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A new section where professionals in creative industries can add to their LinkedIn profile. This allows them to highlight their visual work and accurately represent their roles. With this solution, creatives are recognized by future employers fast, creating a seamless process for both the creative and hiring staff.
While Linkedin remains to be the world’s largest professional network, job-seekers, people in creative, technical, and craft-based industries are limited in the content they can showcase. How might we improve Linkedin’s platform to showcase the creative professional’s relevant work so they can increase their chances of getting hired?
Users are currently able to feature posts, articles, links, and media to their LinkedIn profile.
Through a competitive and comparative analysis, our team was able to analyze different platforms that creatives are currently using. We chose to analyze Adobe’s Behance because it is the leading online platform to showcase creative work and Dribbble based on their popularity among designers worldwide.
When thinking about the challenge behind this project we knew that there were two sides to LinkedIn. One is the creatives side where they upload their most important work to showcase to future employers. The other piece of the puzzle is the recruiters and hiring staff who search for the best candidate for the role they are trying to fill.
To better understand where creatives were uploading their work, we interviewed four creatives with a background in graphic design, illustration, architecture, and video editing. To determine a trend and decrease bias, we interviewed creatives from a variety of backgrounds.
In addition to four creatives, we interviewed two former recruiters, a book editor, and a project manager to determine what characteristics, skills, and work they looked for when hiring a candidate. Having insights from this group helped determine what was crucial to have highlighted on our newly added section for creatives.
Based on our interviews we took note of the most important and common insights from our creatives:
Our interviews with recruiters and hirers gave us these key insights:
We discovered that to quickly match candidates to their dream roles, it was essential for creatives to find a way to present their work while making it easier for hiring staff to view relevant project information.
From the interviews, we gathered important insights and common pain points to create our user persona who represents the typical user behind our project’s challenge.
To help ideate our approach we created the following scenario and user journey based on LinkedIn’s current feature that allows users to showcase their portfolio with a thumbnail and external link.
This journey begins with the user’s initial interest in showcasing their work on LinkedIn and takes us through the process which leads the user to go to a different platform to showcase their work.
We determined that we would create a simple solution for a common issue creatives face. We would design a section where user’s can add a “Portfolio Sample” collection and fill out a form with all pertinent information about that specific project allowing recruiters to see what they need to see in one place making it quick and easy. Creatives will then have the option to put forth their best work by highlighting which samples they would like to show on their profile page.
Interviews from the creative and recruiting side told us that viewing visuals and important project information was crucial for landing a job. With this insight, we determined that seeing this newly added feature would have to be placed higher towards the top of the profile so that recruiters and hiring staff would not have to spend time scrolling down to find such information. Improved content maps for both user view and guest view are seen below and proposes that the Portfolio Sample section be placed underneath the About section.
To make our design cohesive with LinkedIn’s current design we analyzed various patterns on the platform.
With our design strategy in mind we sketched solutions for a new portfolio feature below.
After sketching various designs and ideas as a team, we digitized them below. Key features are annotated to justify each change that was added.
Features 4, 5, and 6 envisions to match up candidates with hiring staff so they can get hired quickly while making the search process seamless for hiring staff.
After creating our medium-fidelity wireframes and prototype, our team wanted to confirm our design decisions with usability tests with four creative professionals to see if we included the right solutions to the user’s pain points and frustrations.
With our findings from our usability test we created higher fidelity frames with those insights. Annotations are provided to reflect key changes that were made.
These changes brings us closer to a product that meets the needs of the creative and the recruiter while finding a way to pair both quickly and efficiently.
After creating a higher fidelity prototype we intend to conduct another usability test to further enhance our design to optimize a better way for creatives to showcase their work and prove to future employers that they have what it takes to get hired for the role. In our next usability test we would like to:
