The existing platform wasn’t meeting the needs of job seekers
Basic missing functionality, thousands of roles, generic job descriptions and a lack of familiarity with teams meant increased search fatigue amongst job seekers.

Research informed improvements and sharing insights
I started by sharing a competitive audit of other tech companies with stakeholders to gain their buy-in. I worked iteratively to test and validate design concepts for enhanced search filtering, type-ahead role matching, and keyword search taxonomies aligned with internal job descriptions.

How I narrowed in on the right solution
Partnering with UX Research, we conducted new-hire surveys and candidate interviews that would help identify job search criteria, keywords and role attribute considerations. This led to the creation of new design templates for search results, job descriptions, and team pages.

Business impact
By better matching candidates with higher relevancy roles, we hypothesized there would be reduced time to fill roles, better team and cultural fit once hires were made as well as improved job performance and satisfaction.

Identifying points of friction
I partnered with the analytics team to understand the highest points of friction in job searches and from application start to finish. We measured time to task completion, the number of session timeouts per user and incomplete applications as areas for improvement.

Narrowing in on the right solution
I partnered with engineering to focus on building out the ability to import LinkedIn and resume information, added auto-save functionality in the A2D1 flow, explored session time-out notifications and designed an SMS feature which would allow for easier, real-time communication between both parties.

Business impact
Reducing the amount of manual response time internal recruiting staff would need to spend following up with thousands of applicants while increasing the speed of time to hire for teams.

Supporting all of Amazon's internal hiring teams
With so many internal teams at Amazon, all with varying levels of design and engineering support made it difficult to publish platform pages, comply with design standards and take ownership over their portions of the Amazon jobs platform.

We built a robust design system, powered by a new CMS
Moving from a Ruby On Rails framework to a full React library of components meant partnering with engineering to re-evaluate our existing framework, understand any restrictions or limitations we might have when replacing existing technology and advocating for the improvements with numerous team stakeholders.

How I narrowed in on the right solution
I met with primary POC's and stakeholders across a lot of the hiring teams to create a documented list of their needs and then translated those needs into a series of high-to-low demand components to scope out the level of effort, and determine a delivery cadence.

Business impact
Providing teams with enhanced templates, new components, and publishing capability reduced manual engineering effort and maintenance costs. The new design system reduced inconsistencies and improved our accessibility standards.

Key job description attributes - The UX design team partnered with our internal UX Research team as they conducted surveys, new employee interviews and group testing to identify the importance of job descriptions, search criteria and role attributes in decision making.

Understanding motivational triggers - By pinpointing barriers in taking steps to apply, as well as motivational triggers, we were able to further inform our designs.

Search results - I worked to help improve and incorporate new filter functionality (1), clarifying role details (2), type-ahead role matching (below), and introduced an interaction pattern allowing job seekers to preview additional job details without having to leave the primary results view for more information.

Improved type-ahead key word search

Improved search results cards

Job details - Job detail pages underwent a lot of updates to improve the visibility of role specific details (1), basic and preferred requirements (2), recommended roles and profile creation calls-to-action (3) as well as adding accessibility requests (4).

SMS job status updates - The addition of this functionality allowed hiring teams to provide automated job status updates and kept applicants informed in real time.

Note: A huge portion of this work is still being delivered and slowly launched as part of the CMS restructuring.

To see a live example, click here

Challenges and learnings
- Gaining buy in from cross-org stakeholders took longer than expected
- Due to security constraints, we were limited to using specific technologies
- Platform tech debt slowed down the speed of delivery

Project credits
While I lead a lot of the design work, it’s super important for me to recognize the individuals and teams who contributed to an absolutely massive amount of work.



Candidate Experience Technology (CXT):
Joanna Zander, Andy Jacobson, Danica Altin, Fangru Wu, Devon Drumm, Erik Ojakaar, Jay Kisch,
Stephan Kotin, Lulu Zhao. 



UI Framework / Data team:

Gaston Concilio, Qinghua Long, Hope Kim, Stephan Parry



Amazon Employer Brand:
Crystal Ashley, Krista Kenna, Corey Chess

Next project: HyperComply