About the Project
Our client is a leading shipping recruitment & training company, their business ideology is to create a perfect match between jobs and candidates. Their established network of clients relied extensively on our client to provide them with well trained and best qualified marine candidates. As our client’s business grew, relying on old school methods like spreadsheets, paper files, and call logs to track the candidates became unsustainable. They often lost out on good talent as the recruitment process was pretty long.
They approached us as they wanted to make the recruitment process easy and structured. After our talks we realized the depth of their issue and that the solution had to focus on usability and top-notch customization for maximum engagement with candidates. They needed a platform where shipping companies could effectively post new vacancies and select candidates. While the candidates could easily find those vacancies and apply quickly.
Our client also wanted to highlight their offerings, verify the validity of technical and other mandatory certifications for applicants, and adhere to their selection criteria which differed from other recruitment platforms.
A Snapshot of the Project Requirement
- A platform that brought marine industry job seekers and employers to one place and incorporated flawlessly with their current hiring process.
- Ensuring a smooth and enriching recruitment process right from resume building to final selection.
- Functionalities like collaborative working between different user groups, daily summary of job applicants, filter details and custom notifications to different user groups.
- Dashboards where employers post jobs, check resumes, review job applications, short list candidates and send notifications.
- A dashboard for the crew to build their resume, check and furnish their resume to open positions. We also incorporated the functionality of referring jobs to other interested candidates.
Our Challenges Briefly!
- As this was our first ever project for the shipping industry, our primary job was to understand the operational industry, study the selection criteria, identify the target groups and create an interface that accommodated heaps of users and tons of information.
- Although testing on pure usability is time-consuming, it was essential to evaluate the search bar results and remove the navigational flaws.
- Since the search algorithm is the core of a job site, we made sure the job listings are fresh, accurate, and easy to scan through.
- It was challenging to design multiple workflows, we broke them down to make everything simple, be it signing in, registration, profile creation, auto email notifications, resume building etc.
- Another challenge was to support 3D secure payments, as it requires customers to complete an additional verification step for additional fraud protection.
Our Approach
We first understood our client’s business thoroughly, this learning approach helped us design a right-fit solution that addressed our client’s current and possible future business requirements. We began the project with a primary goal; to engineer a web application and a mobile app for iPhone and Android that is effective specifically for Merchant Navy. In other words, the key focus was to highlight what they were offering to the candidates and catering to the specifications of the industry. This meant developing a highly complex back-end structure and an engaging, user-friendly design for multiple user groups.
During our discovery stage we realized that we needed a platform to accommodate heaps of users and tons of information. We also wanted to exhibit our commitment to aesthetic design, since the look and feel are critical for first impressions.
Process and Improvements
We started off with a solid wireframe that fell in line with our client’s business objective. We separated the user functionalities and focused on custom features that would fulfill our client’s specific needs and push their business to the next level. One of the core components of a job search platform is custom alerts since both the employer and the candidates would want to be notified of the status of the position and application as soon as possible.
Another key feature for this online recruitment platform is offering tiered pricing or different price packages for their customers (employers and crew). We enabled this feature where our client could offer multiple pricing packages, as per the end user’s needs.
We also developed a user-friendly resume builder for fast, customized creation of professional resumes. We focused on refining and polishing up the user journey, as we wanted to create an easy-to-use environment where even a first-time user has no navigation problems.
Testing, Scaling & Prototyping
Our first round of testing was focused on usability, we evaluated the results of the search bar for relevance, which eventually helped us remove the navigational flaws. We ensured that the listings on the search algorithm were fresh, correct, and easy to scan.
We understood the need for a highly scalable system that could grow along with the volume of users and clients. To execute this requirement, we developed a scalable solution and optimized the performance of the platform in such a way that more and more users could register themselves to avail the recruitment services.
Visual Impact
There is a plethora of information to display on the recruitment platform, so it was essential to highlight the job titles, role and responsibilities. We also wanted to ensure that the large amount of content does not hamper the user readability and navigational flow of the platform. All the key features and buttons were emphasized to ensure that the user has access to information without any hassle. We implemented a clean, simple, and functional design to boost professionalism and performance load.
Integrations
A fast and secure online payment system to facilitate the transaction flow was essential to our client’s requirements. Payment solutions not only strengthen client relationships but also improve business outreach by providing payment flexibility. Integrating a payment gateway is challenging as it uses security protocols and encryption to pass the transaction data safely.
The system also supports recurring payment plans for customers and one-time payment plan for crew. Recurring payment came with its business rule related to upgrade/downgrade of an account and determined the active features of an employer’s account.
We also added the functionality of social media integrations for the candidates/crew. They can authenticate their account, manage their profile and other account settings.
Reporting on 3rd party apps, email integration.
Mobile Apps
We also developed a mobile app for Crew. Both Android and iOS versions are supported, we also ensured that the app offers all the features Crew gets from the web version of the application.
The administration panel for our client helps to manage system wide settings such as payment plans, see employers and crew data, and get a complete overview of the other functionalities.
Our Challenges Briefly!
- As this was our first ever project for the shipping industry, our primary job was to understand the operational industry, study the selection criteria, identify the target groups and create an interface that accommodated heaps of users and tons of information.
- Although testing on pure usability is time-consuming, it was essential to evaluate the search bar results and remove the navigational flaws.
- Since the search algorithm is the core of a job site, we made sure the job listings are fresh, accurate, and easy to scan through.
- It was challenging to design multiple workflows, we broke them down to make everything simple, be it signing in, registration, profile creation, auto email notifications, resume building etc.
- Another challenge was to support 3D secure payments for the Indian market.