Job Search Experience Outcomes

Role: Senior UX Researcher

Methods: Diary Study, Kano Study, Survey, Meta-synthesis

Impact: Foundational Design Pillars, A/B Testing Results

I did many kinds of work at Indeed.com, from evaluative UI evaluation to large, multi-quarter work with specific job seeker segments. But my favorite kind of work has always been mixed-methods, foundational research. Luckily, when I got to Indeed, I was only the third researcher hired, and the first thing we needed to do was to establish core knowledge about job seekers’ needs, wants, and behaviors. Questions we needed to answer were: How does a job search look, from day to day? What should we tell employers to include in a job description? And finally, How should we measure our experience outcomes?

And to be very clear, establishing our research as foundational knowledge was not something I did alone! I worked with many other talented researchers along the way.

But I did contribute a large-scale survey run in 6 countries, which pointed us towards the need to start measuring relevance as a HEART metric. I also conducted the foundational Kano study that isolated the must-haves in a job description; the study’s findings were validated by at least 10 other studies. And I co-ran a field study and diary study with one of my co-workers.

Ultimately, our team was able to confidently tell product managers exactly what core elements we needed to include in both the job description detail and the search results. More importantly, we had documented the realities of job searching in a way that could inform new hires and product managers alike. And finally, our job description recommendations were validated by A/B testing.