Design and process documentation
Design Prompt:
The goal of this exercise is for us to get a better understanding of your end to end design thought process and execution, starting from initial ideations/sketches/research all the way through to a polished end product. Please include your research, user flows and wireframes, as well. It is also meant to be interpreted however you see fit and we recommend that you present your work in a clear, concise and visually appealing way.
Introduction: LinkedIn is frequently used for job hunting. Companies pay to post a job and market their opportunities to qualified candidates. LinkedIn job seekers may search for jobs through keywords, company pages, or via their network of connections.
Task: Design an improved job posting experience for recruiters or hiring managers, that helps them attract and recruit relevant candidates for the position.
Scope: Please think through the end to end experience, and share your thought process, approach, insights, and analysis with us. However, we want to limit the scope of the final deliverable to one high-fidelity design comp that demonstrates your interaction and visual design capabilities.
KEY FEATURES OF THE IMPROVISED EXPERIENCE
- Inclusive & People-centered:
Job seekers pay careful attention to the language used in the job description. Even an unconscious bias in its tone and vocabulary can discourage high potential candidates belonging to a certain race or gender from applying. The ‘tone check’ feature, powered by machine learning, could aid in tracking such innuendoes and make recommendations for maintaining an inclusive tone and vocabulary. This recommended check can be instrumental in creating diverse and inclusive teams.
- Specific and Relevant
Adding screening questions (Step 2 of job posting process) has been made a mandatory step. This would have 3 advantages: a)make job posts more specific and succinct, b) reduce the number of generic applicants, c) make the interview process more efficient by providing relevant information about the candidate as a useful starting point.
The screening questions have been divided in two groups:
- At least 1 field required: Core Skills, Industry Skills, Interpersonal skills, Education, Cultural Fit
- Optional: Tools and Technology, Certification, Location, Language, Visa Status, Work Authorization
- Meaningful insights about the applicant
Skills could provide meaningful insights about the applicant but the term is used loosely by the job poster and the job seeker, often to refer to both skills and industry knowledge. The new job posting experience expands the broad definition of ‘skills’ to specify the following as separate parameters:
- Core Skills related to job function: quantifiable through years of experience and skill assessment test
- Industry Knowledge: quantifiable through years of experience and skill assessment test
- Personality traits: self assessment by the applicant
- Cultural Fit: Values gauged through specific questions
Each of these parameters have distinct options, which could be set as ‘Required’ or ‘Preferred’ by the job poster. Additionally, the job poster may request for a skill assessment as a part of the job application.
Interpersonal skills and cultural fit questions are qualitative characteristics and cannot be quantified easily. However, serious thought to these at an early stage, both by the job poster and the applicants, is consequential to finding the right fit for both. The answers filled in here could serve as meaningful conversation starters during the interview.
- Refreshed visual design
In line with the new branding released in mid 2019, the new UI is designed to be warmer, playful and people-centered. The overall design and color scheme of new icons is a combination of both the old and the new brand identity. Additionally, some of the inconsistencies in color and button style have been addressed.
DESIGN PROCESS
Decoding the Design Brief
I didn’t have any significant ‘first thoughts’ on how to decode the design brief. The reason for this was simple: I had no experience of posting a job on LinkedIn and had limited understanding of the recruiting process. It was clear to me that I wouldn’t have any answers without knowing the nature of the challenges that hiring managers and recruiters face. But as I set out to start interviewing recruiters and hiring managers, I quickly realized that this was the wrong season to be talking about problems, its holiday season! This gave me time to do some secondary research, about the recruiting process employed by companies of differing scales. Alongside, I made a list of questions that I could use to interview people as soon as they replied.
Research and Insights
I started with understanding LinkedIn as a brand and its members. I came across the new branding released in Jun 2019, which includes warm colors, illustrations and vibrant photographs. In line with the brand value of ‘people centered’ and ‘a warmer approach to design’, I decided to utilize the opportunity to use refreshed brand language for an otherwise grey and cold interface.
I was also surprised to learn that after US, India has the largest number of LinkedIn members, followed by China and Brazil. This intriguing discovery encouraged me to find interviewees in different parts of the world. Despite the initial hurdle in doing primary research, I finally managed to conduct 7 interviews. I was doing secondary research side by side, which helped me incorporate more relevant questions to corroborate some of the things I was reading about.
Following are some interesting findings from these interactions:
Most users prefer using LinkedIn Recruiter or Premium to find suitable candidates on their own, but rarely use job posting because it gives a lot of irrelevant applicants.
