B2B PRODUCT DESIGN
Jobble
Job advertisement platform
Jobble came to Neuron looking to expand their job promotion service offerings beyond gig-employment, to accommodate full- and part-time employment needs for new and existing clients.
They sought a design partner to deliver to market an advertising platform that would enable in-house recruiters to manage and customize ads for their job openings themselves — cutting out the traditional middleman (agencies).
The platform needed certain features and functionalities to be competitive in the market and would be differentiated by it’s ease-of-use.
The Market
Publishers
As we analyzed the competitive landscape, which involved digging into product documentation and doing several product demos, we learned that players in the industry fell into three buckets: Publishers (also known as job boards), Ad Optimization Services, and Recruiting Software. Jobble’s goal was to combine parts of each of these services, which meant they actually didn’t have any direct competitors.
Ad Optimization Services
Recruiting Software
Jobble’s goal is to offer a combined platform
Competitor Feature Audit
We selected features to analyze based on what Jobble’s platform would need to be successful.
Our evaluation of the way each product handled relevant features led to several key realizations, the most important of which was that this product needed to be simple enough that it didn’t require special training to advertise jobs, but robust enough to meet the needs of enterprise-level recruiters.
User Interviews
We then went directly to the source to hear from our target users: recruiters. We sought to understand how they managed their days, which tools they used, and to uncover any painpoints or unmet needs.
Our Solution
Streamlining the job upload process
The platform needed to be scalable to meet the needs of users with only a couple jobs to those with a few thousand jobs.
Whereas competitor ad platforms rely heavily on the use of CSV files for uploading jobs, which can be messy and finicky, we opted to have users sync their Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Their ATS already contains all the required job data so this was a much more scalable solution when uploading a large number of jobs. Plus, it meant the job data in the platform stayed current as updates are made in the ATS.
Managing application forms in bulk
Being the point of conversion for every job application is critical to be able to provide accurate, valuable insights and recommendations to users, but this means users would have to create application forms for each and every job they advertise through the platform. We designed a tool to make it easy to:
Create and assign application questions to multiple jobs
Make edits to questions in bulk
Customize question types
Shielding the user from complexity
A key takeaway from our user interviews was understanding the level of detail needed for recruiters to perform their jobs. Recruiters are not programmatic ad professionals, nor do they have the time to spend adjusting their job campaigns like a day trader would with stocks.
We designed a tool that would give users enough control to set limits on their spend, customize targets based on what is most meaningful to them, and easily turn promotions on and off as needed.
Uncovering that recruiters think in terms of ‘applicants’ and ‘hires’, and value a quality applicant as much as a hire, allowed us to strip away the noise of job post views, clicks, and conversion rates, and focus just on Cost per Applicant (CPA).
Consolidated tracking & analytics
Recruiting is very much a team effort that involves numerous stakeholders, so it was important that we made it easy to export and share stats with the entire team.
In general, dashboards and reports are essentially two different ways for users to access the same performance metrics, so we consolidated them in this platform. Users can filter and analyze specific data using robust time and comparison selections and then easily export and share a report.
An end-to-end recruitment tool
For users who choose not to sync their ATS, or don’t use an ATS, we designed an ‘ATS Lite’ experience, enabling them the ability to review and manage applicants in the same platform as they create and manage their job ads.
Conclusion
The design process for any new product is not linear. When redesigning an existing product, much of the groundwork is already in place and it’s an exercise in working within the existing constraints to iteratively improve the experience based on user data. But for a new product like this, everything from the target market to the value proposition to the pricing model needed to be determined. This platform was created to fill a gap in the market, so it was necessary to truly understand the needs and painpoints of the target users’ existing workflows, as these were the guideposts that informed every strategic design decision we made.
Over a period of 6 months, in collaboration with the amazing team at Jobble, we went from concept to developer-ready. The result is a product that enables in-house recruitment teams to take control of advertising their jobs, without compromising on reach or cost-efficiency and without requiring special skills.
