Applying user-centered design approaches to JACK (Harvard Kennedy School’s career management platform)
This was written for the DPI 662 class at Harvard Kennedy School.
What is JACK? JACK stands for Jobs and Careers for the Kennedy School — an exclusive career management system for the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) community. JACK is run by the Office of Career Advancement.
There are two main “customers” for JACK: the employer partners who post jobs, and the HKS students who use JACK to help them find job opportunities. Given that I am a student at HKS, and can only see the student’s view to the platform, I’ll focus on how JACK can better improve the experience for students.
One important question to ask in thinking about this is, what are the success metrics for JACK? In my opinion, if I were the product manager of JACK focused on helping students get jobs, I would propose the main impact metric to be the percentage of students who indicate that they have had an interview or other meaningful contact with an employer through JACK. (The ultimate goal is of course for students to get a job or internship, so I would rather use the former as an intermediate goal that would help me understand more quickly if students are making progress towards the ultimate goal.)
Other metrics that I might watch as inputs, but would not consider my mine impact are:
- The average number of actions taken on JACK.
- The frequency with which students log onto JACK.
- The number of jobs and employers that students are indicating that they like or want to follow.
In order to increase the percentage of students that have a meaningful interaction with an employer, I would want to create a better onboarding experience and navigation for students.
First, to create a better onboarding experience for students, there should be a streamlined login and registration process. By my estimate, it could take less than 5 minutes to sign up for JACK, but signing up thoughtfully right now could take upwards of 15 minutes and can get exhausting. If the process takes too long, students are more likely to put off registering or do a poor job of registering thoroughly, which can engage or weaken their engagement with the recruiting process.
A key way to change the process would be to eliminate questions from the registration form by pulling existing information from the Harvard database and streamlining unnecessary questions. The registration form has about 20 questions, some of which seem duplicative to information that should already be in Harvard’s system — like the name, program, graduation year, and contact information.
In addition, when it comes to asking students about their career interests, there are four categories within which they are supposed to indicate their interests: Sector, Career Streams, Job Function, and Topics. Between those categories, there are nearly 150 options available to check here, and many of them are overlapping. It’s not entirely clear which category is the most critical, and what the hierarchy is between the different groups.
Next, I would suggest streamlining the navigation and turning it into a “to-do” checklist for students who are first joining the site. When you first get into JACK, there’s an extensive sidebar on both the left and right side, asking you to do everything from fill out your profile to setting up interviews to contacting alumni to looking at an employer directory. The main real estate of the page is filled with a banner, which is not very helpful. It’s not clear which actions are the highest value for the user to take next. The Office of Career Advancement might have data, however, on what would be the best things for students to do, and could create a checklist of 4–5 items that the student should tackle next. For example, the checklist could include the following:
Header: Make sure to get ready for recruiting by doing these five things!
- Create your profile and upload your resume.
- Make a Career Coaching Appointment.
- Schedule a conversation with an alum in your field of interest.
- View upcoming events and sign up.
- View jobs and sign up for interviews.
This checklist could be on the homepage where the existing banner is, and the two existing sidebars can be streamlined into one sidebar.
By overhauling the registration and navigation process, JACK can make it easier for students to find the information they are looking for, which should help increase the number of meaningful interactions with employers. Focusing more on the user experience will greatly improve the outcomes we see for this application.
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