“Drawback of Recruiter is that you’ve to try multiple keywords, a C++ developer does structure development, an architect also works on the structure development”
“Women pay careful attention to job descriptions and sometimes the language is a turn off, and we lose out on good candidates”
Despite the large number of LinkedIn members in India, recruiters and hiring managers prefer other platforms for job posting and hiring
LinkedIn is only a starting point to either collect a pool of applicants (in case of Job posting) or to source best match candidates without creating a job post (through Recruiter or just using Premium to find people through boolean search)
The candidate’s alignment with the organization’s values and method of working is valued by all organizations, but it’s touched upon at a later stage in the interview process
“Most recruiters know that the skills listed on LinkedIn profile are pretty meaningless.”
“Gauging hard skills is easier, but soft skills listed on a resume are irrelevant, most recruiters don’t care for them.”
The last two were particularly striking findings and reminded me of a seminar at Tepper School of Business early this year, An INsider’s Guide to LinkedIn. It was conducted by two former employees of LinkedIn: Jeremy Schifeling and Omar Garriott. The duo demonstrated effective ways of utilizing LinkedIn profile to be discoverable by ‘humans and machines’. They highlighted the importance of using the right keywords in the title and paragraph description, using a contextual cover photo for where you want to go and having recommendations. But the ‘Skills and Endorsements’ section was referred to as not too much to worry about, because, by its design, literally anyone can potentially be endorsed for anything.
Some more secondary research on importance of skills to recruiters and hiring managers during the application process revealed a similar anecdote, and I realized the need to make the application process efficient enough to highlight candidates’ skills at an early stage. A piece on LinkedIn Talent Blog from January 2018 confirmed my conviction about the need for re-hashing the hiring process to make it more strategic to discover the right fit.
There is no dearth of high-potential individuals on LinkedIn, but the challenge with the current job posting and recruiting process is identifying the high potential right fit easily.
Defining the Opportunity
I decided to do two things to re-hash the job posting process on LinkedIn to enable recruiters and hiring managers to find the right fit for a role easily.
Job posting as a feature is currently available only for web, and it makes sense since most of the users of this feature would be working in a professional setting. This diminished the need for doing a mobile UI for this exercise and I could stick to the web interface. I also knew that I didn’t need to re-invent the wheel in terms of the user flow because the existing user flow seems to work fine. So I decided to add my ideas to the existing user flow.
Ideation and Sketches
Step 2 of the existing job post form is for including screening questions, but this whole step is optional. I think that this should be mandatory in order to make the requirements and expectations of the employer more specific and succinct. To achieve a balance between asking for too little and too much information right out the gate, I thought that it would be valuable to segregate this step into 2 kinds of parameters:
- At least 1 field required: For skills, knowledge and individual values
- Optional: for other information
Even with this figured, I struggled with making the skills aspect more purposeful. The statement “skills listed on LinkedIn profile are pretty meaningless” had struck me the most and I could relate to it based on my own experience. The general impression of these being meaningless on the profile percolates the weight given to them in job application process. How could I leverage ‘skills’ to give more meaningful insights about a professional?
As I dug deeper, and lost some sleep over this question, I realized that the term ‘skill’ is used loosely both by the job poster and the job seeker. More often than not, it is used to refer to both skills and industry knowledge. I thought it would be valuable to expand this broad definition of ‘skills’ to specify the following as separate parameters:
- Core Skills related to job function: quantifiable through years of experience and skill assessment test
- Industry Knowledge: quantifiable through years of experience and skill assessment test
- Tools & Technology: quantifiable through years of experience and skill assessment test
- Personality traits: interpersonal skills and values held by an individual. These are usually difficult to measure, but self assessment by the candidate during application can serve as a conversation starter during the interview.
The rationale behind separating core skills and industry knowledge was that core skills are fundamental skills that could be applied in different industries. For example, project management as a skill is used in multiple industries: design, healthcare, finance, information technology etc. Industry knowledge, on the other hand, is very specific to an industry sector. Additionally, professionals today are increasingly switching between industries but might have acquired useful core skills along the way. In order to attract the maximum number of high potential candidates for a role, it is important to map each of these parameters simultaneously.
This mapping could be easily done in terms of years of experience of applying the skill. I thought of flipping the existing model of using work experience to map the job function, to instead leveraging the application of different skills by a candidate. Hence in my design, skills and knowledge are the main parameters and work experience is only a way of measuring that. This would also help to bring diverse skill set to businesses and increase LinkedIn’s role in enabling this.
Prototyping
I used Adobe Xd for the high fidelity prototype and Adobe AfterEffects to put the video together. I also leveraged the newly launched ‘states of a button’ feature to avoid making multiple art-boards.
Future Considerations
Given more time, I would have liked to cross link the skills (based on the proposed expansion of the term) and skill assessment feature between member profile and job posting. This is possible though standardization of the tags everywhere on LinkedIn for all job functions and industries. This is achievable and pragmatic for two reasons respectively: 1) LinkedIn has easy availability of this data for through member profiles, 2) unlike soft skills, hard skills and industry knowledge are unambiguous and objective, therefore could benefit from standardization.
I also hope that this model could be tested to see the benefits for both job posters and job seekers.
