Helping candidates stand out with better profiles

Our early research (following a continuous discovery approach) with both candidates and companies uncovered fundamental issues with the Otta profile experience:

• Candidates struggle to write compelling CVs: Many found it challenging to concisely and effectively tell their professional stories.
• Difficulty in standing out: Candidates were unsure how to differentiate themselves, often resorting to generic buzzwords that lacked impact.
• Hiring managers require quick access to key information: With only 5-15 seconds spent per CV, they needed essential details to be immediately visible.
• Lack of centralised information: Recruiters often left the Otta platform to look up companies on LinkedIn and understand a candidate's work history.

Our goal was to make the Otta profile a tool that helped candidates land more interviews, by helping them stand out more easily and ensuring hiring managers could assess fit at a glance. Constraints included:

• Designing for over 2 million candidates with diverse career paths
• Ensuring designs were technically feasible to ship within a 6-week window
• Ensuring the information would be feasible to collect from candidates, either automatically (e.g. from their LinkedIn profile) or manually (requiring candidate input)
• No A/B testing, as the variation between candidates' profiles made this impractical

I ran an ideation session with the Profile squad (made up a Product Manager, 2 full-stack engineers and myself) as well as our CTO (Xav) to explore how the profile could do a better job of telling a candidate’s story. We discussed lots of ideas, including:

• Giving candidates interesting questions to answer, such as "What's important for you in your next role?". We felt this would allow them to showcase their personality without resorting to generic summaries or buzzwords.
• Timeline views as a more visual way to picture a candidate's career
• Displaying information about the company (e.g. industries they operate in) to provide a more well-rounded picture of where the candidate has worked
• A codified summary at the top which extracts and displays key information, such as years of experience, industry experience and technologies used.

I took the pain points, ideas from the ideation and exploration of other profile experiences (including LinkedIn, Tinder and more) to come up with early concepts for a redesigned profile experience. Here are 3 initial concepts:

The Product Manager and I took these concepts into evaluative testing with candidates and hiring managers, evaluating them against the pain points we originally identified. We found the leftmost design resonated best with both audiences, because it:

• Highlighted current role, industry experience, and technologies used
• Featured candidate aspirations for their next role
• Provided clarity and ease of scanning for hiring managers

Some ideas tested well and were still wrong. A timeline made careers easy to scan, but it quietly suggested every career should be a straight line. “Years of experience” was useful to hiring managers, and it often counted against candidates unfairly. We dropped both, then refined the typography, layout and hierarchy over several more rounds.

The redesigned profile included:

1. 1Brand yellow header – Otta’s brand yellow raised the visual hierarchy of key info.
2. 2Improved link clarity – Portfolio and LinkedIn links were more prominent and customisable.
3. 3Summary section – Clear presentation of role, industry, and tech experience.
4. 4Featured answer – A standout question response, chosen by the candidate.
5. 5Duration with dates – No mental maths required for hiring managers.
6. 6Company descriptions – Candidates could describe companies in their own words.
7. 7Company logos – A visual anchor that helped hiring managers scan faster.

We took a decision to not A/B test this redesign because:

• However much effort we put into the Otta profile, it’s only as good as the effort that a candidate puts in. This also means that every Otta profile is different, so how would we A/B test this fairly?
• Our research with candidates and hiring managers gave us a high level of conviction that the redesign is solving several problems

We launched it to our 2 million+ candidates. Candidates report feeling more confident in how they present themselves, and recruiters are finding it easier to understand candidates without switching tabs.

Designing for customisation is challenging. It leads to a long list of edge cases that need to be considered. There’s a sweet spot of when to start accounting for these: too soon and it limits creativity, too late and it leads to scope creep. Planning for this moment is key.