Problem
BC JobConnect was underperforming
Immigrant Employment Council of British Columbia (IEC-BC) launched a platform in 2017 called BC JobConnect, to help businesses recruit new immigrants with relevant skills. It was intended to be a unique space for newcomers to articulate skills and experience, helping them bypass employment discrimination that resulted from certification challenges, resumé formatting, or lack of Canadian experience. Their profiles were presented in a portal for employers to recruit from a diversity & inclusion perspective.
Fast forward to 2021, IEC-BC saw that BC JobConnect was not utilized to its full extent. Candidates and employers did register, but few actually connected. IEC-BC staff also shifted their use of the tool to be more of a lead generator to market their other programs. They asked me at PeaceGeeks to advise on improvements and audit the state of the product, to justify whether to continue investing in it.
Goals
Improving the conversion rate of:
- Registration of candidates (newcomers)
- Registrations of employers
- Contact requests (employer reaches out to candidate)
Users
Target users
BCJC serves four main user types. For the audit, we focused on two that IEC-BC was most interested in increasing registrations and conversions of: “highly skilled” candidates and employers:
Methodology
How did I conduct the audit?
- Heuristic evaluation, by 2 PeaceGeeks designers
- Form analysis — review of full registration data from Jan 2019 - Mar 2021, and deeper analysis of sample of 20 candidates and 20 employers
- Usability tests/user interviews — 2 candidate users, 3 employer users, 1 prospective employer user
- Interviews with 4 IEC-BC staff
Findings
What were the weakest points in the flow?
BC JobConnect was a bit of a legacy product, so it wasn’t hard to uncover UX pain points. But to help IEC-BC focus on the most impactful changes and decide whether to invest in the product further, I wanted to measure the scale of the usability problems to prioritize them.
BC JobConnect didn’t have built-in site analytics, though the system did track the number of contact requests and when the user was last active. Most of the user experience involved filling out form fields to create newcomer or employer profiles. So, I exported all the form data to analyse how users filled out the fields, to find where most users were struggling in the flow:
Candidate flow
Employer flow
Platform usability issues
Based on heuristic evaluations and interviews, we also consolidated 15 overarching problem areas regarding the platform's usability:
Design
What usability improvements did I identify?
From here, we helped IEC-BC identify their most important and immediate UX changes to address usability issues. Some examples:
Progress indicators
Whether it’s before or after their profile approval, users are unclear on what they’re supposed to do next when they’re in the platform.
Issue: Candidates & employers are unaware that the first step after they register is to complete their profile. They don't realize they can't get approved until they do that.
Issue: The progress bar is neither an accurate indicator of approval status nor profile quality. The presence of two progress bars is confusing.
Solution: Reconfigure progress bar and profile status to explain to user what stage they are in, and nudge them towards profile completion.
Content hierarchy
Poor information hierarchy causes the content on the platform to feel overwhelming and difficult to navigate:
Issue: Ordering of information in Candidate Profile does not match what is most important to the employer.
Profile is also overwhelming for candidates to fill out.
Solution: Reorganize the Candidate Profile by most to least important information to the employer
Solution: Break down the profile into bite-sized pieces with a progress indicator so the user is not overwhelmed.
Product-Market Fit
But is this even the right product?
It was clear that there were usability issues. But to help IEC-BC decide whether and how to continue investing in BC JobConnect, I needed to ask if this was the right product at all. Do users get value out of the platform? What’s impeding the user acquisition and engagement? What would help them get value? Here’s what we found:
Despite being quite motivated, once candidates complete their profile, they run out of things to do and thus don’t have a reason to come back to the platform. When interviewed, candidates indicated that they were interested in:
- Ways to improve their profile
- Jobs to apply for, so it can be a two-way engagement (employers looking for us, but us also applying for their roles)
- Information about employers on the platform
- Indicators of how closely their profile matches with jobs or employers
IEC-BC targeted Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) employers (1-500 employees) because they thought these companies would be more interested in alternative recruitment channels. But while 82% of BC JobConnect's employer users were SMEs; the contact requests were disproportionately made by companies of 500+ employee size. In user interviews, we found:
- Though SMEs were interested in diverse hiring, they didn't search for candidates unless it was very niche or needed to fill quickly. For more competitive "highly skilled" roles, they made a posting and received applicants.
- Large companies (500+ employees) had large HR departments which gave them the capacity to search for candidates. They also have more flexibility on where they place candidates, so they’re more comfortable hiring someone even if they’re not the right fit.
- Both types (SMEs and large) would use BC JobConnect for filling low barrier “applied skills” roles where they’re not getting enough applicants.
If there is an accessible, free, easy platform that allows an employer to post an opportunity that is open to immigrants and newcomers, that would be a great option.
Employer interviewee, first-time user of BC JobConnect
Design
How can we make the product more valuable?
