Case study: Designing a Job Marketplace Website
Landscaping Careers with Kalibrr
Having 3.2 million job seekers in 2019, Kalibrr has solidified its position as one of the leading platforms in the Philippine HR tech landscape. To pivot from this breakthrough, we want to refine the job-seeking and recruitment experience of our users while also improving how people perceive the brand.
We wanted to understand how we’ll be able to produce work that could benefit the users of both our job and recruitment marketplace. Through the several research efforts we’ve conducted, we discovered how every platform onboarding begins where they land to log-in or sign-up. This helped us affirm our decision to redesign the website.
Initial Discovery Work
We held a stakeholder interview to validate these assumptions on how we want to present Kalibrr on the website. Apart from that, we also conducted a Product Reaction Survey and sent it to 44 random samples to identify how the general crowd perceives the company. Here are the results for both initiatives:
Stakeholder Interview Analysis
- Outdated content for the new product line (Content)
- Unaligned Brand Design and Design System (Design System)
- Unoptimized User Experience (UX)
- The brand is not appearing on the search (SEO)
Product Reaction Survey
Out of 121 words and 44 participants:
- Clean — 52.3%
- Impersonal — 52.3%
- Business-like — 29.5%
- Ordinary — 15.9%
- Professional — 15.9%
- Ineffective — 6.8%
Web Performance
The information architecture of Kalibrr has tons of pages, making it hard to rank as it competes with the job postings and company pages in the platform. When we conducted a web and online performance audit in July 2019, the search query Kalibrr would show a company page of a construction company in the platform instead of the homepage.
We learned how some factors hinder us to rank on the top of the search and found solutions for each:
Writing the content
We did a rigorous keyword research to help the page rank higher in the SERP to align the copy of our landing pages to our current services and product offerings. This enabled us getting ourselves from nowhere to the first page of the search engine results page.
Media Optimizations
Compared to the old design where copies are included in the images, every header, body copy, and links are now actual texts to ensure search crawlability.
Brand Design
One reason why customer loyalty and retention rate increases is when potential leads and existing customers see uniformity across all of the product or company’s marketing channels. Creating similar and exemplified experiences for the users enable
Design System Application
Design systems bring order to chaos which is why we assembled the pages using Arsenal, our in-house built design system. The pages’ implementation used existing components and patterns to amplify accessibility and efficiency of our pages.
Brand Design Alignment
To establish consistency within all the marketing platforms of Kalibrr, we aligned the usage of colors, fonts, and illustrations to the pages.
Redesigned Pages
For the old page reference, you may check them out here: Jobseeker | Employer
Props to Krizia Lim and Raffy Alcoriza for the illustrations and Dev work!
What’s next?
There’s a lot more that Kalibrr can do for the website such as writing better content that could help us rise above from the search, multi-variant testings and conducting user interviews, and deeper design critique.
We also took time to design possible future iterations such as separating the industry niche pages from the local ones, similar to how food delivery services are doing it, a resume parser alternative for the search bar, and an improved Job Relevance measurement research.
I wrote this article in late 2020 and looking back, I’ve seen a lot of incremental improvements on how I process problems and translate them to design—and I’m glad to bring all of these to Smart and the GigaLife App.
Thanks to everyone who helped me make this article possible including my team at Kalibrr. Shout out to Mark Lester C. Lacsamana, Alexis Collado, Jiggy Villanueva, Cwenne Chua, and Laura Ang. 🎉
