SeekOut: Career Compass

Helping employees maximize their potential

Role

Senior Product Designer: Product Planning, Strategy, Visual Design, Prototyping and Quality Assurance

Overview

SeekOut developed an internal-to-client employee management system, called Career Compass, that helps individuals navigate and develop their careers within their company. This required designing an approachable, utilitarian interface involving many points of data including employment history, performance, goals and preferences.

The challenges

With an over-arching, feature-packed product being created by a small, agile team, the prioritization and seamless integration of each feature and data source was important to consider. How do you set up a released product for success before it’s fully realized? What are the repercussions of any needed adjustments to allow features to be added down the road?

Approach

With the uncertainty of breadth, scope and capabilities that Career Compass would have, and with the need to launch with Beta clients, it was understood that the product would have to be ever-evolving and responsive to client needs as they’re discovered.

This meant that development for each of the features had to be siloed, but regularly remapped and integrated to maintain consistency and fluid integration between the features.

The main features

Jobs and Projects

Jobs and Projects were the first features that Career Compass would offer for employees within the client company. It would be the central resource for finding available jobs (permanent positions) and/or projects (temporary positions), details and requirements to fulfilling the roles, as well as learning about the team members associated with the positions. Additionally, the employee could directly apply for the job/project, and their profile would automatically be shared with the appropriate parties.

All this while understanding how the role related to the employee’s personal profile, exposing where they met the criteria and what gaps they could address.

Starting with a bare-bones system, I designed a search experience that prioritized the details that employees would search by, such as department, location, level, and more. I had to create a tagging ecosystem that had the specific metadata relevant to the multiple search criteria and display each of these in an parsable manner for users to scan quickly.

To help listings be more personal to the user, I also surfaced the relevancy of the positions in relation to their skills, for another facet to measure by.

Profile

While the jobs and projects board let employees know what positions are available within the company, there needed to be a more intelligent way to surface more relevant openings to the users. This is where the Profile work came in.

Sourcing from readily available databases, such as LinkedIn and Workday, the Profile feature was developed to be a starting point for employees to understand how their experience and history related to their career growth and potential positions going forward. Using what could be gathered, we presented the information readily available to recruiters and employers and provided the opportunity for the user to refine and correct their information to better target their goals. In turn, these corrections were passed on and updated within the original sources.

My role for Profile was to find a way to present the gathered employee information, and incentivize the user to update and correct their details so that they can better target their career goals. With the help of a content designer, we were able to create multiple scenarios that encouraged the employees to populate their profile as much as possible.

With the solutions provided, initial clients managed to get at least fifty percent of their employees to interact with their profile on Career Compass within the first month of adoption.

Skills

To supplement Profile, and to inform the previous features of Jobs and Projects, I was tasked with creating a Skills experience that would help the employees be aware of their gaps and areas of improvement.

What skills did the Jobs and Projects require of potential employees? What opportunities were there for the employees to attain missing skills? While engineering developed methods to parse a user’s accessible information – from sources such as LinkedIn – how do we present the collected skills to the employee and have them confirm that the gathered information is correct?

These were only a few of the many questions that surfaced while defining what Skills meant for Career Compass.

I was able to create a system that included skill-tagging, details, as well as a recommendation experience that surfaced related skills for the user to add to their plate. I also made it so that the skill system was agnostic to the surface it was presented on - allowing a user to manage their skills anywhere in the product, in context to the feature they were utilizing.

Learning

With the Skills work surfaced the need to address Skills gaps. Coincidentally, many of SeekOut’s Career Compass clients had previously invested in Learning Management Systems (LMS). There were varying systems, but SeekOut engineers were determined to create an experience that made the system consistent with what Career Compass users were already using. Being the CC was meant to be the source of career enrichment, it should also be the source to provide the tools for enrichment, instead of having to seek out an external educational tool. This is where the Learning vertical in Career Compass came from - which integrates the client’s chosen LMS into where employees were already managing their career profile.

Many of the challenges involved consolidating the separate types of information within the different LMS into consistent fields, such as type of course, type of media, short and long descriptions, duration, ratings, and more. Then displaying all the information without a) taking away from the original LMS and b) not having to host any of the LMS content on our own systems. All while surfacing the different skills and relevant roles that the learning content applies to.

In the same vein that Jobs and Projects were displayed, I designed a system that surfaced relevant information in relation to their profile, such as what skills the learning module would add, and how relevant it is to their current and future roles.

Career paths

Having been focused on the minutiae of the separate verticals of Career Compass, it was becoming obvious there was a lack of perspective for the users to put all of these different elements together. How did these separate vertices come together to a make the full picture that is their career? Enter Career Paths, a way for the employees to map out their career goals and see where their work and experiences could take them.

With the databases that the client company provided regarding their employees, from engineers to managers to c-suite, we were able to see the patterns that people took throughout out their professional lives and generate educated guesses as to where they could end up within the company. We were able to expose the positions that peers previously came from, and where such positions typically moved on to.

This presented me with an opportunity to help users visualize their next step - what they needed to see, and understand more clearly what they needed to achieve. It was a way for individuals to see their career ladders without relying on their managers to define it for them.

After I designed the search and save experience for Career Paths, search became one of the highest trafficked pages among all clients. The implication being that employees were very interested in what their careers could look like within the company in the long run.

Tying it all together

As these features developed, connections had to be made throughout the product. Skills had to be integrated into the Profile, which had to influence the Job and Project results, which influenced the Learning suggestions, and so on. Career Compass became a giant mass of features not dissimilar to an overgrown squash garden, where trying to move one part resulted in partially dismantling, or even breaking, other features.

One of the few things that managed to keep it all together was the design system I collaborated on with the design team. Our individual contributions within our feature areas of controls, inputs, and styles, were aggregated into the unified system that kept our designs updated, consistent, and effective in reinforcing the product brand, whether it was using SeekOut’s or the clients’. Establishing the design system was critical and extremely helpful considering the early stages of Career Compass and the rate in which it evolved.

Results and takeways

Even as Career Compass was released before all the features I’ve covered in this case study were completed, the resulting products generated multiple, early-adopting clients. Companies such as Peraton, Ashby, and Atlassian persevered through the growing pains, and now utilize Career Compass primarily for allowing their employees to manage their professional journeys.

It’s a rare opportunity to create a product such as Career Compass from scratch, with no real references as to how to “do it right,” and with only what you can gather from the limited user research we were able to conduct. This stage in my career also exposed to me how much I’ve been taking for granted being an industry expert (such as gaming) made confident decisions and user advocacy, contrasting with my inexperience in HR tech.

Tools and skills used

Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, Jira, Confluence.

Visual design, Interaction design, Motion design, Accessibility design, Project management, Quality assurance, User research testing and interviews.