Improving the job posting experiences for recruiters on LinkedIn Jobs to attract the relevant candidates.
My Role
Product Designer, Personal Project
Timeline
April 2023 - May 2023, 1 Week
Team
Just me!
Skills
Product Thinking User Research Interaction Design Visual Design
OVERVIEW
Why redesign LinkedIn Jobs?
A personal exploration to improve my design skills.
LinkedIn is a leading product in the professional development landscape with over 900 million users across 200 countries. As a user, I use it to find and apply for jobs, but I never thought about what it takes to actually attract candidates to jobs.
This personal project/design challenge explores one of LinkedIn's many features that empower recruiters to attract relevant candidates to a job posting. As a personal project, I aimed to improve my visual and interaction design skills.
Post a job quickly with recommended job descriptions.
Recruiters can generate a recommended job description based off of LinkedIn's database of job description templates.
Get recommended skills to add to your post.
Based off the job description drafted, we'll recommend skills that you can add to your role.
Quickly share your role to co-workers in your network.
After you post a role, share it with your co-workers to attract relevant candidates.
PROJECT CONTEXT
LinkedIn Jobs allows anyone to post a job publicly on LinkedIn.
Their current resources include:
PROBLEM SPACE
To understand my space better, I approached research with two perspectives in-mind: the user and the business.
PILLAR 1: INTERVIEW HURDLE
Users didn't use LinkedIn Jobs.
Challenge
After my first interview, I realized that recruiters at large companies generally don’t use LinkedIn Jobs.
They use products like: SmartRecruiters and LinkedIn Recruiter that provide better features for large talent pools.
I pivoted and reframed my user interviews based on: first-time users and those with LinkedIn Jobs experience.
Due to my schedule, I didn’t have time to find recruiters who had more experience with Jobs.
I divided my participants into two different groups: those with prior experience with Jobs (2 participants) and “first-time users” (3 participants). I reframed my questioning based off these groups.
PILLAR 1: INTERVIEW INSIGHTS
User interviews provided insights on compensation, posting skills, and tech-literacy.
Compensation
Compensation plays a huge role in the recruitment process, but there isn't a direct area to add it in a job posting.
"Gen-Z, especially, is looking for job descriptions to know how much they're making." - Recruiter 1
Overwhelming Skills
For 3/5 recruiters, the skills section felt overwhelming.
"[Skills is] pretty cool, but pretty intimidating for what it is." - Recruiter 2
Barriers of Entry
3/5 recruiters wished for more guidance on features and wished there were more "safety" features to recover from errors.
"Tech literacy can vary, more error-prone experiences makes me less confident to post a role." - Recruiter 5
PILLAR 2: COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Competitors had similar experiences, but they were updated to fit current job needs.
Similar patterns, just spread out more.
Both Indeed and ZipRecruiter had similar flows to LinkedIn Jobs, but they spread out input fields amongst 4-5 pages. Could this potentially make users feel less overwhelmed?
Compensation, always.
Competitors like Indeed, required jobs to post compensation. They also showed average compensations to help recruiters gauge estimates.
SYNTHESIS
Turning our insights into high-level project goals and ideas.
User Persona & HMWs
With my overall insights in-mind, I crafted a user persona to help gauge who I am designing for.
Prone to errors.
For example: users can select between four severity levels for an incident.
The last two, high and urgent, were coded the same; leading users to misinterpret severity levels.
IDEATION
Adding to the user flow, sketch by sketch.
Crafting the project's trajectory through principle.
Synthesizing our research insights, we had identified two main problem areas which ultimately became the guiding principles for our design explorations:
Usability
Our designs should empower users to take action in order to improve their task efficiency.
Navigability
The entry dashboard should have clear navigation points and next step opportunities.
PROTOTYPES
Designing my ideas into realistic LinkedIn Job features.
Crafting the project's trajectory through principle.
Synthesizing our research insights, we had identified two main problem areas which ultimately became the guiding principles for our design explorations:
Usability
Our designs should empower users to take action in order to improve their task efficiency.
Navigability
The entry dashboard should have clear navigation points and next step opportunities.
USABILITY TESTING
Testing my designs with recruiters and critiquing them with a designer.
Crafting the project's trajectory through principle.
Synthesizing our research insights, we had identified two main problem areas which ultimately became the guiding principles for our design explorations:
Usability
Our designs should empower users to take action in order to improve their task efficiency.
Navigability
The entry dashboard should have clear navigation points and next step opportunities.
DESIGN SHOWCASE
Final designs
REFLECTION
Challenging my design-thinking once more.
Prior to this experience, I hadn't done a similar design challenge in almost 2 years. Between then and now, I had took on internships and started obtaining a degree in human-computer interaction. This challenge tested what I had learned in those experiences, from product-thinking to design intentionality that's backed by data.
