Fulcrum empowers companies to find & hire specialized gig economy workers while staying compliant to employment laws

We built the web app platform and brand from the ground up.
The Fulcrum identity is a direct visual metaphor that animates the process of finding "the one” candidate out of many.

The Battle for Talent

Enterprises undergo a laborious process of trying to find talent through archaic, manual methods. In most large companies, there's a department tasked with finding and hiring hourly/contract talent, but the process doesn't feed the company's need for highly specialized talent on-demand. Hiring managers and CEOs alike feel the pain of the hiring process.

Technology Responds

As a potential solution to this, there are thousands of talent cloud platforms capturing on-demand talent while new players emerge daily. Gig economy workers with unique skill sets can join the platform focused on their vertical and see the offers roll in.

Toptal LogoMaven LogoCatalant LogoThe Mom Project Logo

Enterprises are missing out on this critical talent pool.

For Fortune 1000 companies, access to the talent cloud is limited and legally risky. Sometimes, hiring managers are so desperate for candidates they “rogue spend,” meaning they use the talent cloud platforms but put it on the credit card to circumvent the procurement process. Rogue spend has a direct effect on an enterprise's financial bottom line as it reports inaccurately. Rogue spend also cuts out potential scale-based partnerships enterprises can negotiate.

Accordingly, gig economy workers cannot take advantage of opportunities at large enterprises due to the employer's compliance concerns.

The demand and supply side need a solution. Enter Fulcrum.

️Hire the highest quality talent from best-in-class talent cloud platforms

Leverage the power and extensibility of the on-demand talent cloud in one place

Expand the talent supply chain while working within existing sourcing tools (VMS software)

️Streamline the sourcing process to deliver the right talent at the right time

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Sean Ring, Co-Founder, Fulcrum
It’s rare to find a partner who’s as passionate as we are about affecting positive change in the world.
— Sean Ring, Co-Founder, Fulcrum

Brand Strategy = UX Strategy

When we build an industry-changing solution, we love to start at the idea stage. The Fulcrum team came to us with an industry changing idea, seed funding, and a name. As their design & technology team, our charge was to be smart about how we spent their budget for the initial build and brand.

We created custom user experience and brand workshops that built a strategic foundation for the brand and platform. Backed by research, we developed high-level personas with exercises including empathy mapping, stakeholder interviews, and user journey frameworks.

With this understanding of Fulcrum's varied users, we developed unique positioning to address each user type’s needs.

Personas

To design an experience that truly helps people, understanding their needs is key. We always start with research and our partner’s industry expertise.

Wireframe

Rough wireframe sketches of the landing page helped us tell the story of Fulcrum before we built it.

The Why

The “why” is vital to creating a clear product vision as one team.

“Is and Is Not”

This exercise directly fueled our visual aesthetic for the product and the brand.

User Flow

Story mapping and user flows help us create seamless experiences from initial on-boarding to completing the process.
Hover or tap to see whiteboard exercises

Win the ongoing talent war

For CEO's

Leverage the power of the talent cloud to solve your people problems. Flex work is no longer relegated to traditional hourly rate earners. The "gig economy" is becoming the talent economy.

With flexibility as one of the most crucial components of a healthy business, Fulcrum is your solution to leverage an agile workforce while mitigating legal risk and staying compliant.

Expand the talent supply chain

For Procurement

Provide smart, agile workforce solutions to your company while reducing rogue spend. With a single point of contact and optional integration with your VMS, create long-term value for your hiring needs.

Source talent on demand

For HR

Add talent-on-demand to your total talent management strategy while staying 1099 compliant and empowering direct sourcing. Easily transfer candidates within the company to be sure quality people stay within your organization.

Knock your project out of the park

For Hiring Managers

Get instant access to specialized teams to help solve your toughest problems. Find & deploy the right talent sourced from established and up-and-coming flex hiring platforms in your industry.

Exploring Style

With a solid understanding of the solution to be built, we explored different ways to represent the brand visually. Inspired by an “is/is not” brand exercise, an understanding of our users, and the company's values, we created three on-strategy design directions for the team to review and discuss.

Simple, Clean, Scalable
Bright, Transparent, Speed
Fun, Scalable, Fresh

All three directions resonated with Fulcrum's founders as they expressed the company's vision and users. Ultimately, the direction chosen was clean, simple, and scalable. This way, Fulcrum could feel modern and tech without presenting too informal or edgy.

Tech Strategy

We designed a custom RESTful API as the underlying foundation to the Fulcrum platform, putting innovation front and center, supporting faster iteration. By providing an interface that helps Fulcrum's platform align to the API's request-response cycles, external partners can better understand, use, and integrate with their API.

Leveraging 3rd party Gig Economy integrations from the likes of Upwork and others, as well as VMS integrations from partners like SAP's Fieldglass we were able to create a standardized Staffing and Recruiting engine designed around Fulcrum's gold-standard for seamlessly and quickly trading data between all parties while driving out meaningful and automated results in real-time. These integrations allowed for a highly scalable staffing process that elegantly bridge the gap between the compliant driven business Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and the hugely popular emerging Gig Economy platforms.

API RESULTS
{
"data": {
"id": "#104258",
"status": 1,
"vms_job_id": "28342149",
"job_posting_owner": "John",
"job_title": "Data Scientist",
"job_category": "Web Development",
"labor_category": "Engineering",
"skills_required": "MySQL, PHP",
"skills_preferred": null,
"experience_required": "4 years...",
"experience_preferred": null,
"education_required": "University",
"education_preferred": null,
"rate": "$80-$100",
"hours_per_day": 8,
"hours_per_week": 40,
"total_hours": 2000,
"workload": "Full Time",
"start_date": "2018-04-14",
"respond_by_date": "2018-03-13",
}
}

Continual Partnership

As Fulcrum grows their client base, we continue to support their design and technical needs. We’re building multiple integrations and designing the next iteration of their user experience.

Trevor Foster, Co-Founder and CEO, Fulcrum
BL3NDlabs was like a founding member of our team. Their unique approach to user-centric design and development helped build our initial product and craft our brand. Their thorough process combined with their talented staff set us up for future success while staying on-time and on-budget. An absolutely incredible partner!
— Trevor Foster, Co-Founder and CEO, Fulcrum

tl;dr

Strategy

  • Product Strategy
  • Demand Marketing Strategy
  • Brand Positioning

Design

  • User Research
  • Information Architecture
  • Wireframes
  • Product Design
  • Creative Direction
  • Brand Design
  • Motion Design

Engineering

  • Technical Strategy
  • Prototyping
  • Front End Development
  • Dev Ops
  • Systems Architecture
  • Infrastructure
  • API Integration
  • Software as a Service

Get It

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