Increasing user retention by 7%

Talent seekers took too long to interact with their job openings once they had published them, which caused a high dropout rate after posting their first job.

Internally we attributed this issue to the complexity and terminology of different features on the platform, which were difficult to understand for new users.

To address this, the team developed a self-guided tour which increased user retention by 7%, positive user feedback by 14%, and had a completion rate of 37%.
Product Designer
Role
Torre
Company
September, 2023
Date completed
Context
Torre is an AI-powered platform that connects job seekers with opportunities and helps talent seeker find ideal candidates based on skills and preferences. The following sections are the most relevant for talent seekers:

The job post: Here talent seekers provide all the information to candidates, about the opportunity. Responsibilities, compensation, location, skills required, type of contract, and much more.

The pipeline of candidates: Board type detailed view of the recruitment process for a given job opportunity, helping talent seekers review and organize candidate cards from a potential match all the way to a potential hire.

The candidate dialog: A brief of the candidate's information for talent seekers to review. Skills and interests, professional experience, compensation preferences, reputation, and how do they match with a given job opportunity.
The job post (center), the pipeline of candidates (left), and the candidate dialog (right).
What was the problem?

We had two main problems related to talent seeker engagement:

  • The activation time (how much did the talent seeker took to interact with their job opening after posted) was too long.
  • The dropout percentage (talent seekers not returning after posting a first job) was too high.

We attributed these issues to some features or concepts that we had in Torre that weren't simple to understand for new users. Why?

  • Some concepts were different to the ones used in other job boards. For example, the genome, usually known as a profile, or the match and rank, an algorithmic tool that matches candidates with jobs using hundreds of factors.
  • We had received feedback while testing previous features, that some of these concepts weren't simple to grasp at first and that it took some time to get used to them.

Picture of a confused user.
How did we solve it?
Step 1: Ideation

Within the team we discussed several proposals to solve the issue. A library of short educational videos, adding tooltips to better describe confusing sections, a self-guided tour through each of the main sections of the platform. The only agreement at this point was that the solution should come from the product itself, and it shouldn't require a manual onboarding from someone in the Torre team.

Step 2: Understand the opportunity

We did some research that included reviewing sessions of how users used our platform, exploratory interviews with talent seekers who had dropped out after posting their first job, and recollecting feedback and previous reports about the talent seekers' pain points in our platform.

We identified a need for automation and support for talent seekers in their current flows using Torre (Posting a job, managing candidates in their pipelines, searching for candidates, identifying the relevant areas in a candidate's profile).

The self-guided tour idea was the one we decided to push. Why?

  • Manual onboarding was not scalable
  • It allowed us to identify at which step was the talent seeker leaving the tour
  • It allowed us to add or remove steps as new questions appeared or were solved

Step 3: Hypothesize

Our hypothesis was that the talent seeker guided tour will:

  • Increase the retention of talent seekers (NOOR)
  • Reduce the activation time of talent seekers
  • Increase the positive experience feedback from talent seekers

And to measure its impact we also had to analyze the feature's usage and completion rate.

Step 4: Analyze alternatives

We reviewed different onboarding flows and elements to decide which ones would we implement in our product onboarding. Some of the platforms that we used as a benchmark were Slack, Duolingo, Grammarly, Typeform, HubSpot, and Jellyfish.

We also analyzed either developing the onboarding in-house or having a third party developing the onboarding. We talked with four different providers (UserGuiding, Chameleon, UserPilot and ProductFruits) comparing prices, features and integrations. Ultimately we decided to develop it in house because we could deploy it faster and adapt it to our design system.

Step 5: Design, spec, and deploy

Finally, we designed and specced a step by step self-guided tour that briefly explained the most important sections in the job opening, the pipeline of candidates, and the candidate's profile.

To avoid the feeling of being trapped, we allowed users to snooze the tour and automatically showed it the next time in the step they left it when they opened any of those sections.

We considered a usability test wasn't required as we were using elements and components that were already proved in some of the most used platforms worldwide. It wasn't genius design.

After the development we ran a QA with a feature flag release to ensure that the design, positioning of the tips, and transitions were correct and running smoothly.

The introduction to the onboarding in the job post (right) and one of its steps (left).
What were the results?

A couple of months after we deployed the effort, we ran an analysis on our hypothesis and the metrics defined. The results for those two months were the following:

  • The retention of talent seekers (NOOR) increased by 7%
  • The positive experience feedback from talent seekers increased by 14%
  • The completion rate of the guided tour was 37%
  • The activation time of talent seekers was too variable month over month to attribute any change to this effort
  • With these results in mind, we decided to keep the self-guided tour and research what could we do to increase the completion rate. Changes and new improvements for the self-guided tour will be worked soon.