Increased engagement

Totaljobs is one of the UK’s largest recruitment platforms. Most candidates visited once and left, never reaching the content and services that could have helped them; advice courses tools all sat there unseen.

I designed a personalisation layer to the surface the right thing at right moment, with the goal of raising repeat engagement and applications. 

Approach

I began by mapping what we already had. Working with product, I catalogued every existing service and function against the user states we could actually detect, then matched business and user goals to each state. That matrix became the framework everything else was built on.

Outputs from the initial workshop with Product and UX Research, mapping current services and functionality to known user needs

I then benchmarked how other products approached personalisation, and worked with product insight and analytics to size each idea against our own data before narrowing the list.

A selection of key different approaches to personalisation from market analysis

I wireframed the concept and guerrilla-tested it. Users read the page as a homepage and understood it was responding to what they had done on the site. Language was the weak point: section headings and alert cards did not carry enough context to explain why a given item was being shown to that person.

Initial wireframes of different tailored pages that were drawn up and used in guerilla-testing

Challenge

Content was scattered across the site, produced by teams working in isolation. Pulling the right pieces together for an individual user meant reconciling material that had never been designed to sit side by side.

The second problem was ongoing rather than one-off. Any personalisation depending on developers to update content would stall the moment attention moved elsewhere, so the teams producing that content had to be able to change it themselves.

Final design outputs showing landing pages using tailored content modules designed in both the Totaljobs and Stepstone brand

Outcome

The outcome of this project was an operating change rather than a feature. Personalisation moved off the development backlog and into the hands of the teams producing the content.

What shipped was a set of notification modules responding to dynamic user states, customisable triggers, and personalised landing pages pointing candidates towards their next best action,  all managed through the CMS.

That last decision was the one that mattered. Personalisation built as a fixed release decays the moment the content behind it moves on. Handing tracking, testing and refinement to content teams meant it could keep pace without a development ticket each time.

Uplift in repeat visits
0 %
Increased course registrations
0 %
Increased applications
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Reference

"I have had the pleasure of managing and working closely with Aaron, and I can confidently say that he is an incredibly talented and innovative product designer. He is truly passionate about creating user-centered experiences that not only delight but also inspire. Aaron has a keen eye for detail, a deep understanding of design principles, and a relentless drive for excellence that consistently elevates his work. His contribution to the user reactivation project proved to be invaluable. I would work with again in a heartbeat"
Joe Willett
UX Design Lead

Totaljobs

User reactivation

Brought lapsed users back to the site and lifted repeat visits by by 15% with them

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