Hiring

Behind the scenes: The new LinkedIn Jobs experience

Co-authors: Hang Li, David Huang, Shuangfei Li, and Shannon Zhang

A robust hiring ecosystem is one that serves the needs of both employers and prospective candidates, and is a critical component of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. A robust hiring ecosystem is now more important than ever as COVID-19 has left millions unemployed. To that end, we’ve introduced new ways to help hirers share job opportunities on the platform and as a result will also enable job seekers to take the next step in their careers—you can find more details on what we’ve launched here.

Over the years, talent professionals have widely embraced LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions products. However, research has shown that many small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) don't have dedicated talent professionals, and that the business owner or a hiring manager often handles recruitment. These time-strapped hirers prefer low-effort ways to hire, such as sharing their job posts with their community directly in their LinkedIn Feed, or talking to applicants on LinkedIn Messaging. And with our recent data showing that the share of job applications to SMBs has risen 25% since March 2020, it is all the more important that SMBs are well-positioned to meet this increased interest.

Our goal with this product release was to give SMB hirers a simpler experience that enables them to work efficiently—whether on mobile or desktop.

System architecture

One of LinkedIn’s engineering principles is to build for leverage, a corollary of which is to leverage existing solutions as much as possible. We applied it to this project by leveraging existing mid-tier and backend services. 

Our focus was on revamping the mid-tier to support all clients, implementing new APIs, and building a new UI for job and applicant management for both mobile and desktop (as shown in Figure 1).

architecture-of-linkedin-jobs

Figure 1: The LinkedIn Jobs architecture

Job management

My Items” is another example of how we applied leverage. It is a render model-based framework that displays the items a member wants to keep track of, such as applied Jobs and saved Feed posts. In this case, we added the jobs that a member had posted to “My Items - Posted Jobs,” and leveraged its built-in sort-and-filter capabilities.

The screens below show the simplified job management experience.

product-mocks-showing-job-management

Figure 2: Job management in LinkedIn Jobs

Applicant management

LinkedIn members are used to seeing a two-pane view when searching and applying for jobs. To take advantage of member experience familiarity and maintain product consistency, we also adopted the two-pane view on desktop for applicant management. 

product-mocks-showing-application-management

Figure 3: Applicant management in LinkedIn Jobs

We added contact information, resume, and screening question fields for the existing JobApplication data model in the API layer to map to features on the applicant page. To better align with SMB hirer workflows, we replaced complex applicant pipeline stages with a simplified ratings system of Good Fit, Maybe, and Not a Fit. Further, we added a resume reviewer (shown in Figure 3) so hirers can view resumes instantly without downloading them. 

Hiring automation
To ease the daunting task of evaluating applicants, we designed and automated some of the applicant management tasks, such as sending emails to applications rated Not a Fit. Also, hirers are now able to use swipe gestures to navigate through applicants. They can opt in or out of these automations from the settings page.

diagram-showing-sample-hiring-automations

Figure 4: Sequence diagram for hiring automations

The road ahead

The simpler, lower-friction experience, combined with the new mobile support, resulted in a significant increase in hirer engagement with applications, boosting hiring efficiency and helping more job applicants hear back. As always, we will continue to listen to member feedback to improve the member experience. 

Acknowledgements

Launching a new hiring experience across all platforms has been a cross-functional, cross-team effort. Throughout this journey, we’d like to acknowledge the LTS and Flagship teams, without whom this would not have been possible: Jobs Engineering, Jobs Product & Design, My Items Engineering, My Items Product & Design, LTS Marketing, LTS Biz Ops and Data Science, Messaging, Careers Engineering, Careers Product & Design.