PART 1

Customer/User Job-to-be-Done or Problem

As an employer, I want to easily submit my open positions to multiple partner colleges so that I can increase the number of applicants, without having to create another account for each college.

Value to Customers & Users

Value to Job Seeker: 

• More postings for learners (job seekers) to find additional employment opportunities.

• Better efficiency and UX for the employer means that jobs will be more up to date

Value to Employers:

• As of 2-9-2023, there are 20,954 approved unique employers on US and CA sites.

  • Of those, 749 appear to have at least two employer accounts (~4%).

    • This analysis is based on the employer’s name.

• More applicants for their openings.

• Solidify partnerships with additional institutions.

• Significantly improves efficiency and UX for posting jobs.

Value to Client Institutions:

• Since the release of the Employer Portal, we’ve had multiple requests for this to be addressed.

  • Looking through our records, at least 9 clients have reported this as an issue.

• More postings for their learners to help demonstrate the outcomes of their programs.

• Expand and solidify partnerships with their local employers.

• Remove the pain of explaining to the employers the workaround we have in place of using an alternative email address.

Value to Lightcast

• Increase the use and adoption of the Employer Portal portion of Career Coach. 

• Support retention efforts once fully established with the institution and its employer partners.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

Target User Role: Employers who want to post jobs on multiple sites without having to recreate a login for each site.

Target Client/Client Category: Career Coach customers who utilize the Employer Portal (as of 1-23-2023 122 US clients) and have requested this over the years.

Delivery Mechanism

Within the Employer Portal side of Career Coach.

Success Criteria & Metrics

Employers who’ve previously signed up on one institution's Employer Portal can use those same credentials within multiple institutions' Employer Portals without having to create new email addresses and passwords.

By doing that, we anticipate the number of Work Opportunity jobs opened and applied for will increase. Our goal is a 15% increase within a year of release. In 2022:

• 56,338 Work Opportunity posting clicks, with a monthly average of 4,695

• 6,339 Job seekers applied to those postings, with a monthly average of 528

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

• Adding the ability for employers to pull in their postings from other sites that are included in EBG’s job posting database.

• Subdomain agnostic employer portal that enables an employer with an account to:

  • Select from a listing of CC clients (that have EP activated) to request approval to post

  • After creating a job posting, select the sites they’d like to post it to (need to have been approved by the CC admin before they can post jobs)

  • Interact with all applicants to the same posting in one spot within their employer dashboard

  • This was deemed way too large and complicated for the value we’d gain, so we’re going with a smaller solution that doesn’t solve the full problem but gets us closer.

PART 2

Solution Description

Using a similar technology that was used for adding the feature of multi-site admins would be the most logical way to approach this. Proposed workflow:

• An employer that already has a login on one site, visits another instance and clicks the login

• They enter their previously created credentials

• Their information is automatically filled in from their original account. They then request permission from the new college’s admin

• Once permission is granted, they can start adding jobs to be posted to the site desired. If they wish for the posting to show up on another site, they’ll need to re-create the posting within that second site.

• In their employer dashboard, they’d be able to navigate between sites they have logged in to previously much like multi-admins are able to do

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

https://www.figma.com/file/4h2BAGmHoJ55AeVAdfwBJd/Employer-Portal?node-id=402-2491

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

• We need to keep the same accessibility and mobile responsiveness features that we have now and all performance characteristics should be the same.

Dependencies

n/a

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Just answer yes or no.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• We’ll let the Sales and ES team know it’s coming a week or two before this hits production, but there won’t be a structured rollout as this is a relatively small change to the site overall.

• Prior to the announcement to ES, we’ll create a quick set of instructions and pointers for employers to help both ES and their clients.

Risks

• This is too expensive of a feature that doesn’t fit with the current vision and/or move the needle on our current North Star Metric. However, the number of requests submitted to come up with a solution supports that this would be a value add to our current Employer Portal user base.

Open Questions

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

Are there direct costs that this feature entails? Dataset acquisition, server purchasing, software licenses, etc.?

Team Effort

Each team involved should give a general t-shirt size estimate of their work involved. As the epic proceeds, they can add a link to the Jira epic/issue associated with their portion of this work.

1st Epic Lookback 8/28/23

We are determining success by the change in views and application counts to Work Opportunity postings. Our goal is a 15% increase within a year of release. In 2022:

• 56,338 Work Opportunity posting clicks, with a monthly average of 4,695

• 6,339 Job seekers applied to those postings, with a monthly average of 528

• At 30 days post-release:

  • 9708 postings on the Work Opportunities page have been viewed, 207% of the 2022 monthly average of 4,695.

    • Increase of 5013 (107%)

  • 789 applicants were made to postings, 149% of 2022’s monthly average of 528.

    • Increase of 261 (49%)

• Early indications indicate that this feature has been a success. We’d like to continue monitoring this once a quarter to make sure this isn’t a seasonal effect. The next lookback is scheduled for 11/14.

2nd Epic Lookback 11/14/23

A check-in on the metrics was warranted from the last lookback to see if we were still on the same track.

• While we didn’t see as many of postings viewed when compared to the first 30 days, in September (7024) and October (5989), we were still substantially higher than the monthly average of 2022. We can consider this success metric met.

• The overall numbers for September (537) and October (306) were down from August, and only September 2023 was higher than the monthly average of 2022 (528). This can be due to a few factors:

  • Around the same time as this feature was released, we released the ability for employers to use custom links or application instructions. These aren’t tracked by Keen in the same way. This number only reflects those that apply using the submit resume (default, original workflow). Right now there’s not a way to get a count of those that apply via an alternative route.

  • There could also be some seasonality effects here as well.

• My conclusion is that this was a partial success. It made a lot of employers happy, and thus our clients who interact with them