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Case Study:

RiseKit
Jobseeker
Experience

RiseKit is a workforce development platform connecting jobseekers with right training, resources, and opportunities at the right time. 

We tackled low confidence and fatigue among young, under-employed jobseekers and increased platform engagement with transparency and highly personalized career guidance.  


Written by Kelly Schairer

Introduction 


The Team


I led design for this project in collaboration with a product manager and the head of product.

Timeline and Tools


The project was completed in 8 weeks. We conducted remote team workshops in Miro, leveraged Vercel for rapid concept generation and prototyping, and used Figma as the primary design tool to carry the designs to high-fidelity mockups.

My Role


User Research and Synthesis

I moderated user interviews with users in the form of a conversation about their current work flow, goals, and pain points. I also synthesized the data collected through these interviews into insights to guide the direction of the design.

Ideation and Rapid Concepts

I coined narrative langage that shaped the delivery of this user experience, identifying and leveraging key phrases from the user research to establish product terminology that resonated with our research participants’ goals for the user experience. 

Wireframing and High-Fidelity Mockups

I created every stage of the designs for this project in Figma, using our generated concepts as a reference to draft the inital wireframes, the initial set of MVP designs, and the final iterative high-fidelity mockups after collecting user feedback.

Challenge

Targeting the Job Hunt




Understanding Opportunity Youth


This redesign focused on a user type we call opportunity youth: young adults ages 18–24 who are interested in, currently enrolled in, or had recently completed a workforce development program or support service.

Our jobseeker users are referred to RIseKit by our nonprofit staff partners, who use it to manage their caseloads. Referring clients to the RiseKit jobseeker experience allows them to not only quickly communicate about work and training opportunities, but also collect key demographic information about clients crucial to future grant proposals. 

Distrust in Job Platforms


Under-employment and job hunting have left young people feeling resentful and fatigued. They’re tired of filling in the same forms over and over again and never hearing back. 

RiseKit and their nonprofit partners also need all of that information they’re tired of sharing, as they can only help them establish career goals if they’re familiar with their personal background and employment history. The jobseeker platform would need to build trust in exchange for profile completion and platform engagement.

Life Gets in the Way


Opportunity youth balance career aspirations with insecure access to crucial resources like childcare, housing, and transit, and these real-life barriers impact morale and confidence in even the most highly motivated people.

Though jobseekers are referred to RiseKit through nonprofit partners, the focus of that organization is often not the only support they need. Encouring candid disclosure and discussion of life barriers helps nonprofit staff succesfully place clients, and helps jobseekers set and achieve realistic career goals.

The Approach

Research Insights




40
Young, underemployed jobseekers participated in our user research

“I had no direction and no idea where to start”

- D.C., Opportunity Youth research Participant
“It sucks feeling like you can’t help yourself, or you’re not in control”

- M.L., Opportunity Youth research Participant
“I feel like I’m shouting into the void when I apply for jobs”
- T.T., Opportunity Youth research Participant

User Research


We leveraged our nonprofit partnerships to recruit 40 reseach participants ages 18-24 who were currently enrolled in supportive service programs geared toward workforce development.

We conducted a total of 3 in-person research workshops with our participants, where we split up into groups to conduct interviews and did pen-and-paper journey mapping following their experience finding work with help from a nonprofit. Here’s what we learned:

Maintaining Feelings of Agency

Asking for help can be a hit to self-esteem, and 72% of our research participants experienced feelings of shame when they turned to a nonprofit for help securing work. Participants also shared that they disliked the feeling of handing over control to a case manager.

Users would be more likely to engage with a platfom that allows them to retain a sense of agency and feel like an active participant in their case. 

Communication and Collaboration 

Participants also expressed resentment at the idea of simply being “told what to do” by their case manager, with 60% of participants feeling less enthusiastic about a work or training opportunity they had no hand in selecting.

They had less faith in plans handed to them with no input, which we could combat by building tools for jobseekers to explore their own ideas for future employment, browse opportunities on their own, and engage in conversations about an employment plan. 

Combating Undermined Trust

Our conversations confirmed our assumptions about jobseekers’ skepticism toward job boards and similar digital tools, with 100% of participants saying they dread filling out forms on employment-related apps and websites because they feel like nothing will come of it.

A platform that felt impersonal, extractive, or like "just another form to fill out" would face instant resistance.

Brick By Brick

Participants broadly expressed interest in highly personalized mobile experience that tailor what they see to previous inputs, and expressed satisfaction at the idea of building their own algorithm “brick by brick”. This would be a crucial for us to leverage in our effort to incentivize users to share key information for their jobseeker profile.

Discoveries

Forging a Design Path



Defining the Problem


Here’s the problem statement we developed to connect our research findings to our design goals:

Young disadvantaged jobseekers need to feel comfortable and confident sharing their backgrounds, barriers, skills, and interests so that they can receive personalized career support and succesfully secure placement into training programs and work opportunities.


Approaching the Solution


We also established four design principles to inform the direction of this user design:

CONVERSATIONWe have limited control over the feedback a jobseeker can get during the job hunt, but our product will provide opportunities to check in and troubleshoot with a trusted navigator familiar with their situation.
TRANSPARENCYLow trust in institutions makes jobseekers less willing to part with their personal information. Our user experience will be as forthcoming as possible about why we need the information we’re asking for and how it’s going to help them.


ANCHOREDCareer development stalls when a goal is too vague to act on, or too distant to feel real. Our experience helps users establish a long-term goal, then leads them there with a series of steps they can focus on one at a time.
SHOCK-RESISTANTWe get that life life doesn’t always go according to plan. Users need room to adjust when a barrier is blocking their progress, and should also feel comfortable changing their mind along the way and establishing new goals.