AWS Job Board

AWS Educate Job Board

AWS Educate acquired the partner product AWS Job Board in December 2022. The shift in ownership led to a drastically different experience for both Job Seekers (people searching for jobs) and Recruiters (people advertising and looking for candidates for jobs).

Background:

The AWS Educate Program is a portfolio of products that is within AWS Training and Certification. Historically AWS Educate encompassed several products such as AWS Spark, AWS re:post, AWS Academy, and GetIT. All of these products were primarily targeted towards young learners (middle school to college aged students) who had limited experience with cloud skills.

The Job Portal (renamed the AWS Job Board) was a product that connected adult job seekers with available Cloud jobs.

Because of the decline of the Job Portal’s usage + a significant amount of AWS Educates’ users aging out of being “young learners” and moving towards applying internships or full-time jobs within the cloud career space; a business decision was made to move the the Job Portal into AWS Educate and re-brand the product

This way job seekers who were historically learners of other products would also have the chance to connect both profiles and show what courses or badges they earned within other parts of AWS Educate when applying for jobs in the Job Board.

In the case study I will primarily outline how the Job Seeker experience was impacted. The Recruiter experience is currently in the works, when it is released — I’ll share more!

Challenge 🤔

How might we create a streamlined experience for Job Seekers that is uniform with the rest of the AWS Educate portfolio, while continuing to maintain trust and integrity with existing users?

Outcome ⭐

In October 2023, the revised Job Board experience for Job Seekers was launched. This resulted in a 43% increased use of the product.

My Role 💡

I was one of two designers on this project. I owned the research stages — information architecture scoping, initial interviews, surveys, usability tests, etc. I worked in collaboration with a senior designer to deliver end-to-end wireframes for the product team. Owning this project entailed working closely with stakeholders such as: a team of cross-functional developers, product managers, marketing associates, and a project manager to launch the updated product ✨.

What does the Job Board looks like now? 👀

Here I am walking through the experience of looking through the available jobs, finding a job that meets my criteria, saving the job, editing my portfolio, and looking through courses I can take to refine my skills! Make a free account at https://www.awseducate.com, to try it out yourself!

Let’s Rewind ⏪

What did the Job Portal look like before?

The Job Portal used to be a singular page to edit and upload their resume. To apply to jobs, there was no information listed on the internal website other than the name of the job listing and a link to the company website.

Research

Every decision we made was backed by customer feedback and competitive research.

Competitive Analysis

Ideal Job Seeker Journey Map

We separated the job seeker journey maps into 3 personas: new job seekers, existing job seekers, and job seekers coming from different platforms within the Cloud Career Platform.

Site Map

Ideation 👷🏽

This was the first version we worked on - focus was on improving the experience and introducing different ways to sort through jobs internally.

Second Version: Focus was on brand uniformity, updating the Design System, integrating PM asks, and working with Developers to analyze feasibility.

We worked with a team of marketing analysts and product manager to keep track of strings, labels and where each label would route to. Together, we also prioritized the order in which each page needed be rolled out.

V3

For the last iteration — we were amid a design system update. We had to ensure that the UI was compliant with the new design system and that the UX addressed all of the PM/Engineering concerns:

Homepage that clearly outlines the purpose of the product
A link to courses and labs that outlines the value proposition of adjacent products
Easy to follow steps to encourage users to add to the portfolio and use the product
Figure out where registration should live and what should it encompass —> registering to the whole portfolio or just the Job Board

User Acceptance Testing & Usability Testing

Before starting to test, I identified what needed to be resolved and updated from our Lean Canvas and the UAT testing my broader organization completed for de-bugging pre-launch.

The objective of this study is to identify how Job Board job seekers perceive the product and to create a baseline for usability. With the findings from this study we hope to validate and improve upon the ease of use and usefulness of the newly designed Job Board. We hosted an unmoderated survey with tasks on UserZoom to see how job seekers interacted with the newly released product.

Updates

Encouraging Job Seekers to fill out their profile while still giving them the autonomy to choose not to

Adding an FAQ page to ease the onboarding process + encourage AWS Educate learners to utilize the Job Board by adding it in the footer that can be viewed pre-authentication

Finalizing email templates to send to existing job seekers to explain the shift to AWS Educate — this cannot be shared due to NDA

Results 💯

While this project is still ongoing with the first release we were able to increase registration by 40% within the first three weeks of the release. I will continue to add to this page as we receive more data :)