Building an experimental tool for students and colleges in India to manage campus recruitment

The opportunity

LinkedIn CampusHire was an experimental tool for managing the campus recruitment process in colleges in India. Preliminary market research suggested a dearth of platforms for managing campus recruitment across colleges in India. College recruitment was a chaotic event managed annually in each college. There was little automation and students and college administration used offline tools and manual processes in tracking applications and placements. This was an opportunity for LinkedIn which was looking to develop a member base from the vast pool of college students on the verge of launching their careers. Developing and providing an online platform to students so that they can land their first job via LinkedIn was seen as a strategic bet.

Users & audience

College students across India, teachers and administrators

Team & Role

The CampusHire team was formed in Bangalore with a product manager, a program manager and several software developers. As the lead designer, I led the UX design, UI prototyping and research for the entire project which included defining student, placement officer and recruiter task flows, user validation, interaction and visual design. I managed one other visual designer on this project

Design process & insights

CampusHire was a completely blue-sky initiative with little research support. We started with field research to gather insights from campuses across Bangalore, to begin with. We documented pain points in the recruitment process. Interviews with students, professors and administrators involved in the annual placements events yielded rich insights into how the process was chaotic and prone to errors. This was one of the primary ways in which students applied for jobs. The placements event which was run on engineering, and management college campuses involved inviting companies who had job openings for soon-to-graduate students. Students had to go through assessments, and technical tests on third-party online platforms like Freshersworld, Merritrac and so on. Some were conducted offline. Students found the process unpredictable. There were long waiting periods before they could know about the outcomes. Administrators who planned and ran these placements did not have the right tools to manage the logistics like tracking progress, following up with recruiters etc. I worked closely with the product manager to brainstorm ideas to ease the pain points of students, placement officers and recruiters. We developed fully fleshed-out profiles for each of the users. We then mapped the existing task flows for each profile and identified key actions that each profile had to perform for a successful placement. We converged on tasks that can be automated and decided on what form factor the task can be ideally completed. Students could register their interest, track their progress and accept or deny a job offer, all on their mobile phones. Placement officers on the other hand managed bulk tasks and the logistics of placement events. They would ideally perform these tasks on the desktop.

Design solution

With the above assumptions, I built early HTML prototypes capturing the task flows and actions for each profile and tested them on campuses. After several design iterations and rounds of user validation, I completed the interaction design and initial specs for the visual design.

Outcome & learnings

After the final design handover, plans for building an MVP and enlisting beta partners were underway. We were able to make significant progress towards developing a beta until my exit from LinkedIn in early 2016.