Glassdoor Crossroads Onboarding

Glassdoor hopes to provide a personalized experience for job seekers under different circumstances— those including students and unemployed users. The Crossroads project aims to expand the scope of the user audience on Glassdoor while providing those who may not have work experience access to company and job related content. My responsibility as a co-designer is to recreate the existing onboarding experience to accommodate these new users.

Not All Users have Experience

Glassdoor’s most prominent content that contributes to unique user growth is the millions of salary and company reviews. Over the recent year, this content has also expanded to other information job seekers consider before deciding to apply, such as demographics and benefits. As a part of onboarding, users would provide this information and gain access to all of the content on Glassdoor.

However, research and basic analysis of our NPS scores revealed that many of our users do not have the work experience that could get them through this onboarding survey, creating for a case of inaccurate data (user has provided false information) or user drop off (user gives up onboarding). Most importantly, we were not being inclusive—one of our core company principles.

Who are you?

Our three biggest user groups defined were employed users, students, and unemployed users. The latter two, which we didn’t account for at the time, was our focus. We created a ‘choose your own adventure’ type of splash screen, to create a non-overwhelming way to engage the users that would also let us know which customized onboarding path to take them.

This was also an opportunity for us to clarify our ‘give-to-get’ policy, which I wanted to make more evident for the users as they are often confused about how they can get access to the site due to the history of frequent testing on access levels.

Guided Onboarding

We redesigned the existing onboarding user survey with slight variations according to the user type as they had described in the previous screen. The focus here was to guide the users through the lengthy onboarding survey, while giving them assurance on how the information collected will be used, promising their anonymity.

We kept in mind each of the user types’ situations, for example, removing the ‘current or former employee’ for users who claimed unemployed and asking for internship experience for users who claimed 'students’.

Giving users alternatives

Of course, there were also users who also did not have any work experience they could share. I spent most of the time here, emphasizing how these users could still be valuable for Glassdoor, as it is more important that we onboard them as new users who could then be committed to Glassdoor in the longterm.

Although Glassdoor has strictly barred users from viewing content until they submit a company and salary review, it was important to provide these users a path forward because they make up a big portion of the high-intention, job seeking population. Because job-searching is a lonely and stressful process, it’s also important to help them feel unstuck during onboarding and give options that are helpful to their career.

Reflection

This design is currently being built out to be implemented in FY23. I am excited to see the Growth team focus on personalization for users at different stages in their job seeking journey. If given more time and prioritization on this project, I would have also liked to think through what the post-onboarding experience would look like for these users who have identified themselves and how we could cater specific content to them. We should also give thought to how we could keep users engaged in-app if they have chosen the app download path, so that they would see the value of the app in the long term.