Background

• Carsandjobs.com is a Canadian website operated by automobile dealers associations - it’s primary purpose was to connect people to jobs in the industry
• At the time, not every Canadian province’s dealer association was using it - some provinces had created their own sites
• The site was broken and underperforming
• As it is a Canadian site, it needed to support both English and French, using geo-targeting and taking into account Quebec’s restrictions around the use of English
• The stakeholders wanted to create new revenue streams through value-added functionality

Process

• Discussed the requirements with stakeholders
• Performed an audit on the information architecture and content of the existing site
• Performed a heuristic analysis of the existing site
• Analysed competitors such as mainstream job search sites used in North America such as Monster.com and Indeed
• Created a new information architecture for the site
• Iteratively prototyped solutions, gathering feedback from stakeholders and from informal user testing with volunteers
• Gathered feedback from dealers via stakeholders

Findings

The existing site was structured and written from the perspective of the automobile associations, not the targeted end users. There were effectively three groups of end users, that the existing IA and content didn’t fully take into account:

• Jobseekers (the most important)
• Employers (e.g. dealers): those posting jobs on the site
• Students: those looking to enter the automotive industry, and looking for education programmes and scholarships

Findings (cont’d)

Furthermore:

• Job search functionality was hidden under a mountain of content, and required filling out complex forms with many fields to get results.
• In contrast, competing job search sites feature job searches front and centre, and have very simple one or two field search forms, so you can get relevant results very quickly. Furthermore, they use master/detail views with toggles on the left to enable the user to quickly refine their search results.
• Competing job sites also offer two modes of navigation of job listings: browsing predefined categories vs searching
• The user flows for tasks such as saving a job search to receive emails with new job listings was needlessly complex
• The information architecture was inconsistent, with no straightforward hierarchy and was hard to navigate. Some important content was buried deeply and hard to reach, due also in part because of poor use of landmarks.
• The site was poorly optimised for mobile, not making good use of the screen real estate or established UI conventions
• Some parts of the site were unnecessarily gated - requiring the user to sign up and provide a lot of personal information for seemingly little reason

Issues

Quebec restricts the use of English by organisations - they cannot show any English, even though users may be bilingual:

• In addition to geolocation to automatically derive the probable province and language of the user, to address this issue I also added empty states to job search so jobseekers could choose to see results in other languages/provinces.

Feedback I got from dealers indicated they were used to sending around Word documents with their job listings:

• I made sure to include rich text editing functionality with a preview display of the job listing. I also looked into adding the capability to upload Word documents and have them automatically converted into a usable format for the web, however it wasn’t possible to implement given the resources.

Solution

As a jobseeker:

• You can immediately start searching for jobs from the hero banner of the homepage, avoiding wasted time.
• If you have an established career you can simply fill in fields to tell what (i.e. keywords) and/or where (i.e. city/province) to search for jobs
• Alternatively, if you are just starting out your career or looking to make a change you can easily click through to browse all jobs in the broad category of your interest
• In both cases, you can start narrowing down the search from the results page so you can find job postings that are relevant to you faster
• You can save job postings for later, and save particular searches to receive new job listings via email, and for later browsing, reducing active searching time
• For any given job listing you can see either the full description or just the vital information (highlights) for quick decisions

As a student:

• You can read content about getting started in the automotive industry, so you can know how to begin your journey
• You can quickly find relevant educational programmes and scholarships in your area using the education portal and content as a jumping off point, so you can start your career

As an employer:

• You can post new jobs, so you can find candidates
• You can categorise your job postings so relevant candidates can find them quickly
• You can provide job posting info in both English and French, so you can find candidates that speak the language of you and your customers