Unlocking Job Opportunities–A Case Study on NextLeap’s Cohort-centric job portal
This case study outlines my process of designing NextLeap’s Job Portal, streamlining job post creation and management for the operations team and recruiters.
Disclaimer: The initial designs had to undergo a ton of changes due to time & engineering constraints. What I am showing here are the final designs that reflect a refined & optimized solution that meets the desired objectives.
About Me
I am a Product Designer, based out of Goa, India.✨ Previously crafted core experiences for internal tools and launched multiple 0–1 products at Nextleap.
About the company
We are an ed-tech company that runs live, cohort-based courses across product, engineering & design.
We help students, and early & mid-career professionals break into product-based companies. In the NextLeap community, we have had 4000+ learners across 22 countries in the last 12 months.
Context
The operations team at NextLeap plays a vital role in connecting our learners with job opportunities by partnering with companies.
However, the existing process of operations and communication between the operations team and partner recruiters are currently manual and excessively time-consuming, relying heavily on multiple third-party tools.
Shown below is the current userflow:
As NextLeap continues to grow, the number of partner recruiters will increase, and with it, the operations team’s effort to facilitate communication between recruiters and learners. However, without an efficient system in place, this can lead to significant time wastage and inefficiencies.
Hence, we envisioned streamlining these operations.
During this whole process, learners often face uncertainty about the status of their applications, leading to numerous queries for the team.
Understanding the problem space
To better understand the current process & pain points associated, I spoke to the stakeholders and gathered insights and opportunities for improvement.
User Groups
Whom are we solving for? And what problems are they facing exactly?
Quick shoutout to Juhi Chitra who worked on these illustrations!
1. The Operations Team
- The current method of operations and communication with partner recruiters was ineffective as it was a completely manual and time-consuming process.
- It was difficult to manage many recruiters given that too many 3rd party tools were being used.
2. Recruiters of partner companies (Partner Recruiters)
- One of the primary problems of recruiters is that it is difficult to find suitable candidates quickly from a reliable source.
- The recruiters have to wait for the operations team to hand over the application data. This meant there was a heavy dependency on the operations team.
3. Learners
- In the current process, learners have to fill out an application form for every job they applied to, which meant they needed to repetitively fill out the same set of questions every time.
- They are unable to discover new opportunities quickly even though the number of jobs available in the tech ecosystem is large.
- For any learner actively seeking a job, there is a high chance of being ghosted by external recruiters and that is never a good experience.
- Learners are unaware of their application status which makes them anxious as noticed by the number of inquiries sent to the team about their status.
Objectives of this Project
As we wanted to formalize the current process, we also had certain goals to be achieved with this product. Here are a few:
- Streamlining Processes: The main goal was to speed up the processes thus reducing manual effort for the operations team during the cross-communication with recruiters.
- Increasing Recruiter Onboarding: We wanted to onboard a larger number of recruiters onto our platform. This would result in a broader range of job opportunities for learners, increasing their chances of finding a suitable job through NextLeap.
- Building Trust and Credibility: Through successful placements, we aim to establish trust and credibility in our career services.
- Plan on monetizing the platform: When learners secure employment through us, it could also benefit us as we can earn a commission from the partner companies.
Scope
In this project, I will be focusing on designing the experience to solve the journey from where the Operations Team gets the Job Description (JD) from partner recruiters to the shortlisting of learners by recruiters.
The recruiters have to manually reach out to the shortlisted learners.
Onboarding partner recruiters
The primary purpose of the landing page was to onboard more recruiters onto our platform.
By showcasing success stories of past placements by partner companies, we wanted to instill confidence in recruiters, encouraging them to partner with us for their hiring needs.
Once a recruiter joins the waitlist, the operations team is responsible for either approving or rejecting them.
After joining as a partner, recruiters are directed to complete their company profiles. Once the profile is complete, recruiters can create job posts.
A brief overview of the company can assist learners in making informed decisions when considering applying for a role.
Let's go through the flow of completing the company profile.
Post filling out this form we have another modal that prompts the recruiter to create a job post.
Next up, the flow of creating a job post…
Creating a job post
I decided to split the Job post creation flow into 3 steps to ensure that the recruiters do not feel overwhelmed by the information being presented to them.
Let’s have a look at the steps one by one.
Step 1: About the Job
In this step, the recruiter can provide all the details related to the job. This includes the designation they are hiring for, the employment type, compensation details, the job description, and so on.
Key design decisions made:
- Categorized Information: The data is organized into categories, facilitating efficient information handling.
- Fast Information Filling: UI components were chosen to enable fast data entry, ensuring a good user experience.
- Included only the most important and relevant data points eliminating unnecessary clutter.
This step was pretty straightforward, now moving to the 2nd step.
Step 2: Application form
To simplify the creation of application forms for recruiters, I decided to provide a set of default questions commonly found in job application forms.
This eliminates the need for recruiters to start from scratch and ensures they don’t overlook important questions. They can also add custom questions to further customise the form making the process easier for the recruiters to attract the right candidates with less effort.
I decided to split the default questions into basic, background, and additional questions.
To make it quite straightforward, I displayed all the questions upfront and recruiters can customize the form if they want to by adding more questions to the form below.
