Naukri Aspire: A UX Design Project

Naukri Logo

Project Brief

Naukri is a premier job portal in India, catering to over 20 million job seekers, and has become a key player in sectors like IT, BPO, Finance, and Accounting. It attracts diverse users, from fresh graduates to seasoned professionals seeking to advance their careers. While securing a job is a significant step, achieving a dream career involves more than just employment. It includes upskilling, networking, and continuous self-learning.

This raises an important question:

Can Naukri evolve beyond job listings to become a holistic career development platform?

There’s potential to reshape its image as a comprehensive resource for all career-related needs.

Vision for Naukri

A one-stop destination to build that dream career.

Business objective

Redefine the brand perception such that the platform fulfils all user needs regarding job search & preparation and is ‘job-ready.’

Problem Statement

Freshers and Entry-level job seekers find the career planning process complicated. Applicants often find enhancing their employability and job readiness stressful and confusing.

Desk Research

Naukri Research Mind Map

Key Hiring Trends from 2022

Based on the research conducted by Naukri, the following hiring trends were identified:

1. 85% Y-O-Y increase in IT services hiring
2. 84% Y-O-Y increase in Telecom/ISP hiring
3. 51% Y-O-Y increase in Retail hiring
4. 85% Y-O-Y increase in hiring in Bangalore
5. 84% Y-O-Y increase in hiring in Hyderabad
6. 69% Y-O-Y increase in hiring in Pune

Job Search Mentality

• Unable to explore the best career opportunities.
• Getting overwhelmed by negative feelings leads to stress and procrastination.
• This leads to rash decision-making, over-researching, and prioritising income over livelihood.

Career Move Mentality

• A career move is strategically planned and executed in a holistic approach.
• Align professional goals with personality.
• Taking time to think during decision-making.

Key Stakeholders

Based on the desk research, the following stakeholders were identified:

1. Students & Graduates
2. Job Seekers
3. Recruiters
4. Companies/Employers
5. Recruitment Agencies

New Hiring Processes, Tools, and Services

Due to pandemic-related recruitment changes, hiring processes, tools, and services were increasingly used in India. These changes will continue to impact the hiring process in India for the foreseeable future:

1. Predictive Analytics: Helps deliver data-driven decision-making and insights to identify strengths and weaknesses and reduce talent acquisition costs.
2. Contingent Workers: There is an increasing trend of companies using contingent workers. Contingent workers require a completely different talent acquisition process.
3. Remote Interviewing: Remote interviewing involves using videoconferencing tools. The technology facilitates online hiring, making it easier for others to participate in the selection process.
4. Cloud Technologies: The cloud is a vital component of the tools and technologies of the hiring and recruiting trade, and it allows HR teams to expand their capabilities simply and efficiently.
5. Diversity and Inclusion: Diversity and inclusion are another area of company focus during recruitment. Businesses with a diverse workforce have better productivity and profitability.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Today, AI improves ways to source, identify, and engage talent. It is also used to help remove bias from candidate identification, selection, and hiring.

General Career Building Process

A general career-building process has the following steps:

1. Self Evaluation
2. Conduct Career Research
3. Market Research and Trends
4. Skills Research
5. Assess your Options
6. Prepare for Job Interviews
7. Start Learning New Skills
8. Explore Workplace Options
9. Begin your Job Search
10. Accept a Position

Exasperating Serious Problems

Job seekers in India face considerable challenges due to poor technical and soft skills training. The lack of career development services in education and training institutes has left students to plan and discover their career paths to success. These challenges can be categorised under three broad domains:

1. Poor Career Planning: Lack of knowledge about career planning leads to confusion and stress when deciding the best path forward after completing university education.
2. Late Decision Making: Students make decisions late in their academic careers, which affects their ability to discuss and make clearly thought-out decisions.
3. Poor Goal Setting: Poor goal setting leads to misdirection and misappropriation of jobseeker time and effort in finding a good career start after university education.

Due to these challenges, job seekers actively searching for jobs remain unaware and miss out on good job roles, facing desperation, depression, and procrastination.

Secondary Research Insights

1. Help candidates create better career strategies based on their skills, interests, and goals.
2. Understand the problems faced due to the hybrid hiring process, such as correct assessments of candidates, virtual onboarding, and tool awareness.
3. Redefine and improve candidate profiles to better reflect candidate interests, skills, knowledge, qualifications, personality and needs.
4. Job seekers face increasing competition during the hiring process and lack a mechanism that increases their profile visibility to hiring companies.
5. Increase awareness about career planning in candidates during the early phase of their education/ career.

Primary Research

Research Goals

1. Are Early Career Aspirants able to successfully plan their career path?
2. What are the primary motivations behind selecting a particular career opportunity?
3. How do early career aspirants perceive the value of Naukri in their career-building process?
4. What steps do Early Career Aspirants take to enhance their employability skills and job readiness?

Participant Screening

Education Experience

• Ongoing Bachelors and Masters Education
• Completed Bachelors Education
• Completed Masters Education

Location

• Tier 1 (New Delhi, Bangalore)
• Tier 2 (Lucknow, Bhubaneswar)
• Tier 3 (Varanasi, Nagpur)

Education Institute

• Tier 2 & 3 govt. universities and colleges
• Tier 2 & 3 Private universities and colleges
• Tier 2 & 3 affiliated universities and colleges

Type of Job Role

• Technical Job Roles
• Non-Technical Job Roles

Work Experience

• Current Students
• 0–2 Years Job Seekers
• 3–4 Years Job Seekers

User Types

• Active and Passive Naukri Users
• Ex-Naukri Users
• Those who have never used Naukri

Interview Process

Semi-structured Interviews: The interviews were semi-structured, with a questionnaire for each user segment. They were in Hindi and English. Each response set was documented after the interview was completed.

64 Interviews: 64 interviews were conducted from all user groups. The main focus of the primary research was to understand the problems faced by freshers and recent graduates.

Telephonic Interviews: Telephonic interviews were conducted with candidates from Naukri and user contacts. Each interview lasted for around 15–20 minutes. 5–10 interviews were taken each day.

User Personas

User Personas (Early Students, Graduate Students, 0–2 Experience Job Seekers)

User Journey Mapping

Early Year Students

Graduate Students

0–2 Years Experience Job Seekers

How Might We?

“How might we create a platform that helps job seekers build suitable career paths based upon their career goals and interests?”

Design: Building Naukri as a career platform

Defining Naukri as a Career Platform

Mood Board

Mood Board

Iconography

Iconography

Colour Palette

Colour Palette

Component Library

Component Library

Low-Fidelity Wire Frames

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Screen Mock-Ups

Onboarding Screens

Building Naukri Profile

Naukri Career Platform

Upskill Screens

Mentors and Groups

Jobs and Courses Information Screens