INTRODUCTION
USAJOBS is the United States Government's website for listing civil service job opportunities with federal agencies. Federal agencies use USAJOBS to host job openings and match qualified applicants to those jobs. In 2021, my team revised the process for creating a USAJOBS profile to ensure the process was as frictionless as possible.
The challenge
USAJOBS program stakeholders were hearing anecdotally—from adjacent program offices and other agencies— that there is a perception that “...it takes too long to apply for a job via USAJOBS and this is because it takes too long to create a USAJOBS profile.”
This anecdotal knowledge was the catalyst that set my scrum team in motion to make our own discoveries around the USAJOBS profile creation process as we set out to make improvements.
Glimpse at the current state
Scenario A: An applicant identifies a job they want to apply for on USAJOBS and, as a new user, must first create a USAJOBS profile.
Scenario B: A possible applicant creates a USAJOBS profile in anticipation of applying for a job in the future.
Current state: The profile creation process that takes place — following the creation the required login.gov account— is a minimum of 8 clicks and 20+ questions to be answered before the applicant returns to apply for the job they identified.
Rapid mapping of USAJOBS profile creation scenarios and identifying metrics at key steps
Next steps
We needed to audit the steps to create a USAJOBS profile — taking note of both the required and optional information collected in each step.
I conducted analysis to reveal which fields are required for all users — employing the help of HR Specialists to inform what is used downstream to inform a minimized approach.
Collect baseline data about new account behaviors — how many new profiles were created in the past year, how many user completed, how many users abandoned and how many applied to a job after completing a new profile?
Key artifacts from the discovery phase can be seen below:
Miro board used to capture and audit the USAJOBS profile creation process
evidence
I worked with our data team to collect Foresee survey sentiment to gain qualitative insight into how the profile creation process is perceived by new users
Analysis revealed that new users were confused about what information is actually required vs. optional vs. beneficial when creating a new profile
“It was time consuming and I do not believe all the information requested is necessary.”
“Typing in the details of my work experience and education was tedious. Most sites have you upload your resume and correct what was auto filled. I prefer that method.”
“I had to skip entering information about my experience because it was tedious.”
IDEATION
After determining what profile information is minimally used by HR Specialists in other aspects of the hiring process, I facilitated design studio sessions (virtually) with my scrum team to encourage everyone to bring an idea to the table (Miro) for how we can improve upon the profile creation process.
The entire team participated, sketching ideas and combining the best parts of each idea to inform our final solution.
We rapidly sketched together in our digital white boarding tool in order to create an artifact that built shared understanding among the team
Sketches and ideas presented by the team during our ideation session
THE SOLUTION
When honing in on a solution, our primary goal was to reduce the complexity and length of the USAJOBS profile creation process to see if this would have an impact on profile creation abandonment.
Of 3,001,642 profiles created in FY20, 382,040 or 13% were incomplete or abandoned.
We transformed the profile creation process from a multi-step process with 20+ form fields and questions to a single-step form that has 9 form fields and 4 essential questions.
The team seeking the solution could now measure profile creation abandonment over time against the baseline data collected from FY20.
