Search & Application optimization

Deliverables

User Interviews

Journey maps

Persona’s

 

Empathy map

Interaction design

Visual Design

User Flows

 

At Randstad Groep Nederland

Role User Experience Designer + UX Research

When November 2019 - May 2020

Target audience Higher educated people looking for a job

The problem

 

There are not many people in the world who enjoy the process of searching and applying for a job. Not only can it be tedious and long-winded work. There might also be some pressure: you are (soon) out of a job or don’t like where you at right now. In short: there are better and more fun things you can do with your spare time. This project is focused on the optimization of the search and application process of Yacht.nl

There were three causes to start this project. The first one was that the design was very, very outdated (check below), and the other one was that Yacht wished to increase the application rate. After the initial research, a third reason was added: consultants hoped that the application process (from the consultants perspective) could be improved by increasing the quality of the existing vacancies

 

The old website

 

Kick-off with stakeholders

Insights

 
 

The research: Google Analytics analysis, interviews with target audience, interviews with Yacht Consultants/Recruiters & a co-creative journey mapping session with the target audience.

Some insights (which are still helpful during other projects)

  • Most people don’t immediately think of recruitment or sourcing agencies,

  • Most job websites feel impersonal and distant.

  • Most respondents had the feeling they were not highly educated enough for Yacht,

  • Application forms are too long,

  • Most companies seek unicorns,

  • Vacancies often don’t correspond with reality.

Journey based on interviews with professionals and consultants

Design solutions

  • Search experience optimization

    Creating a streamlined search experience was vital in improving user retention.

  • The approachable consultant

    One of the critical rules I started with is that the recruiter/consultant always must be visible & approachable. This means that there should be a picture, a phone number & an email address always nearby. A solution for that is the sticky bar at the top so that the phone number and email address of the consultant is always visible.

  • Make the application always usable

    Before the redesign, applicants could proceed without adding their resume when they applied on their phone. This was done to make it more usable on the phone, but it resulted in unusable applications and consultants who had to call more people to ask for their resumes afterward. This caused the decision to make the resume field in the application form always required.

    The drop in mobile applications may have scared some stakeholders, but the increase of quality made up for that.

  • More explanation

    Description goes here

  • Work experience is just a number

  • Working from home

    Right in the middle of the process, we hit a global pandemic causing us to be even more agile & think of how to help our (potential) professionals. This also applied to this project. By giving the consultants the possibility to add a ‘Working from home possible’ tag, we could show our visitors that there were jobs that could be executed in the safety of their homes.

Vacancy detail page

The application form

Mobile screens