Improving job tracking at Pathrise
On the spectrum of most dreaded experiences, job hunting falls somewhere between stepping in dog poop and getting a parking ticket.
Enter Pathrise, an online mentorship program for job seekers in tech. Pathrise mentors can't help people avoid smelly sidewalks, but they can teach skills to help folks land the jobs they want.
At the time of this project, Pathrise had 240 active fellows and counting. The team needed a way to improve coaching efficiency in order to scale and support more job seekers.
As the designer of Pathrise's LMS product, I redesigned the job tracker to improve communication between mentors and fellows.
Defining the Problem
Why should we improve the job tracker?
Within the Pathrise LMS, fellows were able to report every job they were interested in, had applied to, or were actively interviewing for. Mentors checked this job tracker before each coaching session to personalize career advice for each fellow.
But mentors were unable to provide maximal value in coaching sessions when fellows didn't update the job tracker.
What's wrong with the existing tracker?
I observed 36 fellows using the existing job tracker to discover what deterred them from accurate tracking.
Considering these pain points, I decided that the solution must be:
Ideation
Fellows wanted to do less. Mentors wanted to know more. We needed to find balance.
In addition to the obvious usability improvements, I brainstormed around the question, How might we surface more data without requiring more user effort?
Working with an engineering partner, I examined the metadata we already had or could easily provide. Together, we assessed technical feasibility of surfacing and organizing information.
Show when a record was last updated
Add interview time field
Add archive functionality
Intelligently surface recruiter contact info
Filter by stage, last updated, etc.
Add search by company
Emphasize upcoming interviews
Show events on a timeline
Organize events by stage
Solution
“I’ve never been so excited to ship a feature before.”
Job tracking deserves its own dedicated view.
Before: Limited real estate gave us few options for surfacing relevant data.
After: A dedicated tab allows fellows and mentors to focus on the job pipeline, with no compromising of the important details.
An empty state provides guidance on how to use the feature and a link to the Pathrise job board.
Fellows and mentors can wishlist job opportunities for the fellow to apply to later.
The job posting can be accessed directly from the opportunity details view.
Job opportunities are shown in a list, sorted by status.
Fellows and mentors can see how long it has been since an opportunity was last updated.
Fellows can easily view the most immediate upcoming event for each opportunity.
Fellows and mentors can view a timeline of events for each job opportunity.
Fellows and mentors can add notes to any event in a job opportunity.
Fellows can easily archive any opportunity to remove it from the list of active opportunities.
Fellows can add a reason for archiving. (This was a bit of friction we decided was worth it.)
Outcome
The new job tracker helped to increase fellows' engagement with Pathrise.
The redesign was a hit amongst fellows and mentors. It set the foundation for future product releases, such as Pathrise's job tracking Chrome extension.
“[The redesign] makes my life easier because I don't have to update Huntr and then update on Pathrise. I think this can be potentially much easier to use than Huntr.”
