Personalizing the Hotjobs experience

Customization drives better user engagement

OVERVIEW

Yahoo! Hotjobs redesign and rebrand

In 2007, an initiative began to redesign and rebrand the front page of Hotjobs, bringing it into the fold of Yahoo-branded properties for the first time since its acquisition in 2002. The goal was to 1) drive more job searches through search listings, improving metrics for completed job applications and 2) offer comprehensive tools for job seekers to increase user engagement.

Before 2007, our team had not developed personas from which we could better understand job seekers’ motivations and base our product design decisions. Once we became better informed by user research, the Product Managers and I were able to design better tools and flows funneling from the front page to serve job seekers’ needs and remove friction on the site.

THE BUSINESS GOAL

Brand recognition goes a long way

Stakeholders wanted to leverage the Yahoo brand by establishing trust and validity on the front page to improve job search listings and job application flow metrics.

INSIGHTS

Job seeker engagement is situational

Our UX Researcher and I observed job seekers during contextual inquiries and participatory designs. From that, our researcher created 5 personas to understand user behavior, pain points and goals.

• Fun-loving techie: “I’m not looking for a beginner job anymore.”

• Frustrated career-changer: “I hate being judged on 1st impressions. I’m better 1-on-1.”

• Striver mom: “I’m a fast learner. I feel I can pick up anything.”

• Industry veteran: “I’m bored at work… I need a new challenge.”

• Savvy networker: “I don’t have a time frame - I’m waiting for the right job.”

For more details, here is the link to the personas.

THE PROBLEM

How do you serve completely different needs on one site?

Before the redesign, Yahoo! Hotjobs tried to serve all job seekers’ needs by offering a very generic experience, mainly focused on driving job searches on the front page.

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Welcome back, we know you.

Because the site served many different types of job seekers with various levels of engagement, it was important to build customization on the front page. If job seekers felt the site was tailored to their specific needs, they would spend more time on it.

DESIGN DELIVERABLES + OVERVIEW OF DELIVERED SOLUTION

Designing a more personalized job seeker experience

I created several exploratory mockups before the team decided on the final one. Since there were strict corporate brand guidelines involved, I collaborated with our VP of Marketing to get buy-in on the final design direction, working up the org chart until we got final approval from the CMO.

Click through the gallery of exploratory mockups:

Once the final design was approved, I reviewed it with Engineering. We decided it would be best to build a modular front page, so content could be easily moved or removed depending on results from A/B testing. Also, content managers could plug in social components such as job search-related questions from Yahoo! Answers or workplace photos from Flickr to keep content fresh.

Working with Product Managers, I designed a “resume” module that would funnel more engagement into the job application flow. The signed-in state for return users would display resume status updates and related stats.

Resume module on front page:

Engineering and I also collaborated with Yahoo Corporate User Experience Design (UED) to ensure the universal search bar required in our global nav met corporate brand standards.

When it came time to implement, I spent roughly 70% of my efforts creating detailed specs and 30% doing side-by-side Visual QA. The site was quickly built to spec with minimal back and forth.

RESULTS & REFLECTIONS

Solid designs stand the test of time

In 2007, I received a Yahoo! WOW award on this project from the CMO for improving metrics related to Yahoo!’s customer experience.

Monster Worldwide acquired Yahoo! Hotjobs in 2010. They retained some of my original key design elements for more than 10 years but added their own visual branding on their front page .