Improving how candidates assess and apply for jobs

The Job Details View (JDV) is a crucial part of the job-seeking experience and serves as a key driver for SEEK's business key results and success. Its purpose is to help candidates make informed decisions by providing sufficient details, context, and relevant actions during their job assessment and application processes.

This case study outlines the enhancements we made to the JDV at SEEK, encompassing needs assessments, analytics review, conceptual modelling, and competitor reviews.

Our objective was to realign the JDV with other internal products, addressing accumulated "debt" over the years, whilst ensuring the preservation of key metrics, especially around Apply Start/Complete.

We started by examining the Candidate Mental Model Diagram (MMD), a crucial user-centred model widely used at SEEK. Along with the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, it helped us pinpoint specific candidates needs we were targeting. A competitor review also revealed opportunities for improvement, notably in the flexibility of our layout between breakpoints, and how we handled our secondary actions (e.g., Save Job).

We collated our insights into a conceptual model outlining the JDV's layout, structure, and content. We used this model to gather feedback from stakeholders, and to ensure alignment before delving into any UI design. We finished it off by collecting results from our A/B tests and providing our recommendations.

Given how central the JDV is to the candidate experience and the business, all of our decisions were assessed against very narrow metrics thresholds.

Not only did we ensure that all our changes were feasible by working closely with Engineering, we further ran large scale experiments in order to validate our solution.

Our outcome was successful, and aligned with our hypotheses that better content prioritisation, visual hierarchy, and layout lead to a more streamlined and efficient experience. Despite this, we were still forced to make changes in order to uplift a secondary metric, namely the Job Share.

The uplift of the JDV led to significant business benefits for SEEK, with improvements in all major key metrics by double digits.

A pivotal factor in achieving this success was our use of validated user-centred models, enabling us to navigate through subjective opinions and uncertainties. Additionally, the use of low-fidelity drafts and designs helped us in gaining alignment across diverse stakeholders, steering clear of early, unproductive UI discussions.

Despite the success in uplifting key metrics, we had to revisit and refine designs to align a secondary metric with the previous JDV version. This underscores the complexities and dependencies inherent in many projects within a large company, often unseen by external observers.