Context

Workshub is a hybrid recruitment platform that combines an agency and a subscription-based job board. This means there are two parts to the business:

• A traditional hiring agency offering a personalized approach and active sourcing for candidates.
• A self-service job board that operates on a subscription model.

These components are interconnected; agency recruiters use the database of candidates who applied on the platform as one of the sources for talent scouting, while subscription-based clients benefit by receiving better quality applications, as recruiters manually review platform applications to filter out completely irrelevant ones.

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Goals

We were looking for ways to increase revenue from paid subscriptions as we experimented with business models.

Our strategy involved providing our users with a wider selection of jobs by attracting more companies to the platform or using alternative methods. This would attract more candidates to the platform, thereby encouraging companies to maintain their subscriptions longer, which could lead to increased subscription revenue.

There is a significant connection to the work of salespeople and product management. However, focusing solely on design work, here's how design aimed to achieve our major goals:

Goal #1 – Get more company clients

• Design an engaging landing page. SEE HERE
• Make onboarding and job posting process more straightforward

Goal #2 – Increase retention of company users

• Provide a convenient way for them to receive and manage job applications, ensuring quick responses from candidates.
• Improve the quality of the applications. As mentioned, our recruiters pre-filter applications so companies only see relevant candidates. Design could influence on this by better connecting the candidates with job positions which they matched the most.

Goal #3 – Speed Up the Pre-Filtering of Applications

• This one involved identifying and eliminating UX issues that slow down the application review process, allowing recruiters to focus more on the agency side.

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Job posting

It’s hard to assess how exactly the redesign impacted the growth job postings, as there were other sales activities happening at the same time with the redesign. But I can confidently say that with the updated form, we began to see significantly fewer misunderstandings of the questions (previously, some could be interpreted in several ways), and clients reported a more pleasant experience due to the cleaner design.

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Applications management

The update addressed both Goal #2 (company user retention) and Goal #3 (internal recruiter efficiency).

Process

Company users and recruiters performed similar tasks when reviewing applications; the only difference was that recruiters had to switch between different companies. We scheduled several calls with our recruiters, asking them to share their screens as they went about their daily routine of reviewing applications. Interestingly, and as often happens, they identified no problems with the interface and had no complaints whatsoever. So we focused on observation to identify areas for improvement.

Core results

• Conversion to company registrations increased by 24% in the three months following our landing page update.
• We compared the time our agency's recruiters spent reviewing applications before and after the updates. Now, it takes about 47% less time, and our recruiters are very happy
• To boost retention, we introduced direct in-app messaging with candidates, which resulted in a higher response rate compared to emails or LinkedIn messages

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