Painstakingly revamping a 16-year old recruitment platform
An introduction to JobStreet.com’s new employer system
It’s been more than a year since we first launched JobStreet.com’s new SiVA Recruitment Centre to the public. Through the best and worst of times, we were able to transform a well-loved, but old product into something that fits into today’s technological aspects. And what a journey it was!
A bit of background
To put into context, JobStreet.com is an online job board that provides employers with a platform to post their job vacancies to the millions of candidates inside our database. For them to post these ads and start recruiting the right talents into their organisation, the employers will need to use the JobStreet.com Employer Site and connect with our old SiVA11 platform.
But as times changed, so did the technology. Everything became faster — our internet speed, the way we communicated with one another and even recruitment processes. This became both an opportunity and a challenge for us as SiVA11 was still running on legacy technologies.
How do we keep up with the changing times, while still maintaining the core features of a very comprehensive product? This was when the idea for SiVA Recruitment Centre (SiVA RC) was conceived.
With that, we had to focus most of our research and design efforts in making this platform a total talent sourcing partner for employers across Asia.
The start of SiVA Recruitment Centre
Back when we first started in December 2015, we barely had 5,000 users in the new platform. But we had a dream and a target to achieve; we wanted to get at least 90% of the users migrated from SiVA11 to SiVA RC by the end of our initiated timeline.
Fast forward to early January this year, 86% of our users had migrated successfully to the new platform. Sure we missed the mark by 4%, but I personally feel that this is still an accomplishment that we can be proud of. Especially after going through various pilot tests to make SiVA RC what it is today (kudos to everyone who was involved with the initiative project!).
The evolution of the recruitment industry
The talent marketplace is now evolving from what it was 10 years ago. At times of innovation, whether it’s from the business or technological point of view, as a creative person we would want to be pushed into exploring something new.
And as candidates are given more options for better career growth, we need to assist recruiters in moving faster to secure the best talents available.
This is why the key design metrics for SiVA RC are measured by:
- Connections between employers-talents
- Increasing on-platform usage
- Efficiency of recruiting talents
This is to make sure the product that we’ve created leaves a lasting impact on the users while conveying SEEK Asia’s mission of “Improving Lives through Better Careers”.
To make this happen, most of our designs went through rigorous user testing and research — focusing on the scenarios that the users are going through and being user-centric all together.
Looking at the changes above, the design direction that I’ve applied here is mainly a card-based UI. It has a good flexibility to design the component of each function in the product and at the same time supports responsive framework easily; supports multiple user devices. Simple and clean designs are practiced throughout the whole application platform in order to minimise the noise for the user. SiVA RC’s new design style uses flat designs with a 2-tone color scheme.
This is to achieve a good contrast that lets users focus on their intended actions rather than the UI itself. The design thinking for every page also focuses on a maximum of 2 main tasks, conducive to a better task-success rate. As a whole, to provide a great product that tells a better story, we will need to cover these 5 aspects: functionality, usability, comfortability, delightfulness and creating a meaningful tool for the users.
“Every great design begins with an even better story.”
— Lorinda Mamo
In conclusion
Converting the ever-complicated SiVA11 into the current SiVA RC was no easy task for me, my team and the organisation. We had to simplify the whole web application that had 8 main navigations down to 3. The whole web architecture has since been restructured to accommodate this and overall, we’re happy with the improvements that we’ve been seeing day after day as more users are migrating over to SiVA RC.
But this is not the end. Continuous learning and iterations are required after creating such big changes for the users. So, whether it be on making the UI even more intuitive, building a technology with better performance or just keeping the metric systems simple, we want to be able to improve SiVA RC as each day passes. There’s always an exciting new journey to be taken on this road and SiVA RC’s is just beginning.
Lastly, I’d be more than happy if you could comment, feedback or give your thoughts on the new SiVA RC based on this article. If you have suggestions on how to improve it further, feel free to reach out to me anytime!
That’s it for now. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful. Happy recruiting!
