A product designer’s redesign of the traditional CV/resume
The design thinking and process behind redesigning the Otta profile
As a Product Designer, you’re often asked if you have experience working with web, app, or both.
What about paper?
What about being tasked with reimagining the traditional CV/resume (which I’ll refer to as just the CV from here on out) to work better for both candidates applying to jobs and hiring managers reading applications?
That’s exactly what I’ve been working on over the past 6 weeks.
I’m Ajay, a Senior Product Designer at Otta — a job platform that matches jobs at tech companies with candidates. We’re trying to change the game of finding a job by building a candidate-first platform that truly works for job seekers.
I’m the product designer for the Profile Squad (if you aren’t familiar with squads, here’s an article detailing the Spotify Model). Our team — made up of a product manager, 2 software engineers, and myself — is focused on making it easier for candidates to stand out with an Otta profile, as we believe it will lead to more candidates getting interviews with companies.
The Otta profile gets sent to companies when candidates apply for jobs via Otta. Here’s what it looks like today:
This Otta profile was initially born from candidates frustrated with writing and designing CVs. We wanted to take some of that frustration away by providing an easier way to create a CV, whilst also bringing the information out of the traditional CV to better match candidates to relevant jobs on our platform.
Initial findings
Our early research with candidates and companies highlighted several pain points about applying for jobs, including:
🖋 Candidates struggle to write good CVs
When we spoke to candidates and looked at their CVs, it became clear that many struggled to tell their stories in a concise and well-written manner.
🙋 Candidates don’t know how to make themselves stand out when applying
Despite candidates saying standing out to hiring managers is important, they struggled with how to do this. Lots would write summaries at the top of their profile, but these are often filled with buzzwords (good communicator, team player, hard-working…) which don’t tell hiring managers much about them.
🔑 Hiring managers need key information about candidates quickly
Hiring managers expect CVs to be 1–2 pages in length and spend 5–15 seconds per CV, so key information needs to be front and centre.
👟 Hiring managers can’t find candidate information in one place
Hiring managers often won’t recognise the companies that candidates have worked at, which adds an additional step in them having to open LinkedIn or the company’s website to decipher exactly what area and industry candidates work in.
Concept testing
I took these pain points as a starting point to inform early concepts, to test with candidates and hiring managers.
Here are some early designs (with made-up data) for the first page of the profile (click to expand).
We took these into evaluative testing and found the leftmost design resonated best with candidates and hiring managers because it:
- Highlighted key information (current role, industry experience, and technologies used), helping candidates stand out and allowing quicker decision-making by hiring managers
- Featured what’s important to candidates in their next role to help hiring managers paint a picture of them
We also critically analysed each design internally to understand if it felt in line with our candidate-first value. For example, I tried to illustrate the candidate’s career history with a timeline view (middle concept above), but we determined it wasn’t inclusive of different people’s paths such as those who have taken career breaks/gaps or are returning to work.
‘Years of experience’ was also found to be less important than the other items listed, so we removed it to focus only on the key information.
