Fast access to tech graduates for recruiters.

Lambda Profiles gets a design overhaul making finding the right candidates easier and much faster.

Limited filtering, poor card design, and incomplete data made finding the right Lambda graduate candidates very difficult.

Students were all over the map with how much of their profiles they filled out and the length of their biography sections. I got to take a look at this page and see how I could improve it.

How might we ensure tech recruiters can quickly see specific groups of Lambda grads?

What will help recruiters find candidates?

There was limited research done by Lambda for this product and more specific answers were needed in order to make informed design decisions.

What I noticed:

The two “Get in touch” buttons didn’t look like buttons and that’s a problem.
It is unnecessary to include all of each section of information vs what it vital.
It’s an inefficient and unfamiliar design strategy for recruiters.

What Lambda needed:

To make sure recruiters wanted to use the page to select Lambda grads by making it familiar.
Show more students on each page while highlighting their skills, diversity, backgrounds and more.
Make searching for sets of candidates as easy as possible so recruiters would stay on the page and reach out.

Single full card before the redesign.

How do we get more relevant candidates seen by recruiters?

Presenting people:

Cards are not a bad idea when showing people but the large cards were simultaneously showing too much about each person and not showing enough actual people.

I looked at recruiting tools that exist and drew some inspiration for different formats to present these rockstars to tech recruiters.

I'm not a recruiter!

To figure out what the recruiters wanted, I conducted some preference tests and asked some questions to get a concensus about the design direction.

Preference test results with percentages and thumbnails.

Illuminations:

Horizontal layouts were strongly preferred to the vertical cards.
The layout with the most votes was the one most similar to LinkedIn.
Recruiters found the large horizontal cards the easiest to scan and get vital information from.

Compromises:

Needed to find a medium between too much and too little information.
Larger card design still only showed 3 students per page.
Biographies were too hard to regulate and work into design due to inconsistent backend data.

Dialing it in:

Making the cards expandable gave them more versatility and allowed me to be super selective about what was on the condensed card.

This served another purpose in allowing the recruiters to stay on one page instead of opening multiple tabs to view candidate details.

Early iteration of the expanded card design, trying to work out information included and placement.

“We are actually going to need a mobile view after all.”

“LOL no problem”.

So despite being assured that there was no need to do a mobile version, we indeed ended up needing it so I got to work on that quickly.

Time machine wishes:

You know, no matter what the product manager says, I’m just going to make a mobile version first anyway because that’s what I was taught and it helps the project in the end either way.
I learned that I need to take more control of my research and the effectiveness of testing is reduced with a middle man.
Pushing the developers to get as close to the design and making sure it works is a much bigger part of the job than I previously realized.