Job Application

Role - Product Designer
Date - Jan 2019 - Apr 2019
Team - 1 other designer, 1 user researcher, 2 product managers, 2 development teams

There’s some overlap in the product context and generative research with my Search for Jobs case study. I recommend checking that out first!

In this case study I’ll be focusing on the job application.

The problem

Across the board, Workday’s job applications are not easy to use. Our internal setup systems encourage recruiters to create long and complex job applications. The job application is quite tedious and its usability leaves something to be desired.

Coming into this project, we were informed that there would be some big constraints we would have to work around.

• We can’t remove any steps or questions from the application. People in our customer companies have spent time setting up these applications. We have a strict policy against changing existing data.

• We can’t change the application flow. The job application code base is incredibly complex. Changes to the flow would need much longer development times that we didn’t have resourcing for.

So we created a goal to balance improvements and constraints: How might we make it easier for job seekers to apply for jobs while minimizing dev effort?

We conducted generative research to understand the pain of applying to jobs

We spoke with 11 job seekers. Here are some of our findings:

How much time will the application take? Do I have all the necessary information on hand?
This information is rarely presented up front. People want to feel confident that they can complete an application in the time they allot themselves.

Filling out job applications is a long and manual process.
For people who mass apply, the process can really wear them down. For someone who’s picky about their next job, they may not finish an application if it seems tedious.

Many sites also support resume parsing to autofill applications. But this rarely works correctly. Sometimes fixing the autofill is more work than manually applying.

“It would take [me] an hour or more to fill out [some of] these questions.”

“[I’m] discouraged by this process because there’s so much data entry.”

Usability roadblocks are not uncommon.
Many job applications run on difficult to use legacy software. We spoke to many people who accidentally submitted incomplete or incorrect information. Sometimes they’re unable to complete the application at all.

“If I ran into a jam on an application I would just stop.”

We reviewed the existing flow to understand requirements and find quick wins

Since we knew that we couldn’t change the flow, we walked through the existing site with developers to understand how it’s currently structured.

This is a an map that covers the entire career site at a high level:

This is an example of an existing job application flow with 3 steps. There can be up to 13 steps enabled.

These are some areas of improvement we had influence over:

Make the job application flow continuous.
After clicking Apply, you’re sent to a separate Create Account page, then thrown back to the job application. Also, resume parsing is the first step, but it’s not obvious that this can be skipped.

Fix components with poor usability.
Some dropdowns have so many options that they become difficult to use. Workday also has a ‘Prompt’ component similar to a searchable dropdown, but it’s known for poor discoverability and usability.

A clickable prototype isn’t real enough to gather insightful data

So I created a coded prototype to let participants really experience the pain of filling out a long form.

These are some of the changes I made:

• One unified modal for all the different ways to start an application.

• Progress bar now shows discrete steps and step names.

• Included new helpful interactions such as autocomplete fields, field masking, and a new searchable dropdown.

• Put Create Account as the last step to see if that influenced willingness to fill it out.

We tested this with 8 participants. Here are some of the research findings:

A unified ‘Start Your Application’ was successful.
It eliminated the problem where users thought resume parsing was a required step.

The progress bar updates were successful, but people also wanted to click on it.
Showing the discrete steps and step names helped set expectations about the length and types of questions. However, some participants perceived that the application would take significantly more time. Participants also wanted to click on the progress bar to jump between steps, but that was out of scope.

All steps should be included in the progress bar.
Create Account and Review weren’t shown in the progress bar in this prototype. This noticeably disoriented participants.

Smarter fields usually worked well.
Participants loved autocomplete and wanted it everywhere. Future designs need to also support manual overrides for edge cases like apartment numbers and international addresses.

Additionally, some participants did not realize that the dropdown component was searchable. The ones that did had greatly increased speed and confidence.

Delivered Designs

Start Your Application
One place where you can choose how you want to apply to this job. This makes it clear that resume parsing is not required.

Know where you are in the application
See the full process up front. Stay in context the entire time, even with account creation.

Complete your application faster and more confidently
Supportive fields like autocomplete help make the application easier.

What’s next?

This page is still in development. There’s a ton of engineering work needed to move from our legacy technology to the new experience.

In the future, we’d love to redesign the job application creation process to encourage shorter applications. This would be a big undertaking involving multiple teams, so we’ll have to generate interest for this in the meantime.

This project was also our first foray into usability testing with the entire product team involved. It helped get product managers and developers used to talking with job seekers and built empathy. Since then, we’ve continued to involve the product team in all our research activities.