Cleantech Rising

For 12 weeks during the spring semester of 2018, I had the opportunity to do user research for Cleantech Rising, a company focused on encouraging a clean future by helping young professionals get into the cleantech industry. During my time on this project, I worked to improve the job board website by conducting user analysis, distributing surveys, and working with my team: Tom, Jia, Ansel, Arun, and Mei.

The Problem

Right now, the cleantech industry is one of the largest recipients of venture captial, contributing to the rapid increase in jobs among cleantech startups. Students are entering cleantech fields like environmental architecture, engineering, law, and policy. However, there is a need for cleantech job search engines to help match the increasing number of students with industry opportunities. The current cleantech job search process is frustrating, time-consuming, and intimidating. The goal of this project was to improve the job search process so that both students and employers have a more efficient experience while catering to the needs of their careers and companies respectively.

User Research

Going into the research, I wanted to understand both the employer and employee hiring process. Some of the questions that I had are listed below.

On the student side:

1. How do you search for jobs?
2. What types of resources would be helpful for breaking into the industry?
3. What other career websites have you used? What features do you value the most? Which are the most helpful and why?

And on the employer side:

1. What types of roles do you hire for? Have you encountered recurring issues with applicants?
2. What job boards do you use and how often do you hire through them?
3. What are some pressing needs that a partnership with universities or a third-party organization could address?

In order to answer these questions, we split the project and learned the students point of view by conducting surveys and leading individual interviews with representative students. Additionally, we also conducted industry analysis by comparing general job board engines, niche industry websites and completing HR interviews.

I created a "Cleantech Job Search Survey" in order to understand student's job process, the resources they used, their search engine preferences, and what features of job search engines they value most. I distributed the google form to a wide range of Berkeley environmental clubs as well as across California universities such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, Scripps, and CalTech. In total, I received more than 100 responses!

My other teammates and I also collected data from students through case study interviews, as well as interviewed a variety of cleantech-related companies about their HR process. With the student interviews, we delved deeper into their answers on the survey and why they made certain choices in their job search process. We reached out to a range of big and small companies as well as non-profit organizations such as the Sierra Club and Grid Alternatives. Our goal was to understand how they hired young professionals and the role that job boards played in their hiring process.

Research Insights

Based on the surveys that I conducted as well as the work of my teammates interviewing both students and companies, I came up with various insights:

1. Students demonstrated high interest in the cleantech industry but with relatively low experience, many not knowing where to start searching for a job. Approximately 70% of students were interested in finding summer internships and 57% of students were looking for research opportunities. Nevertheless, more than half of the survey respondents spend between 0-3 hours job searching.
2. Survey respondents were looking for job opportunities in a wide range of fields from engineering to business, software and data science, and product design and law. No category was greater than 25% and 20% of students were unsure of what they wanted to do, yet still expressed interest in cleantech.
3. Some of the pain points that students found were that there was no clear starting point for the job search process and it was intimidating applying to large companies or that they had either incompatible skills or no interest in available jobs. Moreover, most received few responses from recruiters and had no personal contact or visibility. There was also a lack of a centralized platform and location for cleantech related jobs.

On the hiring side, we learned about the most frequent methods that small companies used to hire young professionals, which was relatively different than the method used by big companies.

1. Overall the hiring process for younger professionals versus experienced employees is very different. For young professionals, small companies use a range of techniques from job boards, recruiting through LinkedIn, and getting referrals.
2. Small companies are looking for tools that will reduce hiring time while maintaing transparency. Such companies are trying to build company culture by selecting diverse and hard working applicants that have relevant skills. As a result, many startups use job boards sparingly as connections and networking are usually more effective.
3. Big companies were much more difficult to connect with. Nevertheless, our results state that larger companies receive too many applications from underqualified applicants. These companies have their own university outreach employees and company-run hiring process.

Divergent Thinking

In order to address the issues that we found from our surveys and interviews, my team and I thought of a wide range of solutions that could potentially fit different aspects of the problem.

We started with thinking about how we could develop a structure program that allowed students to interact with industry professionals in the fields they were interested in. One solution we came up with was to establish a mentorship program that guided students and enabled them to explore their areas of interest.

Another group of solutions centered around generating exposure for Cleantech Rising to gain more users. This included developing a professional certification program to both generate revenue and attract new users, giving exposure to small companies looking for brand recognition, and partnering with universities to gain legitimacy and acquire more student users.

Lastly, we thought of how we could redesign the website to include more features and an easier flow looking for opportunities. Some options were advanced search criteria, easy filtering options, creating a matching system to help companies find the best candidates, and adding resources such as resume reviews.

Narrowing Project Scope

Because of my design background coming into the project, I was tasked with creating mockups for the resdesign of the Cleantech Rising website. I focused on incorporating features that would help streamline the searching process with clear filters and easy search options as well as the ability to favorite specific opportunities. I also worked to integrate other features and resources into the website to benefit young professionals.

Sketches, Wireframes & High Fidelity Screens

All of the design decisions made for the following mockups were based off of the research regarding the users and competition outlined above. Overall, my goal was to integrate the functionality of the pre-existing job board site under the brand of Cleantech Rising. To do so, I hoped to create clarity about what Cleantech Rising has to offer and how to best navigate the site while adding filtering and searching measures as well as the ability to favorite jobs and see job developments in order to expedite the job search process. This mockup focused mainly on the job searcher rather than employers.

The home screen was designed to be easy to navigate and clearly show the features and provide quick access to jobs that users previously showed interest in. Adding features such as the ability to favorite and see your recent searches was to attract returning users by creating the ability to interact without having to apply and is a key step in keeping track of job opportunities.

For the job search screen, my goal was to create an eye-catching page that showcases jobs with the necessary information and to help users quickly scan for opportunities they're interested in. I also added options to filter and sort jobs by hours, location, experience and category with clear buttons so that users would always know what filters were being used.

Final hi-fidelity mockups of job board design

Reflections

The Cleantech Rising team!

This was my first time working in an organized group setting with a clear distribution of work between members. It allowed each person to truly focus on their portion of the project, and when pulled together, each of us could easily represent in-depth the work that we had completed.

When doing the survey work, it was hard at some point to keep up motivation and continue reaching out to students in order to get people to take the survey. I learned how important connections are and how necessary it is to ask others for help in distributing the survey. This was crucial to the survey's success and allowed us to reach a larger audience that we couldn't have hoped for otherwise.

Overall, this was an extremely rewarding experience as I focused on the user research aspect of the design flow more than I had previously. Doing so allowed me to collect and analyze data regarding both student and employee interests and likes, which informed my design decisions for this job board website mockup.