Locations on careers.linkedin.com
Showing job seekers what it’s like to work for LinkedIn in their city
Overview
Company: LinkedIn, a professional social network (you know the one!) with 16,000 employees in more than 30 locations on five continents
Role: Research, content strategy, and UX writing
Team: Myself, a designer, and the head of talent attraction
Tools: Sketch, Google Sheets, Google Docs, LinkedIn style guides
Problem
We were planning to update LinkedIn’s company recruiting website, careers.linkedin.com. I interviewed 17 new hires to learn how they used the web to research LinkedIn as an employer. (A whole other project, deserving its own case study!)
Research insight: job seekers want local information.
For example:
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Is there commuter-shuttle service to the Chicago office?
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Does LinkedIn hire engineers in Singapore?
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What’s it like to relocate to Dublin from the continent?
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Would my commute be shorter if I worked in San Francisco or Sunnyvale?
User: Potential applicant
User goal: Learn about local workplaces
Business goal: Increase qualified job applications
Our challenge: Take users …
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From the careers.linkedin.com homepage
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To a location-filtered list of LinkedIn jobs on LinkedIn.com
… While helping them accomplish information-seeking goals along the way.
Content Strategy
Requirements:
I assessed what we knew about the existing site, our users, and our business needs. Then I defined guidelines for our locations content:
Stay consistent with LinkedIn.com: We’d be sending users off the careers website onto the LinkedIn platform. That experience needed to feel consistent.
Design a scalable solution: We wanted to quickly deliver the same solution for each of LinkedIn’s 30-plus workplaces, ranging from the headquarters campus to small sales outposts.
Write for nonnative speakers: English is the language of business at LinkedIn. Our solution would only ship in English. However, English is not the native language for many employees and candidates.
Language:
Working with LinkedIn’s voice guidelines and product-content style guide, I identified language that adhered to our requirements.
Two terms worth noting:
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Jobs, not opportunities or openings. Jobs was the word our users used, and it was also the term on LinkedIn.com.
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Locations, not offices or cities. Not every LinkedIn location is an office. Some cities have more than one location.
Content patterns:
I wrote repeatable microcopy and defined how we should adapt UI copy strings for each location. My goal was to template as much as possible and minimize customization.
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See local jobs is the primary call to action: specific, but not individualized
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Teams, Amenities, and Transportation labels: accurate and relevant across all locations
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Overview paragraph: Boilerplate needing minimal customization
Information and testimonials:
We needed help gathering information about individual locations. I wrote prompts for our local stakeholders, as well as for local employees – so we could collect testimonials.
User Flow
Our challenge was to take users from the careers.linkedin.com homepage to a location-filtered list of jobs on LinkedIn.com.
Our user flow starts on the homepage, with a new call-to-action section:
It leads to a location category-page that links out to individual location pages. The user can learn about a location: teams (functions) that work there, amenities like meals and fitness facilities, and transportation information like onsite parking and nearby transit stations:
From the location page, users can “see local jobs” on LinkedIn.com:
Status
Locations and other updates to careers.linkedin.com will ship in autumn 2020.
Takeaways
What I learned:
Even with such a simple flow, it’s worth taking the time to research and think through your choices.
Biggest challenges:
Creating something that feels locally relevant, but requires minimal adaption, location to location.
My favorite step:
Honestly, I really like rationalizing word choices. 🙈