CareerBuilder Mobile Application
Research | Writing | Prototyping | UI/UX Design | Service Design
Overview
Moving to a new country is an exciting feat, yet settling down is not as easy, especially when it involves finding highly skilled employment. This project was born out of my interest for personal and career growth. Also, having lived in different counties and experienced the woes of navigating the employment and cultural landscape of a foreign land, I was inspired to focus on tackling some of these challenges that immigrant job seekers face when they first arrive in a new country.
How might we make career development equitable for all job seekers?
CareerBuilder is a mobile application and service designed to solve the obstacles faced by recent immigrants in seeking and obtaining highly skilled jobs in the United States. The purpose of this tool is to increase the resilience of immigrant communities by providing resources that can increase employability and reduce the social isolation they encounter when integrating into American culture. Even more than that, it is designed to enable job seekers to develop habits for career growth, and more importantly, democratize career development for all types of job seekers regardless of ethnicity or social status.
User Onboarding
To seek help and join the CareerBuilder community, users are expected to answer a few questions by taking a quick survey during sign-up. This allows the application to tailor content and resources based on the user’s response.
Find help & Connect
Users can find job search support from industry experts who will assist them in articulating their previous skills and foreign experience into a well-crafted resume. Users can also connect with friends on the platform as well as other job seekers and potential employers at events
Learn and build habits for career success
The platform also provides a resource and learning section that will provide actionable tasks to help users engage and build efficacy in career development habits as well as understand the US job landscape.
The Process
Secondary Research
At first, I started this project trying to understand the factors that impede career development among low-income and minority job seekers in the United States. Consequently, I researched current career development trends and looked at how people were solving this problem in the competitive landscape. Here are some of my key findings:
User research
Over several months, I interviewed a mixture of job seekers and industry professionals. I talked to over 20 people, from recent graduates to seasoned career professionals, career coaches, university career counselors, recruiters, and HR hiring managers. I also participated in virtual career development conferences to understand the biggest challenges for immigrant job seekers. Through these interviews and observations, I uncovered the barriers to employability for foreign-born professionals compared with domestic job seekers in the United States. I highlighted below a few things that a few of my interviewees had to say:
Research Insights
I synthesized my research and narrowed it down to these key insights. These also helped me realize the criteria I should design against
User Persona
Based on research insights I created a persona profile for my key user
Prototyping, Explainer video, and User Testing
For the first prototype, I scripted and developed an animated explainer video to test the validity of the concept with career coaches and immigrant job seekers. User testing helped to refine the key features I should focus on in this iteration. As a result, I designed against 3 criteria that will provide personal employment support for immigrant job seekers.
Reduce social Isolation
Provide resources and tools to improve employability
Affordable employment support
Next steps…
With regards to this project, I reckon that there are still some grounds to be covered to seeing its actualization. First on my agenda is to do a series of testing with potential users. I am open to see how it might evolve as I plan to carry out user testing over the summer of 2021. I have not fully determined if the idea would run solely as a mobile app or if it might work best as a service. At the same time, I have been wondering if I could extend the user segment to include people contemplating the idea of moving to a new country or are in the process of doing so… I don’t know! But I am excited to see what the outcome of the user testing would be at the end of the summer and I’d take from there.