Based on the insights, it wasn't clear that the usability improvements would significantly increase user acquisition and engagement. I explored some recommended features to strengthen the value of BC JobConnect. (Given IEC-BC wasn’t undergoing a full platform rebuild, these are designed in accordance with the existing (legacy) look-and-feel)
Leverage BC JobConnect as a job board
Since SMEs were interested to hire diverse candidates but didn’t normally search for candidates, and candidates needed a next step to come back to the platform, a way to increase platform engagement would be to create a job board feature for logged-in users.
Employers can post jobs through their account, to which candidates can apply and submit their BC JobConnect Candidate Profiles.
By sending employers a link to the Candidate Profile, this could encourage employers to return to the platform and Request Candidate Contact.
Rather than having to run their own searches (current UX), employers could be shown relevant candidates for their job postings, based on profile filters such as location, minimum education requirement, occupation details.
Similarly, candidates could be shown jobs relevant to their profile. These could be emailed to them to compel them to sign back into the platform and keep their profile up-to-date.
Telling newcomer stories
Employer interviewees mentioned that their reason for using BC JobConnect was due to a personal connection with the immigrant experience. They lamented that the Candidate Profiles lack personality, as the Profiles are visually identical and lack viewable documents (resumes, cover letters).
The profile could incorporate a personal newcomer story, such that employers can connect more with the cause of supporting newcomers.
Educate newcomers to translate their experiences
Newcomers did not feel well-equipped to know what to provide in their profile and how best to translate their experiences. Employers also noticed that the way profiles were filled out were not the most useful.
Tips and guidance could be added in the Candidate Profile to educate users on how to improve their profile and increase job prospects.
Conclusion
What did I present for IEC-BC's next steps?
One of the challenges in this project was sorting through the plethora of issues to present actionable next steps for the client. To do this, I came back to the client's needs: they wanted to know whether to keep investing in the platform, and whether there were cheap usability fixes that could immediately improve its performance.
As such, I shared with them the following conclusions:
1. Adding the job board
BC JobConnect was not achieving its intended purpose because both newcomers and employers lacked a reason to come back. Based on the findings, I suggested that the job board would be the most important and opportune feature to add to the platform in order to make BC JobConnect valuable to its users, and increase registrations and contact requests.
2. Fixing bugs and improving copy
If IEC-BC was comfortable with BC JobConnect just being a lead generator for its other programs, there were a few "very high" severity issues that would be cheaper to fix, to improve users' registration experience: such as adding contact information for users to contact about profile approval, adding better copy for progress indicators, and fixing a password reset bug.
3. Usability overhaul
Then, there were many "high" severity usability issues, pertaining to user flow, content hierarchy, styling, selectors/inputs/fields — all of which required redesign work and likely redevelopment. I concluded that, in large part, the reason BC JobConnect was hard to use was because the software was not actually designed for recruitment or candidate data originally, but it was adapted from a learning management platform. Redesign and rebuilding would likely be better in the long-term, but IEC-BC would need to decide whether this platform is a strategic priority for them.
Impact
Results and lessons learned
Because this audit was handed off to the client, I did not get to oversee the resultant UX changes. IEC-BC did however consult me further on the job board feature, to help scope technical requirements.
If I had the opportunity to continue on this project, I would have loved to partner on development, iterate and test designs further, and especially ideate more on ways this platform could help newcomers translate their professional experiences for local contexts!
Key takeaways
In this project, I saw how important it was to adapt our audit/research methods to address the client's pain points and needs.
For example, with the heuristic evaluation, we used Nielsen's 10 Heuristics as a basis, but soon found it to be unwieldy because a) they were hard for the client to understand, and b) there were too many issues under each heuristic such that sorting by heuristic was overwhelming for the client to know what to do next. We also tried organizing issues by screen, but even this felt overwhelming. Finally, we landed on ranking issues by severity and cost (as IEC-BC wanted to know what the cheap fixes were and what would require rehaul), and then categorizing them according to technical scope/type (eg. flow, content hierarchy, copy, labels, styling). Categorizing by technical scope/type helped IEC-BC easily understand who they would need to employ to address these issues (ie. they could fix copy issues on their own, but for the flow they would likely need engineers).
Being a legacy platform, BC JobConnect had so many issues that at times it was hard to know where to start. I really enjoyed the challenge of going through the quantitative and qualitative data, to piece together the data story that answers the clients' questions.
In addition, I enjoyed finding new ways to collect data to assist in the client's decision-making process. Because of the sheer volume of usability issues, I wanted to know which issues affected more users, in order to prioritize them for IEC-BC. Because BC JobConnect didn't have site analytics on user activity or behaviour flow, I ended up figuring out a way to export all the user form data, analyze empty and erroneous fields, and "reverse-engineer" where users dropped off or struggled. It ended up being super fun to dig into the data in this way!
While I enjoyed diving into the small usability details, I really appreciated the opportunity to contemplate product-market-fit and question the product at large, since IEC-BC was considering whether or not to invest in BC JobConnect further. It was valuable learning how to balance detail with direction, in order to present strategic next steps!