Xavier Massaut, Head of Product Experience at StepStone -the leading online job board in Belgium- explains how his company optimises their users’ job search experience.
Nowadays people are used to getting orientation, searching, ordering and buying all they need online. Xavier Massaut: “People expect a user friendly and personalised online service. Not only for shopping, where for example Amazon is taking the lead, but also when they search online for a job. That’s why today it’s more important than ever to focus on the user experience. It decides whether your business is successful or not.”
A current study by Walker, a customer intelligence consulting firm, even predicts that user experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator by 2020. Xavier Massaut: “The more you give users what they want, the more successful your business will be. This was proved by Netflix: in 2011 they ignored the wants and needs of their customers by splitting their DVD and streaming businesses and effectively increasing prices by 40%. Result: Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers.” (source: Business Insider)
Personalised journey to optimize UX
A recent survey conducted by StepStone shows that 56% of jobseekers wouldn’t apply for a job if the job ad didn’t appeal to them. But how do you build a product that delights your users? To better understand and serve their users, StepStone conducted extensive research. “The first thing we needed to do was to track our user’s behaviour onsite, like Netflix, Google and Amazon use data-driven design techniques to improve the UX”, explains Xavier Massaut. Therefore, the StepStone Product Team interviewed over 100 candidates and recruiters, studied over 100 hours of user video recordings and applied eye-tracking research. “The result is a whole personalised journey for our users: an optimised design for all job ads that enables our company to elevate the user experience from ordinary to extraordinary.”
Heart of the digital future
To support their users at every step of their jobseeker journey, StepStone also launched other personalised features. “When a candidate enters our homepage, jobs that might interest him or her appear immediately. We also send those recommended jobs via mailings. It’s similar to the ‘recommended’ series that Netflix offers after a user has viewed a specific program,” says Xavier Massaut. On top of that, the recent searches of a candidate on StepStone’s website are tracked. This is similar to Google. The algorithms are constantly refined to match the search results with the specific needs of the user.
“One of the keys to making the user experience a success is to keep in touch with the user, even after a new product has been launched,” explains Xavier Massaut. Like Netflix asking for feedback after downloading a specific program, StepStone sends out surveys to candidates after they’ve applied. And with success: “Since we started sending surveys,
hundreds of candidates have shared their feedback. Our customer service transmits all the information to our product team so they can start with product development.”
Xavier Massaut concludes: “In today’s context of the ‘war for talent’, user experience is the key to successfully matching companies with the best candidates. As UX is the beating heart of the digital future, we are working hard on all touchpoints for our users to have the best possible job searching experience on the market. Our ambition remains to be the jobsite of choice for all candidates and customers.”