Job searching on LinkedIn could be better
Some thoughts about how the job searching functionality on LinkedIn could be improved
They say that looking for a new job is a full time job in and of itself.
There’s nothing glamorous about searching the internet for your next role or opportunity. From being required to sign up to x many job board sites just to submit an application, to constantly refreshing job board feeds for new roles it can be a long, tedious and painful process.
Like many, LinkedIn is where I frequently check for new roles, or updates from companies and colleagues posting about new positions. It’s also where I search daily for new jobs and applications, and I have come to realise that there is room for the job searching tool to be improved and provide a better job searching experience.
Small details like pushing promoted job advertisements over the search results that have nothing to do with the terms I typed into the search box, not filtering out results where I have already applied for a role add up to lots of little frustrations.
I’ve decided to just focus on the search functionality and how that experience could be improved to make life a little bit easier.
Currently, the job searching dropdown leaves something to be desired:
Above is a screenshot taken from the current job search dropdown menu. It’s okay but it could be better. It doesn’t tell the user anything useful other than “Recent searches”.
What I find frustrating is the “Try Searching For” section where LinkedIn is trying to be helpful but is failing. None of the recent searches have anything to do with the “Try Searching For” suggestions, and if they’re a personalised recommendation then it’s failed again because I don’t have any experience or reference to Marketing Manager or HR roles on my LinkedIn profile.
I decided to conceptualise and design a few small changes to this functionality to improve the experience for users.
Above, you can see the small proposed changes I have designed. From making the title of the searches clearer — Your recent searches, to adding a visual icon to quickly indicate to users the delete functionality of the clear history option.
Something new that I thought could be useful to users, would be a visual indicator for new results if it’s a search term you’ve previously searched. From my perspective, I use the same searches everyday when looking for my next job, but seeing if there’s new results in the search bar before I search could save a lot of time not searching through the same results over and over again.
(Say search again!)
Finally, I rethought how the recommendation functionality could work. By stating in the title that it’s basing the recommendations on the user’s experience (coming from their LinkedIn profile) it would provide more context for the user where the suggestions are coming from. The roles suggested would be based in a similar field to what the user has experience in, combined with what they have been recently searching for.
These are just a few small ideas and tweaks I thought LinkedIn could benefit from when it comes to helping it’s users look for their next job.