Research 🔄 Design
I used the research findings to iterate on the designs, and then took them through testing again. This was an iterative process and I refined the designs between each round of research. Here’s another set of designs we tested:
We found that the codified summary (left) and the company descriptions (right) resonated well with candidates and hiring managers. This was because they:
- (Again) highlighted key information
- Clearly separated each work experience with the company logos acting as natural dividers
- Explained the companies and industries that candidates have worked in, which gave hiring managers greater conviction in how good a fit the candidate would be and also meant they didn’t need to find this information elsewhere (LinkedIn or the company’s website)
The redesigned profile
After a few rounds of iteration, we reached a final design (final, for now — iterative design is never-ending). Here, you can see the redesign, with key changes numbered and explained below:
- Changing the header to Otta’s brand yellow
A punchy yellow header raises the hierarchy of key information, helping candidates stand out quickly. It resonated well with candidates and hiring managers during testing; in fact, designs without the yellow were described by candidates as boring and less eye-catching. The use of Otta’s brand yellow also serves to highlight to hiring managers that the candidate has come from Otta. - Increasing clarity of links
For a lot of candidates, the links they add to their profiles are important in showcasing who they are. For example, portfolio links are often required for designers and engineers. We’ve made this clearer by putting links at the top of the profile, allowing candidates to label them and providing custom icons for that touch of polish. - Summarising key information
Hiring managers told us that they focus on 3 things — work experience, industry experience and technology experience (where relevant to the role). For work experience, this is weighted towards the current role. We’ve put this information front and centre, which has also resonated with candidates who feel this makes it easier for them to stand out. - Featuring an interesting answer written by candidates
The summary section wouldn’t be complete without a candidate-first angle — we’re Otta after all! We already have questions for candidates to write interesting answers to on the Otta profile, and we’re taking this one step further by allowing candidates to set a featured answer to showcase at the top of their profile. This will allow candidates to stand out to hiring managers better, by bringing some personality to their profiles. - Adding duration alongside dates
We’ve done the maths so hiring managers don’t have to, making it easier for them to see how long candidates have been in each role - Enabling candidates to tell hiring managers about the companies they’ve worked for
We understood from hiring managers that they’ll typically read a candidate’s CV and then go to LinkedIn to find out more about the companies they’ve worked for — specifically, what the companies do and the industries they operate in. We wanted to put this front and centre for hiring managers by adding it to the profile and encouraging candidates to add this information in their own words. - Adding company logos
Candidates can now add the logos of the companies they’ve worked for, helping them stand out and customise their profiles further. During testing, we also found this helped hiring managers to distinguish each work experience and move between them faster.
So that’s it! All the changes to the profile that have gone live for the 1 million candidates on Otta.
What does success look like?
At this point, you probably have lots of questions…
What’s next? How will you measure success? Is this an A/B test?
Of course, we’ve asked these questions ourselves and here‘s our thinking:
We’ll be looking at how this performs over time:
- Are candidates using our new features?
- Is it leading to a higher quantity and quality of applications?
- Are more candidates filling out their profiles?
We took a decision to not A/B test this redesign for the following reasons:
- It’s part of a long-term play in our candidate-first strategy
- However much effort we put into the Otta profile, it’s only as good as the effort that a candidate puts in. This also means that every Otta profile is different, so how would we A/B test this fairly?
- Our research with candidates and hiring managers gave us a high level of conviction that the redesign is solving several problems
All of the above meant that we didn’t want to make 50% of candidates wait before they could use the new Otta profile.
Learnings along the way
Our team of 4 have been working on redesigning the profile for 6 weeks since it came about from an ideation session in June. In that time, we’ve learnt a few things that I thought would be useful to share:
- It’s tricky working on a solution that can be customised by users, as it leads to a long list of edge cases that need to be designed for. However, there’s a sweet spot of when to do this — too soon and it would have limited our creative thinking, too late and it would have led to scope creep. Finding this sweet spot will be different for every project, but it’s important to plan for this moment.
- Clear communication, especially between designers and developers, is important to understand feasibility and effort. As a team, we all had visibility of the designs and direction early on, meaning I knew I wasn’t designing anything that couldn’t be built. We also had honest conversations about the scope, pushing back against scope creep and descoped some parts when we realised the effort required was higher than planned. Understanding this shift as we moved from design to build, and trusting developers to know what’s feasible in a set timeframe, was important to this project’s success.
- Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good — There are some ideas we had early on that would have been interesting to explore or build, but we decided not to because of one reason or another (e.g. effort required was too high, significantly more research would be needed). With iterative design, it’s important to acknowledge that the first release won’t be perfect. And this is ok because you will learn in the process and improve it in the future.
Conclusion
So that’s it. Thank you to all of the candidates and hiring managers who joined research calls and provided feedback on the redesigned profile. And a big thank you to the rest of the Profile Squad — Becca (Software Engineer), Jadams (Product Manager) and Merton (Software Engineer) — for bringing this idea to life.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! If you skipped to this point, thanks for skimming 😉
