Upwork: Enabling Localized Talent Search for U.S. and 
Global Markets.

Upwork hired me to lead design for a cross-functional team focused on enabling localized hiring across the U.S. and globally. The objectives of this team were to:

• Meet the demands of companies seeking specialized, local talent.
• Mature Upwork’s product to compete with staffing agencies and attract larger enterprise clients.

The initial solution the team had prior to my engagement—a simple toggle to post jobs and search for U.S. based talent—validated strong demand and increased revenue (domestic talent commands higher rates).

However, hiring managers and businesses wanted more flexibility to find hyper-local talent (by city, state, or region), and the existing search experience only allowed filtering by time zone.

UX Audit:
I conducted a comprehensive audit of the end-to-end hiring experience, from onboarding to job posting and talent search, identifying friction points and unmet needs.

Data & Search Analysis:

I partnered with data science and search teams to analyze user behavior and found the following insights:

• Savvy buyers prioritized skill and budget, but often had preferences for certain regions (e.g., Eastern Europe for software developers).
•  Less technical buyers preferred working with local talent for easier communication and trust.

Sales Team Insights:
Collaborated with sales to understand enterprise client needs and market signals. This revealed an urgent need for internal teams to vet and source talent by location—critical for competing with staffing agencies.

Competitive Benchmarking: 
Conducted a comparative analysis of analogous platforms to identify best practices in location-based talent search.

To address this, I designed a new search experience with flexible, intuitive location filters, guided by these principles:

• Location is a central criteria to the main search experience.
• Users can search by zip code, city, state, region, country, or time zone.
• The system intelligently expands searches to include relevant metropolitan areas, surfacing better matches beyond a strict zip code.

Initial sketches: 
Experience exploration and layout, to answer whether the location search should be part of the main search experience or a filter. For my initial exploration, we decided the location should be part of your initial search (talent type + location = results, which then you can filter further.

Search location criteria:
Established the different parameters users can search for based on known use cases. Based on this, we designed a smart typeahead that is able to anticipate the user’s intent and guide users toward the right outcomes.

A guided search experience through a smart typeahead:
As soon as a user engages with this location search, the typeahead would guide users toward the right search criteria, before they even start typing their location.

Final Output

View prototype

Strategic Impact:
My proposal led Upwork to reorganize teams, establishing localized talent hiring as a KPI for each domain (e.g., talent search), rather than as a horizontal initiative. This shift improved resource allocation and focus.

Go-to-Market Readiness:
The sales team gained confidence in Upwork’s ability to compete with staffing agencies and pursue larger enterprise deals.

Long-Term Value:
This work became a foundational element of Upwork’s “Talent Scout” sourcing services, supporting the company’s broader upmarket strategy.
Thought Leadership:
I acted as a subject matter expert for the talent search team as they launched the initiative, providing ongoing guidance.

Today, this feature is being used as a filter, and it’s considered the 3rd most important search and filter criterion for hiring managers and businesses when they’re finding talent in the marketplace.