Not make it weird for job seekers to find the right hiring manager or recruiter for the role they're interested in?
In order to address this problem, I've created a feature called recruiter profiles.
Designer & Researcher
August 2021 - November 2021
Figma, Notion, Google Surveys
Solo Passion Project
With Recruiter Profiles, no need to cold message, stalk endlessly & pray that someone messages you about a specific role! Know who & why you're contacting someone, for the right role.
I began my research though doing a sample survey in order to understand what painpoints would be necessary to focus upon & empathize with who are my target demographics.
Above are some common themes that I found within my survey results.
LinkedIn is just 1 of the many job seeking platforms & so I conducted some user research & looked into what LinkedIn could leverage vs other platforms. I found that;
I interviewed 4 people who gave me insight on how their job search process was like & while each of them had varying success job seeking, it seems there were a few commonalities amongst all interviewees as seen above. These commonalities gave me a foundation to start forming my problem statement.
At this point I decided that I would focus upon helping job seekers find important contacts easier & in a more organic way, to form genuine connections.
I started off analyzing the results of my 30 survey respondents by affinity mapping.
I decided to try & seek a pattern amongst each of my notes & decided to group them into 2 groups; User Goals & User Constraints.
When coming up with potential solutions, I divided each of them into different subsets to see which ones would be more feasible by improving existing features vs building new ones from the ground up. Ultimately I decided to revamp the profiles for recruiters & hiring managers.
I chose this because it would benefit in improving the current makeup of profiles while also bringing something new to the table.
Once I divided the notes into 2 groups, I began to think of different kinds of solutions that could alleviate the user goals & the constraints that they were facing.
Because I have identified the problem statement, I shifted my focus on analyzing my current research in order to find potential solutions & begin the design process.
I began mapping out the information architecture as I started up my early designs in my head just to help me focus on what I should design & how structurally my designs would pan out.
Because I had originally scrapped features for this project, I had to reiterate my IA & tried to keep the workflow as simple as possible.
For my 1st iteration I decided to layout some basic ideas down as to how the workflow would look like. I sketched out the basic layout of how I would want the feature to look like & navigate through the whole flow.
I had initially planned for my workflow to be simple, only adding a additional feature in a 'application progress tracker' which I had scrapped later on.
That being said, I began to design my high fidelity wireframe but that's when I ran into a few problems once I began testing my design with 3 participants...
I decided to go back to the drawing board and take a look at what I can change based upon the feedback & critiques that I had received.
I began to test my initial designs through 3 user tests & 1 expert interview with a current designer. The main takeaway, is that I had good ideas, but I would need to improve my designs & rethink the workflow as well.
I decided to test out my new designs to see how well they fare for usability & overall comfort level. I only did a small sample size of 3 people to test out my designs, here's what the results were;
Because I had a small sample size, further testing & iterating is required in order to understand the feedback that I had received was verifiable and actionable in future explorations.
A project can start off with a large scope trying to tackle many different problems but may not scale due to lack of manpower, resources, budget, or time. I learned this later on because I was being spread too thin doing this project by myself & losing sight of the actual problems.
It is better to have a clear, well defined vision on what to focus upon with the proper amount of collaborators to justify a projects intentions.
