A Foot in the Door is a platform that is catered specifically for applicants that have less than five years of experience in the field in which they are looking for a job. The applicant side of the platform is up and running, but the people posting the jobs and searching for candidates don’t have a user-friendly and cohesive process.

Our plan was to begin by completing secondary research to understand the current state of the industry and how our competitor’s present job posters with their system. In our research, we found that current job boards lack efficient filtering systems and focus too much on the resumes and not enough on transferable and soft skills.

After the team completed our secondary research, I continued by doing a competitive analysis with the top job posting platforms: Indeed, LinkedIn, Zip Recruiter, Career Builder, and Simply Hired. It was obvious that A Foot in the Door was lacking several features in comparison including, filtering applicants by keywords, an applicant tracking system, data analytics, or an intuitive messaging function.

I created a screener survey to find our target audience of hiring managers and recruiters, which had 68 participants. 44% of those participants had posted jobs in the past, 96% of those that had posted jobs required less than 5 years of experience for those jobs, and 57% of those participants believed that the candidate’s quality of experience was the most important factor when deciding who to hire. Only 7% of participants believed that the quantity of experience was most important, while 20% value personality the most.

From these participants, we chose 9 people that had posted jobs to interview about the current job posting structure. Every interview that was conducted mentioned issues with filtering candidates. They were receiving too many applications and many were from people with no relevant experience. All of the interviewees also voiced an affinity for soft skills and specific personality traits. They mentioned that a lack of experience wasn’t a deal breaker as long as the candidate was motivated and could learn on the job.

During our ideation process, I established our problem statement: When recruiting and hiring for a job, hiring managers find it difficult to filter through applicants with the current job posting structure.

Our proposed solutions that we established as a team were:

-A more streamlined filtering system with features to better sort applicants

-Deadline alerts for submissions to increase communication between hiring manager and applicant

-A dashboard showing data analytics

-A job posting function catered to entry-level candidates

-A soft skills assessment in which the job poster will choose soft skill categories and there will be AI-generated questions for each applicant to showcase their abilities and personality

After ideation and the iteration of our mid-fidelity prototype, I conducted user testing with 5 participants through Maze. The average time that they spent completing all three given tasks was 46.1 seconds and each participant found the site easy to navigate. Their favorite features were: the ability to see the jobs listed, applicant profiles, and the job posting user flow.