How We Increased Delivery Boy Hiring From Our Product By 400% In 3 Months
Last year, we as a team decided to deep dive into one of the fastest-growing blue-collar recruitment verticals of the country i.e. delivery boys. The challenge was to bring this extremely offline driven recruitment process on our product. This is the story of how we did it in ~3 months.
Just a little bit of background: I’m a product manager at Aasaanjobs (now a part of the Olx Group), a blue-collar/entry-level recruitment platform in India. Our goal has always been to use technology to organize the rather disorganized blue-collar recruitment market of India.
At the start of this project, we as a company already had our legs firmly grounded in the delivery boy hiring segment for a couple of years, hiring for most of the big delivery recruiters of the country from industries like e-commerce, food tech, logistics and so on. But this was largely driven offline and when the projected demand for hiring delivery boys rose almost 5–6 times for the Diwali season, we knew that we would have to turn to other channels.
Enter, Product Team.
Problems We Knew Upfront
- Not So Tech Savvy User Base
Aside from using popular apps like YouTube, Whatsapp and Facebook, delivery boys don’t find other apps easy to use. Adoption was going to be a challenge. - Too Much Manual Intervention
Right from calling the candidate to verify job requirements, documents and following up with them constantly about the job, hiring delivery boys has always been a manually driven process. - Finding The Audience Online
Understanding where and how to find Delivery Boys online to bring them to our product was going to take a good amount of user understanding.
The first step, as always, was going to be some solid user research.
User Research
We set up a team of a designer, developer and myself, a product manager to meet about a hundred delivery boys across the country. The main goal was to understand their expectations and challenges during the process of searching for a job.
These were some of the key challenges we discovered as a result of conducting user research:
- Need for Instant Gratification
In the offline world, it took delivery boys only about 2–3 days to land a job via referral whereas, in the online world, they would never hear back from recruiters for months after applying. - Incomplete/Incorrect Job Description
Incorrect salary details and work timings are widely used by recruiters in this segment to get prospective candidates interested.
Additionally, generic job descriptions never answer important delivery specific questions that job seekers.
There were a lot of other challenges that we discovered during the research process but that is perhaps the topic for another article.
However, with these challenges in mind, we were ready to get to the drawing board. The next section covers how we solved the problems we knew upfront and discovered during user research.
The Solution
Delivery Boy Specific Job Description Page
We designed a job description page specifically for Delivery Boy jobs which looks very different from the rest of the job description pages we had.
The main agenda here was to share information with the user that they value about the job and will help them make a decision. All of this information was verified with the respective clients by our internal support team.
Instant Interview Booking for Relevant Candidates
We also designed an instant interview booking flow with the following goals:
- Instant gratification for the candidate where they could simply book an interview with no manual intervention and go for the interview.
- The flow also includes basic questions that they can simply tap and answer which helps us reduce the manual effort of screening applications. These data points were used to auto-reject applications as well.
- Lastly, the candidate can also upload documents on the product directly which our team could then verify and approve.
The Good, The Bad & The Way Forward
As a result of implementing this flow, we were able to solve for many of the problems we started out with:
- Reducing Manual Effort
- We were able to reduce a lot of manual effort for our internal teams as we were able to screen applications, schedule interviews, and collect documents directly on the product.
- However, other areas of manual intervention that we still need to optimize for is repeatedly calling and reminding candidates to go for interview, training and finally join the job.
- Uploading documents was one section where we realized the users were still struggling and required manual intervention for a bulk of the users, however, we have some good solutions in the pipeline to solve for it. - Surge in Application Numbers
The delivery specific job detail pages were an instant hit with our target audience and it was clear from the rise in social shares of the page on Whatsapp. We also saw a ~15% increase in the conversion of users landing on the job page and creating applications. - Quality Conversions
As a result of automatically screening irrelevant candidates, over 70% of the candidates creating applications met all job requirements and simply had to show up for interviews to get the job. - Challenges with Content
- Some of our users were still finding it difficult to understand the pages mainly due to a language barrier. While we did try to optimize the content as much as possible to make it easy for everyone, we might explore vernacular versions of these pages in the future to help more users discover jobs.
- Scaling and experimenting with Video Job Descriptions is another area we are keen to explore.
All said and done, we were able to increase hiring delivery boys by 400% over the quarter and are now confident about exploring other segments similar to delivery boys in such depth.
