The CareerOS

Career OS: The Career Execution Platform guides students on job search strategies, interview prep, and networking with alumni and organizes the entire process.

My role
  • User research
  • Competitor research
  • User interviews
  • SME interviews
  • User flow diagrams
  • Wireframing
  • Prototyping
  • Brand identity
Platform(s)
  • Desktop
Location
  • Yerevan, Armenia
Year
  • 2022-2023

1. Discover

Job hunting is not an easy sport. Yet everyone has to go through it at least once in their professional career. The journey seems to be especially challenging at the initial stages of the big climb up the ladder of success. The CareerOS steps in to help the newly graduated MBA students land their first job in the most controlled, mess-free and planned way possible.

User research

The founders of the company are MBA graduates and this presented a big advantage especially in the initial stages of user research. The first people they were talking to in order to find out the main pain points rising professionals encounter were actually their colleagues and classmates. This accelerated the process greatly.

Users and the details of research

Method

Remote user interviews in the format of Q&A sessions.

Interviewees

12 MBA graduates in active job hunting process.

Sample questions asked

What we were interested in the first place was the typical job search journey of our potential users so we made sure to have the answer to that specific question first of all. Some of the questions we asked were as follows:

  • Describe your approach to job search and networking.
  • How do you stay organized during your job hunt?
  • What tools do you use to stay organized and focused?
  • What were/are the main pain points during your job hunting experience?

Competitive research

The competition in the industry of career coaching and job hunting software is pretty tough. We carried out an extensive competitor research to find out the key benefits and competitive advantages that each of the competitors had to offer and used the comparative analysis results to verify our initial concepts and the main value proposition in the most illustrative and comprehensive way.

2. Define

Key takeaways

Based on the initial results, some of the main takeaways of the interviews were

  • The job hunting journey can sometimes get really disorganized.
  • There are more than four tools typically used to control and plan the application process.
  • Networking is sometimes a huge challenge.
  • Finding the right people and being up-to-date for deadlines and follow-ups is really difficult.

Laying the grounds for design

After summing up the analysis results from user and competitive analyses we worked close with the founders to come up with the basic features that the platform should include. Some of those were:

  • An intuitive job board that would sum up all the relationships with companies and clearly demonstrate the current progress with each.
  • A robust Chrome extension allowing to save any contact or job post to the CareerOS profile for further reference.
  • Networking best practices, tips and pieces of advice for each step of job hunting journey.
  • A database of companies and a smooth onboarding allowing to filter out the right contacts and companies based on the users' preferences.
One of the initial user flow diagrams

3. Develop

Brand identity and design system development

Since the initial plan was to create both trial versions of the initial MVP concepts and the branding aspect, we decided to split the wireframing stage and jump into creating the design system with the most necessary components. That would enable us to go forward with UI-styled screens and also have the brand identity in place to jumpstart the marketing efforts as well.

CareerOS logo uses the symbol of airplane taking off reflecting the philosophy behind the brand and the ideology the founders truly believe in. The geometric scheme behind the brandmark helped to create a dynamic yet balanced look.

A spread of the brand guide

Apart from the initial brand identity fundamentals, I also supported the team with marketing materials for both digital and printed media.

In order to ensure consistency of components across the rapidly growing number of screens, we created and implemented a detailed design system encompassing all the components and layouts used across the system.

The main features designed

As we were ready with the initial scope of the features I started drafting the most essential flows that had to be covered in the first MVP scope. Because the backlog also had some really great features which still required a lot of effort on the development side, we decided to include those in the later stages of the product development.

  • An onboarding walkthrough for the first time users.
  • A Chrome extension allowing to save the desired information from LinkedIn in a click.
  • A job board allowing to see all the jobs and companies a user has interacted with.
  • An interactive stepper demonstrating all the information a user may be interested in at the current step.
  • A dashboard summing up all the most important information in one place.

4. Deliver

User testing

In order to be able to give the beta testers an early access to the core functional of the platform we decided to design the core parts like the stepper and the Chrome extension first and while we started receiving feedback on those and improving the gaps, we also continued working on the medium-priority chunks of the platform like the onboarding walkthrough and the dashboard.

Method

Remote moderated and structured user testing sessions during which the users were asked to perform a certain task like adding their first three companies and contacts to the platform or sending their first introduction email to a suggested contact.

Interviewees

10 MBA graduates in active job hunting process

Sample questions asked

  • Please navigate to your job board and try adding a company to your company directory.
  • Please try to add three contacts using the Chrome extension.
  • Please sign up for the platform and try out the main features. Elaborate on whether you found the onboarding walkthrough a valuable addition to the flow or not.

Next steps

After each testing session of a single flow we combined the results and feedback using affinity mapping and identified the main gaps, the main opportunities and the parts the users found to be most valuable.

An example of affinity mapping

Some of the key takeaways from the first rounds of testing were:

  • The users found the platform to be easy-to-use and intuitive.
  • They also found it to be too focused around LinkedIn while integration with other platforms would also be a big benefit.
  • The onboarding walkthrough lacked a progress indicator so we improved the step counts and made the process more predictable and controlled.
  • The value of the Chrome extension didn't seem to be self-explanatory enough so we added a section in the dashboard illustrating the main ways to use and to benefit from it first.
A part of the refined prototype after one of the user testing session series

Summing up

CareerOS has since grown into an active career execution platform connecting students, university career teams, and employers. The product direction continued beyond the first launch scope, expanding into university dashboards, employer-facing tools, AI-assisted career guidance, outcome tracking, and multilingual support.