Zomato Jobs Concept
Fastrack Process for a Design Contest
Context
Recently, Zomato organized a web design challenge to redesign their Careers page. Normally, I am against spec work, but since I had some free time to kill and hadn’t design much in the last few months — I took this opportunity to improve my web design skills as well as learn more about Zomato as a company.
Problem Statement
Design a Careers page that appeals to our target candidates, is easily comprehensible and speaks Zomato.
The problem statement mentioned three important points — the webpage should:
- Help candidates find and apply for the right roles, in their chosen location.
- Give visibility on the hiring process.
- Showcase the experience, environment, and culture of Zomato.
Collect
So I started the work on Monday morning and had roughly 30 hours to finish the thing. Since I was already low on time (Procrastination, duh). I decided to focus on the above mentioned 3 areas in my solutions and tried not to go overboard.
I decided to divide my initial research into 2 parts:
1. Learning more about Zomato as a company
This involved diving into Glassdoor, Linkedin, Zomato Blog (especially the Culture part)and reading interviews of the founders. To more know about the brand of Zomato, I spent some time on their Dribbble page as well.
Do You Know — 2018 saw a 60% increase in the number of restaurants accepting online table reservations through Zomato
Basically, I was searching for answers to questions like
- How big is Zomato?
- What kinds of departments are there?
- Are there any values on which the company is built?
- If yes, what are they?
- What’s the best part of working at Zomato?
2. Learning more about Career Pages
This part involved doing an analysis of major tech companies’ career pages. Some of my personal favorites were — Stripe, Dubsmash, Medallia, Shopify, Spotify, Airbnb, Uber, MailChimp, and Digital Ocean.
This article by Nipun Vashistha was a great read as well: https://uxplanet.org/designing-careers-page-at-bewakoof-com-1af76f98ed83
Synthesize
Next up, I tried to make sense of all the information I had collected to come up with the final wireframe.
There were a lot of common patterns in all the major tech companies careers pages. Most of them had —
- A Call to Action to the Job Listing Pages (Since a lot of them used 3rd party Talent Acquisition Software like Greenhouse, Lever).
- A section of various departments/teams in the company.
- A section about the company, it’s mission and values.
- Some testimonials or links to various social media channels.
I decided to follow the same industry standard, but since there was a lot of content to be shown. I decided to divide the sections into 2 parts:
I tried to arrange the informative sections and actionable actions in an alternate fashion to keep a balanced view.
Create
Zomato Team had provided the participants with the color palette and the font to be used. But since web version of Zomato is not updated (visually) regularly, I had to fall back to the Android app to see the vibe of the brand in order to keep my design consistent.
After several hours of pixel pushing and seeking *inspiration*, I was finally done with the designs.
- I used a non-rectangular footer (and header) like the one often spotted in Zomato’s posts.
- I designed the testimonials the same way restaurants reviews show up on the Zomato app. (Thanks for the inspiration, Dubsmash team :)
- Since one of the requirements was to give visibility on the hiring process, I decided to add a section to cater to that need. The section contained links to blogs like “How Zomato Recruiting Works” or “Ace your Zomato Interview” — Basically something to help the candidate.
- In order to maintain the tone, I tried to use icons that matched the visual design of Zomato’s app.
- Initially, I had decided to keep a “Save Job” option but due to lack of time, had to let it go. But I didn’t remove the idea to show the application length time. Often, there are theoretical/subjective questions asked in the application form which takes time — the reason why I often procrastinate filling them :(
- Also, I decided to design a confirmation email that can tell the candidate more about the hiring process.
Full Designs
Home Page
On this screen, I majorly focussed on solving 2 out of 3 problems (showing what is it like to work at Zomato and giving visibility on the hiring process), while giving multiple touch points to solve the 3rd problem of finding jobs.
Job Listings Page
I designed a separate Jobs Listings page with filters and search — to solve the 3rd problem of finding and applying for the right roles.
Individual Posting
I had barely any time left for the Individual Posting Page but I decided to put together one. Not really satisfied with this one.
You can play with the Figma Prototype here: http://bit.ly/zomatojobsbysharma
Reflect
Looking back at the designs again, I noticed I made a few mistakes (as always) —
- I overused the red color in the visual design. I agree that it is the brand color, but red is often associated with danger and negative connotations — so am not sure how much sense does it make to show all the actions in red.
- I gave a link to “Locations” in the navigation bar but didn’t design the screens for that. I had a few ideas on how to go about it, but procrastination :(. For someone judging the design, the “Locations” Link in the nav bar doesn’t really add any value since I have nothing to show for it.
- I forgot to add the submit button on the job listings page 🤦♂️. (Stupid mistake, I know)
But all in all, it was a fun challenge. I learned significantly about Zomato and it’s culture as well as polished my design skills a bit. Shoutout to the Zomato Team for organizing this.
It would have been great if the team could specify the scope of the solution expected in the problem statement itself. For instance — here I wasn’t sure if we need to design the application process screens as well or will it be handled by 3rd party Talent Acquisition Software like Greenhouse.
But anyway, All’s Well That Ends Well. I won the 1st runner up prize in the contest :)
Till next time 👋
