Tapping the Indian Government Jobs Market — Case Study
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Team: Alok Dubey (Design Lead), Viren Baid (Product Lead), Anuj Verma (Product Manager)
Project Type: Consumer Growth (Next Billion Users)
Objective
Government jobs have become a craze for the millennial generation because of job security and employment stability. With a significant percentage of the total workforce, the government sector employs about 2,15,47,845 Indian nationals. In 2018, Indian Railway published that the vacancy to application ratio for their latest recruitment was 311:1. Around 2.8 crores applied for the 90,000 openings for the railway recruitment 2018.
Government recruitments are conducted by various authorities or organizations and are conducted in multiple venues at centers across the country. Our core objective is to provide a go-to platform for all government job-related queries and applications, regardless of the industry.
Our job platform currently exhibits a variety of jobs in the private sector, and the newly designed portal will be integrated into the existing platform. Seamless integration is required to connect both to balance the user experience of the website and app. The combined platform will act as a one-stop solution for India’s jobs for both the private and public sectors.
Why did we tap this market?
As an industry leader in the recruitment sector, we always keep an eye for vivid and out of the box innovations to onboard more users and website visitors. To improve the visitors to listed jobs ratio on our website, we need to improve the targeted traffic flow to the site.
Every year, billions of candidates browse and search for government sector jobs. Although the preparation period for each candidate might be 2–5 years, the government jobs’ success rate is minimal. Most of the government job aspirants turn to private-sector jobs while applying and preparing for the public sector ones or after losing interest. Navigating them to a platform that provides all information they are looking for along with other private-sector job opportunities is undoubtedly a win-win for both. Hence by tapping into the public sector market, we are gaining more candidates for both the focus sectors.
Design Process
When we started our journey, we weren’t sure about the outcome at all. We had multiple uncertainties, such as:
- What should be the features?
- How to list all the government jobs?
- How to update the listings daily?
- Should we create a listing platform like our rivals or allow direct job applications through our platform?
- Do we need more resources to implement the same?
Competitor Analysis
Since we were stepping into a new market, we conducted a full-fledged competitor analysis to learn and understand the government job listing domain. Using SimilarWeb, we found out the top ranking websites in this niche. We recorded their monthly active users (MAU), organic ranking, traffic, etc. The results we got were mindblowing. Here we are listing some of the significant pointers we found through our analysis.
- Some of the top sites in this domain get around 50–80 million MAU traffic.
- Although traffic is quite high, most of them lack an excellent mobile interface.
- The number of mobile users is much higher compared to desktop and tablet users.
By conducting the SWOT analysis, we got a clear picture of the features provided by the top ranking websites, user performance on the ranking websites, keywords which are ranking for the related domains, and the competitor’s weak points.
Competitor analysis and SWOT gave a clearer picture of the platform. The outputs listed based on the google search results and SERP ranking is as follows.
Creating Job Stories/JTBD
Considering the number of targeted users, making user personas was an obsolete task. Instead of this, we divide the users into their current work status, education, types of the job industry, and designation hierarchy. This helped us get deeper level insights.
For example, if a candidate is unemployed and is looking for a job in the public sector, he/she will be looking for information on job roles that suit his/her qualification. Here his/her unemployment is the job status or situation; the public sector is the target, the information he searches for is the motivation, and the job roles are the outcomes.
Devising Solutions
We categorized the available features based on user interest and feature popularity based on Google’s SERP data. This helped us in formulating the top features we must include in the portal. We prioritized these features in multiple phases and found that the job listing feature should be released to the market before anything else and the user engagement in the succeeding phase. In the user engagement phase, the portal shall provide multiple solutions to the user requirements.
Challenges
But the answers to some of our questions remained. For eg., In India, government jobs hire on many standards like caste, city, designation, department, etc. So showing data was massive, and showing on the mobile screen was a very tedious job. We needed some smarter way to do so because none of our competitors were doing justification with the mobile experience.
Since lots of platforms already existed in the market, so to get the initial attraction, we also needed to come with a more SEO driven platform. For this, every URL, every content, every label genesis was derived based on the top keyword search.
Wire-framing & Prototyping
We needed to build a smarter solution for making the job addition and updates seamless. The user interface should be catchy, easy to read, and reliable. We designed the portal gripping these focus factors.
Mobile Listing Platform
The Government Jobs portal was added as a redirection from the central job listing platform. This was done to attract users who are landing on the private job platform towards the new Government Jobs portal.
Jobs categorization was done based on the SERP rankings from Google results. For e.g., Jobs by Indian State Board, By Education, By designation, By organization, etc. This was arranged to simplify the job hunt procedure for the aspirants.
Job Posting Editor
Listing the job erudition with variable data and an excellent user interface was of vital importance. For example, a single job post can have open roles based on state, cast, designation, gender, etc. To filter the data properly, we need a dynamic and powerful editor on the portal. And also an exceptional data representation on the mobile interface. Before finalizing the interface, we discarded multiple designs because of low readability and complexity.
Result
Although we cannot showcase growth and data representations, here are some of the highlights we’ve achieved so far.
- The successful and timely launch of the portal.
- Some of the jobs listed had got a huge volume of organic traffic within weeks from the launch.
- Some of the government category pages are pushing the DAU and MAU of the platform.
What’s Next?
Although it is still the initial year of the launch, we were able to get good engagement and reception on the platform. Here are some of the future plans we have on our list.
- Facility to send job alerts and customized job notifications
- Providing adequate data, such as previous question papers, study materials.
- A quiz module to break the monotonous job preparation time.
- Promote related private jobs along with the listed public sector jobs.
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