UI/UX Case Study: Redesigning LinkedIn Jobs

What is LinkedIn?

Over 890 million users in 2022, LinkedIn is a professional platform which is used to build and your professional network. Around 49 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs every single week.

Why the Redesign?

I am a fresher graduate and I have no jobs right now. I applied to several jobson LinkedIn, but since I didn’t get feedback on my applications, I was kept wondering , what exactly went wrong.

A study suggests that around one-third of applicants ignore their applications, when they don’t receive a response from the recruiter/company within two weeks of submitting the application.

So what’s the problem I’m trying to address?

1. Company lost a deserving Candidate
2. Due to lack of information/communication, the applicant lost a prospective opportunity that could have turned to be his/her new job.

In this article, I have tried to identify few gaps in the “Jobs Section” of LinkedIn that needs to be bridged, and have also tried to come up with# solutions to address each one of them.

Let’s get started:

Competitive Analysis

Before starting the project, I did competitive analysis to identify existing design patterns. I studied user flow of all kinds of similar platforms to understand the decision making factors of a user, in a better way. Some of the platforms were:

1. AngelList
2. Glassdoor
3. ZipRecruiter
4. Naukri

Although, these platforms share similarities in terms of functionality, but they still differ in the way they allow their user to experience.

User Research

In order to gain some perspective, I created a google form, where I asked users (who never used LinkedIn before and users who use LinkedIn frequently) about their age, employment status and the reason for using LinkedIn.

I was dismayed to see that 60.2% of users use LinkedIn to apply for Jobs. Around 48% users were not satisfied with the process of applying jobs. So I decided to focus on improving the job transparency of the application process.

Some of the common pain that I identified were:

1. Over-abundance of content Information placement was cluttered and not one particular single thing was trying to catch their attention.

Problems

Now before moving into the problems, there were some confusions among the users with whom I interacted.

Confusion Number 1: Is this applicable only for the Job seekers or the Recruiting professionals as well?

My assumption: As of now this is only applicable on Job seekers.

Confusion Number 2: Are you referring to the entire Jobs Section or any particular niche in the Jobs section?

My assumption: I am referring to all the flows and functions that an user undergoes while applying for a job, ranging from “searching for a job, filter options and set notification reminders.”

Jobs Page:

The main purpose of this page is view available jobs to the users. Being a content heavy page, the results needs to be structurally organized with the right amount of emphasis for different pieces of information.

Problem No 1

Lack of hierarchy and the scattered placement of information in the Jobs Page.

This increases the cognitive load on the user. The user might find it difficult to scan through different sections of the screen at a glance and then find a particular result they were looking for as the user has to scan from extreme left of the screen to the extreme right. This might lead to a bad user experience for the user.

Solution

Centre-aligned fixed width layout

The current design has a full width layout, Instead I made it a centre -aligned fixed-width layout, so that it’s easy to scan through sections, irrespective of the screen size.

Before

After

Problem No 2

Users rarely receive a feedback on their application.

Solution

Application Tracker

The current design has no such feature. I have added a feature that would keep track of all the job applications of users and also check the status of my application during the whole process.

Feature to track Applications

Problem no 3

Candidate is often not informed about the expiration of a job/in-activities of the job post.

During the weekdays mostly, when the candidate is in a hurry, the candidate prefers to save the job instead of applying it straight away, as some jobs take a bit of time for their application process. In their free time when the user visits the Saved Jobs section and finds something like this!

Solution

Notifying the candidate in advance before expiration of the job through emails and notifications.

Problem no 4

Very little information is provided about the Company’s Culture

Solution

There can be a “Chat with the Recruiter” functionality available, using which the user can reach out to the recruiter of a company that she is interested in and learn more about the culture of the company. Of course, this feature will be available only if the recruiter opts for it.

Future Steps

1. Contact Job Recruiters to better understand about the Job process from their point of view.
2. Improving the Application tracker further.
3. Creating a mobile application.
4. Widen the scope of the project to redesign more LinkedIn features.

Key Learnings

1. In depth analysis of the design decisions is really important to make sure that you’re fulfilling user requirements through empathy.
2. Small change in design can impact a lot in the entire User Experience for the user.

Hit me up on https://www.linkedin.com/in/muktiray123/ ,if you want to discuss further :)