AmbitionUp
AmbitionUp was a startup conceived in Mumbai, helping aspirants to personalize their career and job search and employers to narrow down applications to ones most suitable to their requirements.
Finding the Perfect Job/Candidate
Two of the primary issues that job applicants face is to find job postings that match their skill level and align with their career interests. At the same time, companies face the issue of finding relevant applicants while going through hundreds of resumes that don't fit their requirements.
AmbitionUp aimed to create a platform that would match applicants with relevant job postings based on their aptitude and in turn provide the companies with applicants that they would want to hire, cutting down the time and money spent on the hiring process.
Competitors
Naukri.com (Think of Indeed)
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Biggest and the most popular job search website in India
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Also the costliest
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Sells access to candidate database (for search) and amount of job posts (requires negotiation)
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Leaves it up to the employer to sort through the resumes and perform the next steps (Except if you opt for Naukri RMS)
Freshersworld.com
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Finer filters for searching applicants
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Handled next steps for the selected applicants (Communication, approval, etc.)
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Only for freshers so searching for experienced candidates isn’t possible
Let's find you a job!
Carving a Spot in the Market
The companies mentioned above were divided into 2 categories, the established players like Naukri and the innovators like Freshers World (but with a limited reach). While formidable, Naukri left a lot to be desired when it came to user satisfaction for both applicants and job posters. Freshersworld on the other hand had taken over a niche market, working with companies who wanted to hire freshers/New Grads.
I and the team at AmbitionUp were trying to develop a product that
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Brought innovation to the table that allowed new grads to get hired or applicants to skill up to get better jobs.
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Also, aimed for the larger job market captured by behemoths like Naukri.
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Tried to provide a good experience for both applicants and employers that not a lot of products on the market provided.
The Vertical Slice
This section is intended to explain some of the design considerations while I was creating the different modules of the product for the MVP and talk about how business and user needs were balanced. To keep the project details concise, I will talk about the aspirant (applicant) journey module. This module consisted of the aspirant profile creation process, challenges to skill up and the resulting aspirant profile.
Keeping Aspirants Motivated
One of our primary goals was to keep the Aspirants motivated and informed throughout the profile creation process as this was the step where many could lose interest, due to the amount of information to be added. Through research, we had found that this was the step where aspirants could submit an incomplete application or move to another job portal/platform.
We came up with a few solutions to this problem:
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Divide the form into manageable chunks depending on their function
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Provide a sense of progression through an AmbitionScore, which updates based on information added like experience, education and challenges completed (This score is then used to recommend jobs)
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Provide a sense of advancement by dynamically updating available jobs at the Aspirant’s level
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Improve the usability of the profile creation section with an interactive, keyboard friendly and logical multi-step form which includes key features like clear labels, intelligent information auto-filling, auto-tabbing to next input
Dealing with Personality Assessment
Personality assessment was one of the requirements that many companies had when hiring to get a candidate that would fit their work environment or team. Now, these personality tests could end up being too intrusive for the Aspirants, acting as a psychometric test. Their effectiveness in predicting job performance is also quite questionable so our solution tried to satisfy the requirement without being intrusive.
Using a third party, the assessment was done by evaluating text written by the aspirant. To help aspirants, we kept two options, one allowing aspirants to add text from any of their written work or answer some open-ended questions. These responses would then be used to create a personality report (focusing on the broad strokes) of the aspirant's personality traits. This report would then be provided to the employers only if the aspirant chooses to apply. The aspirants were also given the results of the personality report for transparency.
Choose Your Destiny!
To test the Aspirant's skills, we decided to have challenges that would determine their expertise and appropriately increase their AmbitionScore. (Note: The Aspirants didn't need to complete a challenge before applying for jobs, this could include entry-level jobs).
Even with a lack of experience, the Aspirant could possess the necessary skills for a more difficult challenge. We wanted to give Aspirants flexibility in choices and provided them with multiple challenges that would reward them for going for harder challenges and allow them to apply for better positions. I also added information like the expected salary and the number of jobs that completing a challenge would provide to help Aspirants make the right choice.
A Profile to Call Home
Once the Aspirant had finished with the profile creation, they would be directed to the profile page which also acted as a dashboard where they could apply for new jobs and keep track of the ones they've applied for.
All the information contained in the profile acted as the resume (with a standard format to help with information organization) when the applicant applied for a job which helped take some pressure off the aspirants. The aspirants were also informed about the status of their applications, letting them know at what stage they were in the process and allowing them to send and receive messages from employers once contacted. We also encouraged employers to give aspirants a reason why they weren't hired so that aspirants could better prepare themselves for future opportunities.
Rising above the competition!
With this product, the company wanted to secure its place in the market. AmbitionUp aimed to provide value to its users that the competitors weren't providing at the time, which included:
Value for Aspirants: Maximize placement possibility
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Help aspirants personalize their job search
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Match them with jobs they are most likely to secure using a scoring system
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Help them understand where they stand with employment prospects
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Provide means with which they can improve their skills and score (Possibility of online course integrations)
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Standardize their applications (Take care of information organization and readability)
Value for Employers: Reduce resources spent hiring
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New payment model to allow more flexibility (Instead of paying a lump sum of money)
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More control over the job requirements (Even allowing for skill level requirements)
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Assurance for the applicants that apply for the jobs (Through their score and challenges completed)
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Only aspirants who meet the hiring criteria will be directed to the job posting (Less amount of time spent finding the right candidate)
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A standardized view for the applications (No more attempting to make sense of resume formats)
Reflections
AmbitionUp was my first project as a professional and as the only UX Designer in the company which allowed me to learn a lot and also work as hard so that I could take up more responsibility for the product. As a first-time UX Designer, I had to learn to identify and represent the needs of the users as best I could. This meant finding ways of getting feedback and being able to justify the design decisions being made.
Being the only designer also had its shortcomings as I had no mentors who would help me evaluate the design decisions. This made me learn some hard lessons that would conclude with me redesigning parts of the product to make them more usable. Now, I wouldn't call that bad as it did help me learn a lot and fast-tracked my journey into being a UX professional.
Overall, this experience made me fall in love with User Experience and ever since then I have focused on getting better!
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Thanks to the creators of the icons used in this case study
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Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
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