Create differentiations in one site for multiple users

Hi there,

I’m going to start working on a new assignment I’ve just got. Maybe you guys have some input for me.

The case: Create one website with multiple categories. This will be a recruitment website, so like a job site, there will be loads of vacancies (around 1200).

Current situation: We’ve got 5 recruitment websites all focused on different markets. For each website, we have a recruitment team. The idea is that the teams can get multiple markets (categories). It’s not ideal to create new websites/names for each of these markets. That’s when they came up with the idea to create one strong recruitment brand.

Question: When people are searching for an IT job, many people use Indeed for example, and get redirected to our vacancy detail page. What would you do next, because you don’t want them to go to sales, marketing, and technical vacancies? There is a big chance they don’t like them because they are irrelevant.

Possible solution: Create subsites within the website and catch the users within that subwebsite where there is only relevant information for them.

Does any of you have some experience with this? I would love to read some case studies or information about this subject, somehow I can’t find it when I’m trying to Google it.

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It’s called A/B testing. Basically, you want users to be re-directed to the relevant pages based on their searches from Indeed etc. Talk to your developers and have them set this up.

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Ah maybe I explained it wrong. A/B testing is not what I mean. I mean it more like I have 4/5 different targeted audiences, all specialist in one particular area of expertise. We somehow have to get them to the right vacancies, but from a vacancy detail page to higher up. If they don’t apply, we want to go to the vacancy overview of their particular expertise. But the websites focusses on many expertises.

Ideal situation: User gets to vacancy detail page on our websites, doesn’t like that paticular vacancy and wants a overview of other vacancies (but still within his expertise).

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This is the crux of the problem for me. When I last job searched, with the exception of a couple of the larger tech companies (think Google, Apple, etc.), I didn’t search by company. Quite frankly, I didn’t care who I got a job with, so long as that job was within my capabilities. I was searching by job title, not by company. If a job posting didn’t match what I was looking for, I left the site. I didn’t go look for other job postings in the same category at the same company.

I’m just a single user, so take my feedback with a grain of salt.

I say all of this to make the point that your solution shouldn’t be guided by your goals, it’s should be guided by your user’s goals. And what is your user’s goal? To find a job that matches their skillset, and that job need not be at your company.

To that end, if your goal is to reduce abandonment, you want to think about what would keep users on your site. You need a value proposition here - why should the user stay once they’ve decided the posting doesn’t meet their needs. You need to show users they have something to gain. And you need to make sure that value proposition doesn’t get lost in the copy.

In this situation, I’d use visual hierarchy and z-pattern reading design to my advantage, leveraging related job postings and categories as my value proposition. A short listing of related jobs with similar keywords and a link to the category as a whole in its own column on the top left of the page under any chrome/branding would work well to accomplish this in most cases. You’d end up with something that looks like this:

The point @ux_dude makes about A/B testing is important, however. Does this design actually accomplish the goal of decreasing abandonment? The only way to tell is to test it. You can do this by serving up different versions of the same page and using your analytics product to analyze time on page, user flow, and abandonment rates.

For this to be truly effective, you need to have something to measure it against - either your current design or a competing design. One pattern to look into and leverage may be the F-shaped reading pattern theory and how it might work with your content.

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I don’t really get the problem. Many job aggregators solve this through:

  1. Breadcrumbs showing the category in which a vacancy is posted
  2. Suggesting other similar vacancies

Example - https://www.cv-library.co.uk/job/209162614/IT-Manager:

  1. Showing a full list of similar vacancies next to the vacancy description.

Example - LinkedIn job search:

Why don’t you take those examples and user test them?

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As I understand they want a user to go further with the search not within the company, but within the related category.

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@sandervolbeda If I understand this correctly, this sounds like a good opportunity to introduce a cross-sell style module in the bottom of the page. Think of Amazon, Ebay or something simialr. You search for a product, read the description, realie it’s not for you and scroll down and see - “You may also like”
Am I thinking in the along the same lines as your solution? I will try to find some examples that aren’t product related.

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I was also thinking of LinkedIn jobs.

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Yes, I totally agree with you! I went back to the data because of your reaction. I went back to the data to check if there is even anybody in the current situation going from the job detail page to the job overview page. The answer is 1/3000. So it’s not worth going over it yet.

Thanks for the extra information to work in the job detail page, I’m very happy the tips!

I will that! Thanks for the advice! Currently, I’m doing interviews for the new website. I’m going to throw in some questions about how they like to search for jobs.

The data showed this is not the case. I’m going to figure out ‘why’ this is the case in user interviews.

This is a great idea Ari and worth testing I think. New idea just popped up in my head! Maybe try to test if people like to ‘scroll’ to the next job, that is similar to what they are already reading. So after reading one job, the next one will be underneath it and load when people are at the end/bottom of the vacancy. What do you think of something like that?

Thanks for all the help so far guys! I keep learning from you all :smiley:

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Interesting idea, I’ve never seen it before on job sites! It resembles social network feed, right? My only concern is - what if a job seeker reads only first lines and leaves before scrolling to the end? Maybe truncate the vacancy text, so that a user could see that there are more vacancies below (like social networks do)?

Smth like:

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Although after some thinking I consider the truncating idea not good. A user comes from search on Indeed and expects to see a vacancy description. Seeing a list of vacancies instead will be confusing.

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@sandervolbeda You could also set up true-intent surveys to see what users really expect when landing on this page and what they heop to get next.It will help with reducing time being used assuming

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I took a couple of weeks off for school. This is one of my favorite threads since I’ve been back. Y’all rock!

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That is really something to keep in mind indeed! Smart thinking, I will keep this in mind. In short, I might not apply for the vacancy overview page but, it is good to know how far people are scrolling on the vacancy detail page. If not enough people get to the end of the vacancy, my idea is not worth implementing yet. If that is the case I should first have a look at the vacancy detail page to see what problems occur there. This is just like the feedback @dougcollins gave me. Really got to start there.

That’s a great idea! Do you maybe have some really good examples for me?

Great to hear! I’ve had some very helpfull input so far.