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LinkedIn Exercise

I will be working on a fun LinkedIn exercise as a part of their interview process for the summer design internship 2018. This medium post will be used to document my general process to show I reached to the solution.

Task |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. Design an improved job posting experience for recruiters or hiring managers, that helps them attract and recruit relevant candidates for the position.

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.

Duration | 1 week

I first had to use their tool to understand the problem and identify design opportunity. Therefore, I tackled the problem by first taking a look at the job posting experience. My first impression with the job posting experience I would say was a little overwhelming. It did not provide many cues for recruiters especially in the job description and the budget section. With these two design opportunities in mind, I moved on to conduct an in-depth research. Browsing through the interface, I was able to identify room for improvements such as:

After my initial rundown of the job posting experience on LinkedIn, I began my research on the role of recruiters in the hiring process, challenges recruiters face during the hiring process, and the hiring process itself. Thankfully, LinkedIn had a lot of resources regarding talent overview, employer branding, strategy, as well as the LinkedIn Recruiter demo video on YouTube. Of course, LinkedIn wasn’t my only resource (Avature, Quora, SmartRecruiters.com, and many more).

At this point I learned that:

I decided to conduct an interview with one of the LinkedIn recruiters to validate my research findings and to get a better sense of what happens in the industry.

Recruiters create job posts at least 4 times a year.

The duration of hiring process varies from couple weeks to couple months depending on the complexity of the role.

My thought: It might be helpful for the recruiters to have a schedule or a calendar that is shared with the whole hiring team…

The biggest challenge comes from confusion by the hiring team on what they are looking to hire and high competition in the market to hire talents.

My thought: How can I facilitate more communication between the hiring team? They should be able to ask each other questions instantly to avoid further confusion.

After the interview, I learned that one of the most significant difficulties performing the job does come from confusion within the hiring team (miscommunication). Some new I learn was that the difficulty also results from high competition in the market to hire prospective talents. However, some of my initial questions still remained unresolved:

What is the difference between recruiters and hiring managers? What is their relationship and how do they work together?
In order to find the answer to my question, I dug deeper into my research. Hiring managers and recruiters have the same goal of hiring the right person for the right role. The difference seems to lie in the scope of the work: hiring manager is someone who looks over the entire hiring process and recruiters are the ones who are in the forefront of the hiring process discovering talents and creating a shortlist of prospective candidates that will be handed to the hiring managers for closer evaluation.

Who are the stakeholders of the hiring process? Where and does the hiring process start?
I am aware that the process differ by companies and for the roles but I was able to come up with a general timeline of the hiring process.

For the purpose of the project, I will be focusing on step 2) planning to step 4) posting and promoting job openings.

As confirmed through an interview with a recruiter, there are more than just recruiters involved in the hiring and posting process. I created a stakeholder map to better understand their influence and contribution to the hiring process.

Recruiters are challenged by confusion within the hiring team on what they are looking to hire. It would be interesting to leverage this pain point through my design.

Recruiting and hiring process is something that I am not familiar with. Instead, what I was familiar with was the job seeker’s perspective. As an active candidate, I had a sense of what general job-seeking experience is like but I also wanted to hear what other applicants thought about the process.

Why is understanding the candidates perspective important?
I believe understanding the job-seeker’s perspective would be crucial to creating an effective and competitive job post on the recruiter’s side.

Total of 7 people from age 20–24 (juniors and seniors) was interviewed.

From the interviews of both sides of the problem, I was able to identify 3 pain points.

The applicants struggle with abstract job descriptions and lack of transparency in the application process, which is caused by a problem in the flow in the hiring side (which is also a result of high competition in the market). Therefore, and improved experience for the recruiters will be able to improve the experience of the applicants as well.

My goals for the design challenge will be focusing on bridging the communication gap between the hiring manager and the recruiters. This concept will come to life through three main features.

Should there be last minute changes, the recruiter can be notified by the team. The chat feature will especially help with recruiters who are new to the job or new to hiring a specific type of talent. In the case of a big corporate hiring team, the chat feature will also help contract recruiters working with in-house recruiters. Being able to talk to the hiring manager and the departments with the hiring need will give recruiter a better sense of the qualification for the role. The chat feature will make it easy for the hiring team to reach out to each other in such a crucial step of the hiring process.

I saw a design opportunity to change the organizational structure and the visuals system. The current posting interface does not seem to have a clear structure to the different steps. Instead, I decided to structure the first page with information regarding the position and second page with information about the candidates. Also, based on talent user feedback I wanted to reduce redundancy in the job descriptions. This will be solved through reorganization of the different steps.

Previously mentioned in the beginning of the post, I was able to identify design opportunities in the job posting interface, which were:

Currently, every recruiters use different terms and format when are creating a job description on LinkedIn. With the new design, the recruiters will be prompted to organize the description into these three categories. The recruiters will be provided with list of things to start off their descriptions with, which may help out the recruiters who may be new to their roles.

In addition, recruiters often include information in the job description that is already available on the job post through filtered search.

Currently, there is only single text area available for job descriptions. I wanted to section them off so that recruiters can input specific information for each sections.

Lastly, I wanted to reorganize the overall structure of steps so that it would be more succinct and intuitive.

The prototype was created with Framer X (which is fairly a new tool. I did not realize that they do not yet support cloud sharing).

I am aware that there is a separate platform for recruiters called “LinkedIn Recruiters”. However, since it was a paid service, I wasn’t able to experience the features of LinkedIn Recruiter (but I did see a demo video!) Some of the features I designed may already be in the Recruiter platform. Most importantly, I came to appreciate recruiters a lot more through this project. Being a recruiter is difficult job for sure…

If I had a chance to re-do this one week challenge, I would spend more time on design iterations. I struggled to find the right balance between the time I spend on research versus design iterations. This was a very quick project but I saw tons of design opportunity that may have been really cool to work on given more time (I would want to look more into applicant’s experience with job description section).

Overall, this design exercise really challenged me to think and act fast. After all, design is really all about the execution of great ideas.

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