Ladders Search Experience

Ladders is a premium job site helping people find jobs paying $100K or more. There are two sides to the website, the job seeker site, and Ladders Recruiter where recruiters source top talent.

My role: Product designer on the recruiter experience team

The problem: Ladders’ customer success team reported a lot of complaints from recruiters about the company search filter

The objective: Redesign Company filter to be easier to use and elevated compared to competitor site experiences

The date: October 2019



Ladders

My Process


Understand Users

Gather the feedback the Ladders team received to understand our users' pain points

Competitor Research

See out how other sites handle search filters to see current trends and experiences

Ideate & Refine

Collaborate with product and engineering teams to design a more effective company filter

Understanding Users

Before the redesign, Ladders had a free text entry for all search fields. We found our boolean search option to be popular in the keyword field but more confusing in the company filter.


Customer Feedback

  • "What is Boolean?"
  • "How do I add more than one company?"
  • "I’m getting no results for my search when using the Company filter"
The Original Filter

Boolean Search

Competitor Research


Drop-down including logos and urls

Competitor

Drop-down including industry

Linkedin

Pills after a company has been added

Competitor

Ideate & Refine


Utilizing our existing drop-down style was the starting point, but...

existing

I enhanced the existing with logos and contrasting hover color

v1


After sharing my ideas with other teams internally, I refined the design by making the logos bigger for quicker recognition. The larger logos required wider rows so I suggested we include company industry on the second line to aid in differentiation.

final

Finally, I wanted to add a feature that would elevate Ladders' filtering capabilities. After 3 companies were added to a search, I designed the filter to suggest similar companies. The suggestions would be based off of company size and industry.

valueadd

The Outcome


Autofil Search

The Results

  • Customer service inquiries regarding company filter diminished, freeing their time for more pressing issues
  • The sales team was excited to demo new feature and shared positive feedback from clients
  • 34% of searches using the filter added a suggested company, showing positive adoption in the first 30 days

My Thoughts

Ladders' company filter has been made more usable for various skill levels by including visual cues like logos and reducing the opportunity for typos by providing a drop-down list. It is also an enhanced experience compared to the competition with the suggested companies feature. Moving forward, I would like to explore how to provide even stronger suggestions!