The UX Award 🏆 Winning
Job Advertising Platform

An advertising platform that enable in-house recruiters to manage
and customize ads for their job openings.

Company

Jobble, Inc.
2022
Web App
Product Designer
1 Design Director
3 UX Designers
2 Visual Designer
1 Product Manager
5 Developers
Neuron

Product

Role

Team

Design Toolkit

Awards

Company

Jobble, Inc.
2022

Product

Mobile App
Web App

Role

Product Designer

Team

1 Design Director
2 UX Designers
1 Visual Designer
2 Product Managers
5 Developers

Design Toolkit

Preview
Context
Challenge
Research
Exploration
Solution
Conclusion
Top

The Context

Limited traditional gig-employment model

As the gig economy rapidly evolved, we recognized a fundamental shift in the job market landscape and identified an opportunity to expand beyond our traditional gig-employment model.
Simultaneously, businesses sought greater access to a diverse pool of talent that could cater to both short-term project requirements and long-term operational needs.
Therefore, the creation of Jobble's expanded platform was a strategic move to accommodate these new trends and meet the needs of both job seekers and businesses.

The Challenge

How might we support diverse employment types while simplifying access to a broad talent pool for businesses?

Creating an advertising platform that would enable in-house recruiters to manage and customize ads for their job openings themselves — cutting out the traditional middleman (agencies). The platform would need certain features and functionalities to be competitive in the market and would be differentiated by it’s ease-of-use.

Research

The Market

As we analyzed the competitive landscape, which involved digging into product documentation and doing several product demos, we learned that players in the industry fell into three buckets: Publishers (also known as job boards), Ad Optimization Services, and Recruiting Software. Our goal was to combine parts of each of these services, which meant they actually didn’t have any direct competitors.
Our goal was to combine parts of each of these services, which meant they actually didn’t have any direct competitors.

The goal: Create a combined platform

The platform will offer a feature set that is competitive in the market and a management console that is differentiated in the market by its UX, enabling users to self-onboard and create and manage campaigns based on performance metrics.

Guiding Principles

  • Reduce complexity and manual work
  • Automated workflows will help minimize the manual effort required to set up and manage campaigns. This principle will be carried through to the UX/UI by simplifying the often complex interfaces of ad platforms.
  • Flexible and extensible
  • The platform will exist in a complex and rapidly-evolving ecosystem of online recruitment tools, so seamless integration with the most commonly used third-party softwares is critical to adoption.
  • Easy and intuitive setup
  • Onboarding and campaign setup should feel straightforward and painless to encourage users to switch from competing platforms or from using an agency. Reducing the time-to-value will ensure new customers are able to quickly experience the benefits of the platform even before manual integrations are fully set up.
  • Consumer-grade design
  • Create a user-friendly and visually stunning experience that commands recognition as the ‘industry leader’, and that establishes a UI framework that is flexible and extensible into the future.
In order to accomplish the goals of the Jobble advertising platform design, our focus must be:
Flexible and extensible
The platform will exist in a complex and rapidly-evolving ecosystem of online recruitment tools, so seamless integration with the most commonly used third-party softwares is critical to adoption.
Easy and intuitive setup
Onboarding and campaign setup should feel straightforward and painless to encourage users to switch from competing platforms or from using an agency. Reducing the time-to-value will ensure new customers are able to quickly experience the benefits of the platform even before manual integrations are fully set up.
Consumer-grade design
Create a user-friendly and visually stunning experience that commands recognition as the ‘industry leader’, and that establishes a UI framework that is flexible and extensible into the future.
Reduce complexity and manual work
Automated optimizations will help minimize the manual effort required to set up and manage campaigns. This principle will be carried through to the UX/UI by simplifying the often complex interfaces of ad platforms.

Competitor Feature Audit

We selected features to analyze based on what our platform would need to be successful.

Our evaluation of the way each product handled relevant features led to several key realizations, the most important one:

This product needed to be simple enough that it didn’t require special training to advertise jobs, but robust enough to meet the needs of enterprise-level recruiters.

User Interviews

We then went directly to the source to hear from our target users: the recruiter. We sought to understand how they managed their days, which tools they used, and to uncover any painpoints or unmet needs.

Key findings include

  1. Job promotion is just one of many tasks a recruiter manages, so a simple-to-use tool is essential.

  2. Recruiters may not have the necessary knowledge or experience to decide on budget using Cost per Click (CPC). Instead, it would be more helpful to connect the spending to the number of applicants, which can give a better understanding of the budgetary decision.

  3. Applicant and job data are often shared across all departments and locations of a company, so maintaining clear records of activity and metrics is critical for efficient collaboration between disparate teams.

Exploration

Colors

Typography

Our Solution

Streamlining the job upload process
The platform needed to be scalable to meet the needs of users with only a couple jobs to those with a few thousand jobs.
Whereas competitor ad platforms rely heavily on the use of CSV files for uploading jobs, which can be messy and finicky, we opted to have users connect to their Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
Managing application forms in bulk
Being the platform for every job application is essential to be able to provide accurate and valuable insights, but this means users would have to create application forms for each and every job they advertise through the platform.
Shielding the user from complexity
A key takeaway from our user interviews was understanding the level of detail needed for recruiters to perform their jobs. Recruiters are not programmatic ad professionals, nor do they have the time to spend adjusting their job campaigns like a day trader would with stocks.
We designed a tool that would give users enough control to set limits on their spend, customize targets based on what is most meaningful to them, and easily turn promotions on and off as needed.
Consolidated tracking & analytics
Recruiting is very much a team effort that involves numerous stakeholders, so it was important that we made it easy to export and share stats with the entire team through a dashboard with the updated daily data and time series charts.
Users can filter and analyze specific data using robust time and comparison selections and then easily export and share a report.

An end-to-end recruitment tool

For users who choose not to connect to their ATS, or don’t use an ATS, we designed an ‘ATS Lite’ experience, enabling them the ability to review and manage applicants in the same platform as they create and manage their job ads.

Conclusion

The design process for any new product is not linear. Everything from the target market to the value proposition to the pricing model needed to be determined. This platform was created to fill a gap in the market, so it was necessary to truly understand the needs and pain points of the target users’ existing workflows, as these were the guideposts that informed every strategic design decision we made.
Over a period of 8 months, we went from concept to development-ready. The result is a product that enables in-house recruitment teams to take control of advertising their jobs, without compromising on reach or cost-efficiency, and without requiring special skills.
More projects
Product Design
5 min read

Booking VIP tables has
never been so easy

Real-time, table reservation system with POS integrations for easy to use ordering. What a time to enjoy night life!
Case study
Product Design
6 min read

Creating a sustainable investment experience

Sustainable investments going towards what matters, with the user staying in full control.
Case study