Overview

LINKEDIN SCREENING QUESTIONS MATCHED JOBS

Job seekers on LinkedIn only interact with screening questions when applying for jobs. Hirers use seeker responses to determine whether they’re qualified for a role. Screening questions matched jobs inverts the power dynamic and provides seekers with job recommendations based on their qualifications.

Along with leading the end-to-end Product Design, I assisted in shaping the product strategy for this 0-1 product.

Role

Product Design Lead — End-to-end product design, user flows, rapid prototyping, usability testing

Timeline

6 months // Deprioritized

Background

Previous experience

A job seeker is a LinkedIn member who is actively applying to roles rather than passively looking. While they’re applying for jobs, seekers often come across screening questions added by hirers who want to know about their qualifications. 

As part of their application, seekers are expected to answer questions ranging from experience with tools and skills, and employment authorization, to level of comfort with working on-site and their highest completed level of education. 

These questions are often must-have requirements for the job and help hirers weed out applicants who don’t meet their qualifications. Upon submission, the seeker’s responses are then tied to that job and cannot be reviewed, revised, or reused anywhere on LinkedIn. I identified two core problems around the existing seeker-facing experience.

Problem 1

Limited seeker-facing touchpoints

The only time seekers interact with screening questions is while applying for a job. The responses are submitted to the hirer and LinkedIn will store their responses on the backend. However, there is no way for a seeker to revise or even review their responses after submitting their application. Seekers are left to wait to hear back from hirers. One bright spot in spite of all this, is that job seekers have provided 350M unique responses under this workflow.

Problem 2

One-sided benefit

Despite serving both sides of the talent marketplace, the existing screening question experience heavily benefits hirers. If a seeker fails to meet the must-have qualifications of a job, they receive a rejection email. In fact, only 26% of seekers’ qualifications match those of the job they’re applying for. This means it takes longer for hirers to fill their roles and seekers are left with no next best action upon rejection.

Vision

My PM and I brainstormed solutions to these problems. Our vision is to create a seeker-facing screening questions ecosystem made up of additional touchpoints for seekers to:

  • answer SQs independent of job applications, 

  • Maintain their responses to ensure their answers are accurate and up-to-date

  • And receive job recommendations based on their responses so they can be matched with jobs they’re qualified for. 

To measure our success, our goals were to increase two key metrics: qualified match apply by 20% and seeker response liquidity from 350m to 1B one year post launch.

Vision

Touchpoint 1

The first touchpoint I tackled was response maintenance. This is where a seeker can review and revise their responses as well as answer recommended screening questions they haven’t already answered. 

With the help of 3 weeks of user research & weekly design reviews with partner teams, I iterated on the experience with a focus on streamlining the response entry experience. 

One decision that came from a working session with the Eng team was to use seeker profile data to prefill question parameters. For example, if a seeker listed Figma as a skill in their profile, we can prefill that parameter in the question.

Response maintenance iterations

One of the biggest unknowns during the ideation phase was where in the LinkedIn ecosystem would our new touchpoints live. I thought it was essential for the Screening Questions touchpoints to be centralized and not live in disparate parts or products on LinkedIn. It is also important for the connection between answering screening questions and receiving improved job recommendations to be direct and immediate. 

While I socialized the project with many product teams, The Jobs product always felt like the best team to collaborate with because it’s the hub of job search activity for seekers on LinkedIn. 

Jobs home consists of recent searches, updates for jobs you’ve saved or applied to, and jobs cards which feature a list of jobs based on different customizable parameters including job title, work preferences, and location.

Touchpoint 2

Collaborating with the Jobs Product Teams

Design explorations

After brainstorming with the jobs home team, I proposed a persistent Screening Questions module on the page. This module allows seekers to answer questions independent of job applications. After answering a few questions, a new Jobs card would load listing jobs that match their responses. I went through many iterations of balancing the number of screening questions we’d present to the seeker with the limited height of the module. So a lot of explorations around carousels and stacked modules and how question module interactions would play out upon being answered.

Jobs Home module iterations

Design explorations

After the seeker answers questions in the module, we would load a new Jobs Card. I didn’t have as much flexibility in this product, but I was able to introduce a new flavor calling out the qualifications that led to the recommendation.

Jobs Card iterations

Collaborating with a researcher, we shared the seeker-facing screening questions touchpoints with 17 job seekers over 3 weeks. Sessions were centered around product entry point, usability, and expected actions, user sentiments in responding to screening questions, and seekers’ sensitivities about response data.

Participants responded positively to pre-filled parameters and even went a step further to suggest pre-filled responses for question modules.

Something we found surprising was that multiple seekers expressed their willingness to answer up to 10 questions in rapid fire format. This helped guide our threshold on how many questions needed to be answered before loading the Screening Questions matched jobs.

User research

Usability testing

Final designs

Upon landing on Jobs Home, the screening questions module will be available. A seeker can answer 3 screening questions to get better job recommendations. They can also tap the “See your saved answers” button to go to response maintenance.

Jobs Home

After answering three questions, a new job card containing our seeker’s Screening Questions matched job recommendations is loaded onto the page. 



Our seeker can review these SQ-matched jobs individually or tap “See more” to view all SQ-matched jobs they’re qualified for.

Additionally, our job seeker can access the response maintenance experience from the screening question module below the Jobs card.

Final designs

SQ matched job recommendations

If our seeker taps “keep improving your recommendations”, a leaf page opens with the response maintenance experience where seekers can answer recommended screening questions to improve their job recommendations and review or revise previously answered screening questions.

final designs

Response maintenance

The project was shared with product leadership and well-received. We were given feedback and asked to make some revisions. Ultimately, the project was deprioritized due to a re-org in product leadership which led to a shift in overall strategy.



Despite the changes, we were able to launch the SQ-matched job recommendations card.

Reflection