Problem
Blind has always been a platform for tech workers to talk about work, company information research, and finding new opportunities in the industry. However Blind as it stands is limited to research alone, with no way to take any action on companies or open roles that they see being talked about on the platform. Many job seekers end up asking for referrals or open positions through organic posts, which most of the time do not lead to any help or results.
Opportunity
We realized that there is a very clear opportunity here to connect those who are researching and looking for jobs directly with the most popular companies and their open roles on Blind. Furthermore, by creating a job board on Blind, these jobs can further fuel the conversations between our users when they are comparing / contrasting offers and pay ranges with each other.
Our primary measurement of success on the consumer side is job views / sessions per week, and on the b2b side, the amount of jobs we can pull in from either existing job boards or new roles directly from internal recruiters.
Process
I managed the design teams work across the b2b and b2c side of jobs, where I personally worked on building out the consumer side of the experience, and had 2 designers on my team building out the b2b jobs portal. The consumer experience was focused on browsing, filtering, and searching for open roles, while the b2b side was focused on job post creation as well as importing existing roles from platforms like greenhouse where roles may have already been setup.
Research
To make sure we’re building the best experience possible for our job seekers, and to improve upon what they are already using out there, we ran UXR sessions with 7 participants. The participant pool was made up of a mix of individual contributors from juniors to more senior IC’s and 2 people managers. Roles were primarily software engineering based since that’s our majority on the platform, with 3 candidates in design and product.
We learned pretty early on that participants disliked reading through job posts, and find it hard to find important information that helped them decide whether to apply or not. In terms of ranking, we learned that some of the most important pieces of information includes compensation ranges, workplace policy (Remote or Hybrid), required YOE, and finally tools that the role uses. This was especially important for engineers who need to know what coding language is used on the team.
“I don’t tailor my resume for each job, instead just look for jobs that match my skills (java, docker, etc)”
Other learnings that were just as important were how happy people currently working at the company are, both on a company and team level.
“I wish there was a place where testimonials are there for teams. If there's a large number of happy people at a company, usually it's a good chance that the company is not toxic”
Outcome
We launched our first version of the jobs feed that drove a 45% increase in job post views compared to our test feed that Blind Korea launched a few months prior to the US release date.
Have since added 20,000+ open roles on the platform.
Helped the company raise an additional 15m in funding due to the new jobs experience and business line.