an additional level of personalisation and control over the missions that get shared with them, which increases the likelihood of matching the best people with the best role.
While this helps Brigad meet their short- and medium-term goals, including reducing the late withdrawal rate by 3X, the long-term impact of this cannot be ignored.
Better matching increases the sticking power of Brigad, and will keep both businesses and freelancers returning to the app to find the best opportunities.
Job Prioritisation
Brigad uses the TravelTime API to algorithmically prioritise which jobs get shown to each worker.
For example, if there is an urgent mission starting in 3 hours, the app will show this to the people that could get there fastest. This creates a much more powerful and reliable matching system that not only considers skills and salary, or just physical location, but real-world commute times too.
Reminders
Brigad also uses the TravelTime API to send reminders to workers once they have agreed to a job. This increases the likelihood of people fulfilling their mission and reduces late withdrawals.
Brigad notifies users to remind them of their mission, when it starts, and how long it will take to get there via their preferred transport mode.
Together, TravelTime and Brigad have reduced the number of late withdrawals from jobs from 6% to just 2%. And because companies only pay Brigad when the job is completed, this has driven a significant increase in revenue from the app.
Grisha Ghukasyan, the VP of Engineering at Brigad, explains why it works: “Until we started working with TravelTime, all we showed was kilometres and straight-line distance, but it made people leave the app. The user will click on the address to redirect to Google Maps to see how long it takes to get to a job from their home.”
Why Brigad chose TravelTime over Google
Speed, price and volume of requests
Like many companies looking for a commute time solution, Brigad first looked at the big players, including the Google API. However, Brigad’s VP of Engineering, Grisha was disappointed to find it was “not useful at all”.
“I started to look at companies that could calculate the travel time. But Google’s travel time API is not useful at all. It’s not quick and it costs a lot for what it is.”Grisha Ghukasyan
VP of Engineering at Brigad
Speed
The Google API was far too slow for what Brigad needed to achieve. Its performance would slow down the matching algorithms and make processing each worker connection too time-consuming.
Read our in-depth Google vs. TravelTime performance comparison.
Price
The Google API is extremely expensive because it charges by usage and every single travel time calculation needed. For the scale and speed that Brigad need to meet their goals, Google API would have been 8X more expensive than the TravelTime API.
Size of requests
Brigad have hundreds of thousands of freelancers available for work at any one time. Even with some filtering based on matching criteria, when a new mission is listed on the app, there may be thousands of relevant workers that Brigad then needs to calculate the travel time for in a single request.
The Google API could not cope with the size of requests that Brigad needed to reliably deliver the travel times for their users.
Why TravelTime comes out on top
The Google API did not meet Brigad’s requirements. They did consider other providers but none of them had the features needed and building a solution in-house was deemed too time-consuming and costly, which would distract from the core platform competencies.
TravelTime comes out on top for many key API capabilities:
Performance at scale
TravelTime allows its customers to produce very large matrices with extremely low response times that don't slow down search or matching algorithms.
Compliance
Unlike many of the bigger players, TravelTime prioritises privacy and will never build a competing app or website. Other APIs collect user details, but this would have created compliance problems for Brigad, so the TravelTime API was ideal from a privacy standpoint.
Transport modes
The TravelTime API has all the modes of transport required by workplace search platforms – driving, walking, cycling, and crucially, public transport. This ensures that the matching capabilities are as powerful as possible, meeting the unique needs of both businesses and those they are trying to hire.
Integration
The integration of the TravelTime API is fast and simple. With TravelTime’s comprehensive API documentation, Help Centre, and dedicated Customer Success team, integration is a smooth process.
Additional features
Compared to many APIs, TravelTime has many additional features that not only meet Brigad’s existing requirements but inspire them to imagine the possibilities of new use cases. A feature that offers vast potential is using isochrones.
TravelTime API: Supporting Brigad’s future initiatives
Unlike many APIs, TravelTime API has both distance matrix and isochrone endpoints.
In the future, Brigad can integrate isochrones into the app to display how many people are with a given number of minutes radius of a job location – and therefore how many will receive information about the mission. This will provide more visibility on the available talent for businesses in the given area.
Brigad is also considering data analytics use cases for the API. Because of the fixed price and unlimited usage model that TravelTime offers, there may be ways for other parts of the business to get value from the licence without any impact on overall cost.
Elevate your candidate matching algorithms with TravelTime
If you want to replicate Brigad’s success and integrate travel times into your candidate matching or jobs platform, to improve relevancy and personalisation, integrate the TravelTime API into your platform.
Unlock the potential for higher revenues and happier customers by adopting this innovative approach to job connection algorithms.