This helps makes the process simpler as the recruiters can view all the questions being asked to learners in one go and add more custom questions specific to the role they are hiring for.
I also made it clear to indicate the questions that we were being asked compulsorily to the learners.
Here’s a closer look…
The question widgets had to go through a re-vamp as the old UI was outdated. As part of the revamp, I ensured that the new widgets were made collapsible, allowing users to collapse them and still have a clear preview of the newly added questions.
Here’s a closer look at the question widgets…
Now moving to step 3.
Step 3: Review the job post
The recruiters can see a preview of the job post that they’ve just created. After confirming all the details the recruiters can send the post for review and approval to the operations team.
Recruiters can also preview the form they just created.
Once the recruiter sends the job post for review, they can view the same on their dashboard.
Operations Team reviews the job post
The Operations Team should have a bird’s eye view of the whole process.
Once a job post is sent for review by the recruiters, the operations team can approve or reject it.
Now we also have a use case for the operations team to create the job posts & so the ones created by the operations team had to be mentioned on the recruiter’s dashboard. Here, I show a tooltip to indicate the same.
In scenarios where a recruiter is hiring for multiple companies, the company logos assist recruiters in quickly identifying the specific job posts they are seeking.
PS: While this specific use case does not currently apply to NextLeap, it is worth mentioning as it demonstrates the design’s scalability for potential future needs.
Coming to the operations team’s dashboard,
With this dashboard, all of the job posts are on one screen making it easier to manage.
Upon clicking on the job post, the operations team can view the preview of the job post.
Once approved by the operations team, the learners can now start applying for the same.
Now moving to the experience for NextLeap learners…
Learners View
Once the learners are eligible* they get access to jobs curated by NextLeap on the learner-facing UI called the Learning Management System(LMS).
Eligibility criteria for learners: Learners would be manually marked eligible by the operations team if they’ve cleared the cut-off percentage in their graduation project plus a few more criteria set by the company.
Applying for jobs
The Jobs tab is further divided into All Jobs, Applied, and Rejected tabs, each featuring job cards for easy access.
Clicking on a job card expands it to reveal a full-page view of the job, where learners can apply by submitting the application form.
Job Cards
Job cards are designed with relevant information to entice learners to tap for more details, helping in their decision-making process.
Let’s take a look at the different states of the card now…
The job details page
The job details page contains all the information about the job, the company details, and so on.
Another view of the details page when a PDF file is uploaded,
Real-time updates to ensure transparency
As we know job searching is already a very anxious process, and we wanted to make sure learners are informed about every step of the journey after they’ve applied for a job on the platform.
We showcase a widget that will provide contextual messaging based on the learners’ job status post applying for the role.
This could potentially reduce the number of queries from learners about their application status.
The application status of jobs for learners
This tab provides a quick way for learners to view their applied jobs, and the ones shortlisted by recruiters in one place.
Shortlisting & Hiring Learners
Recruiters now have the ability to directly shortlist or reject learners from the applications tab, eliminating the need to wait for the operations team to send application data.
To shortlist or reject a learner, recruiters can click on the learner’s name in the ‘In review’ tab. This action opens a side sheet that presents the learner’s basic information and their completed application form for review.
Filters help recruiters quickly find what they are looking for by narrowing down the results according to their preferences.
Upon shortlisting the learners, recruiters can take the hiring process forward by manually reaching out to all the learners in the shortlisted tab.
The recruiter can choose to offer personalized feedback on the platform itself.
After the hiring process is completed, it is essential to capture the outcome and track the success of placements made through NextLeap.
Recruiters must fill out a form to close the job post, including details of the candidate hired from NextLeap (if applicable) and feedback on their experience to help us improve.
Leveraging other products to communicate updates
To ensure effective communication we plan on utilizing multiple channels such as email and WhatsApp to share important updates with learners and recruiters.
For learners, we can send messages to notify them when they are shortlisted for a role or when new jobs have been added. This approach ensures they receive timely information even when they are not actively on our website.
Similarly, recruiters could also receive messages whenever new learners are added to the talent pool or as a reminder to close a job post after a certain number of days.
Potential Impact
- The job portal’s launch will reduce manual work and enhance employee satisfaction and productivity.
- Onboarding more recruiters will create additional job opportunities for learners and increases the likelihood of successful hires.
- Monetizing the platform through commissions from companies for successful hires can eventually contribute to revenue growth.
- More placements through NextLeap will result in increased customer satisfaction and help in building trust and credibility.
- Satisfied learners are more likely to recommend our courses to others.
Learnings & Challenges
Collaboration was a key aspect of the project, as working closely with stakeholders allowed for diverse perspectives to be considered and ultimately led to a more well-rounded final product.
Through this project, I had the chance to explore a wide range of design patterns, including navigation, page layouts, and information architecture.
And that’s a wrap!
You made it to the end of the case study, I hope this was an informative read!
✨ Grateful to each and every individual who has contributed to this project.
🤝 I am looking out for a full-time product designer role. If you’d love me to be a part of your design team, do reach out to me on Linkedin or Twitter. I’d love to have a conversation with you!
See you somewhere on the Internet. Cheers!💜🌻🌈🦋✨
