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Localwise is the local job community. We connect local people to jobs at local businesses. At Localwise, we are on a mission to transform local hiring through the power of trusted relationships.
One common pain point for both types of users (both job seekers and employers) is getting the interview for the right job and sorting thru all the prospective applicants. Job seekers had no way of expressing to employers if they really wanted or "prioritized" a certain job application over another. Employers needed a better way to sort thru 50+ applicants who applied and asked for a way to filter "priority" applicants.
We designed a new feature called Priority Apply to engage our Localwise users both the job seekers and employers. Priority Apply helped job seekers by giving them one free Priority Apply daily. Employers received the benefit of seeing which job seekers chose to use Priority Apply for their job posting. This new feature allowed us to gather more data from users to improve the job matching results as well as drive up user engagement.
Compared with LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter, it is clear Localwise did not have any priority apply feature compared to other job boards. We wanted the priority apply on Localwise to be a free feature but limited per day so that users (job seekers) had to prioritize which jobs they wanted to use Priority Apply on. This is also helped users (employers) to see sort thru which applicants used Priority Apply for that particular job posting.
Working closely with the customers support/sales team, we started to listen into conversations and hear first-hand from employers and job seekers what the pain points were. In addition, we looked at data from Google Analytics and user flows from Full Story to gain a better picture of the pain points. Users (job seekers) were not getting called back or progressing in the interview process and that was frustrating. Users (employers) had the challenge of sorting thru lots of potential applicants and it was hard to know a job seeker who really wanted the job vs. a job seeker who applied to hundreds of different jobs. Using this information, we starting creating personas and creating the priority apply user flow.
After an iterative process of looking at users (both job seekers and employers) and understanding the data, our team designed a solution to better engage job seekers and also help employers find the best job candidates. The final solution was prominently featured on the homepage of the website.
We created an option to allow users (job seekers) to become a priority applicant. The main motivation for users to sign-up was to get more visibility and increase the odds of landing an interview. When the user clicked the continue button, the next step was gathering more user information.
Next, we used our current job filters and asked job applicants to fill out their ideal job, cultural fit, experience level, and uploaded resume. Gathering user information provided us with lots of useful data and also the user's social connections. This user data also helped us to improve the job matching algorithm.
Finally, we also created a contingency step in case users got discouraged or decided to close the Priority Apply window before finishing. The overall results were positive as user feedback from both job seekers and employers enjoyed the new Priority Applicant feature. Three KPI metrics we looked at for this feature was (1) Number of applications (2) Number of priority applications (3) Number of hires. Overtime, we started to see a statistical significant correlation that with more priority applications an employer had a better chance of hiring. We also started to see that this feature also helped re-engage job seekers and another objective of getting more user data from users was also achieved.
