Motivating tech talent to connect with new career opportunities

My Roles & Responsibilities

Client Single Point of Contact, User Research & Interviews, Visual Style Guide, Hi-Fi Mockups, Client Deliverables

Tools

Figma, Principle, OptimalSort, Paper Prototyping, Note Cards

Background

Celential.ai is a venture-funded artificial intelligence (AI) startup which focuses on serving as an online recruiter for tech talent in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. Job seekers can utilize the platform, allowing the service to recruit individuals for compatible opportunities. The primary target audience are software engineers, however, future projects will cater to professionals from all tech related professions.

Project Opportunity

To promote more users to utilize the platform and giving each user a customized career matching experience, a new project arose in which:

Weekly matches are given to the user
The new match will quantifiably distinguish a rating system for how compatible the match is on a letter system (A to C)
The opportunity will display all the quantitative data about the job opportunity and position’s company by the company’s AI.
The opportunity will also allow the user to quickly select “Interested” or “Pass” allowing further steps towards the application process, eliminating time to screen to see if the candidate is interested.

The Challenge

The project’s main goal is presenting information to users regarding the job description and company description. The client would like our team to redesign the platform that helps display information in a compelling manner, enabling users to take action on an opportunity.

Pain Points: Initial Observations through Heuristic Analysis & Contextual Inquiry

Difficult to scan and strict flexibility, not allowing users to customize information that they feel is relevant or least relevant.
No proper grouping of information, going against human limitations in visual perception.
System does not allow forgiveness when users selects an action.
Visually, the aesthetic and minimalistic designs can be better implemented.

Developing a Project Plan

Information Architecture and Understanding What Information is Most Important

Information architecture comprises the most effort in navigating. The original design did not establish any grouping methodology, therefore various methods were utilized to establish groups and subgroups to better organize the information.

Some of the information that was given to my team:

Card Sorting and Contextual Inquiry

Card sorting, both in person and online, were used to understand how people perceived the information and if certain information should be grouped. Contextual inquiry was conducted to understand how people navigated through the current website.

User Interviews

“There are too many job postings out there on various sites. I’m not sure if I’m wasting my time?”

— Interviewee

“The amount of information is overwhelming when looking for a job. I usually eye only specific details about a job before applying.”

— Interviewee

“I really don’t like going over hundreds of job postings and resume dropping into each application. But sometimes, I feel like I have no other option when applying for jobs.”

— Interviewee

“Am I over-qualified or am I under-qualified for a job I am applying for?”

— Interviewee

User Interview Findings

Tech talent, especially passive job seekers, are not motivated to review new job opportunities if relevant information is not presented within a short period of time.

What do the surveys say?

I needed to identify current problems and motivations of job seekers that are in the process of reviewing open opportunities. My partner and I decided to create a Google form survey to gather up information that validates assumed pain-points & guiding my future design decisions. The results were very helpful in knowing what my main goals of solving were.

Synthesis: Establishing the Main Groups of Information

After our initial research, we established groupings to simplify the perception of information. We came to finalize 5 different groups that testers had a high affinity in forming.

Comparators: Similar to Online Dating

The match making process of Celential.ai’s new platform mimics a dating app, CoffeeMeetsBagel, in which users are given a few matches daily. Users are required to take action on interested or pass based on a set of information. The habitual action and the perceptibility of information parallels how users will utilize and interact with Celential.ai’s new platform.

Key insights from this analysis:

“Interested and pass” bar is always visible.
Certain information is prioritized for better scannable perception.
For passive job seekers, similar to passive online dating users, information should be laid out in a way where users can use minimal effort to determine if they should select interested or pass.

Psychology and Visual Perception

Based on human psychology, people have limited capacity to hold information.

1. limited capacity (only about 7 items can be stored at a time)
2. limited duration (storage is very fragile and information can be lost with distraction or passage of time)
3. encoding (primarily acoustic, even translating visual information into sounds).

https://www.simplypsychology.org/short-term-memory.html

Gestalt Principle: Proximity or Contiguity [1]

The principle of proximity or contiguity states that things which are closer together will be seen as belonging together. Looking at the picture to the right, since the horizontal rows of circles are closer together than the vertical columns, we perceive two vertical lines. Since the first two columns and the last two columns have less space between them than the center two columns, we perceive two groups of two columns.

https://etad.usask.ca/skaalid/theory/gestalt/similar.htm

Evaluating the problem

The information collected by Celential.ai is not being displayed in a manner that is easily digestible for job seekers, adding unnecessary effort in their ability to make quick and informed decisions, decreasing their motivation on whether or not to pursue a job opportunity.

Hypothesis

If we increase discoverability of the most relevant information, and if we increase affordance for our call to action points, job seekers will be more motivated to make a decision on the opportunities they have been matched with. Therefore, improving their current experience by enhancing motivation and curiosity, while improving the AI match engine.