Glassdoor - 2018 to 2019

Helping employers highlight their diverse company structures

Large companies often have a multitude of divisions and subsidiaries in their organization that many jobseekers aren't aware of. As we continued to evolve the Glassdoor employer toolset, we created a feature to help companies showcase their unique organization structures to jobseekers.

This feature enabled recruiters and employer branding teams to tailor their brand stories for their divisions and showcase relationships between parent companies and their subsidiaries.

My Role

Product Designer

Team

Soumya Mohan, Product Manager
Melody Paine, User Researcher

Timeline

5 months
November 2018 - March 2019

Problem

Jobseekers are often unaware of the relationship between parent companies and their subsidiaries or divisions

This results in missed opportunities for jobseekers to find relevant jobs and employers miss out on key branding opportunities for their divisions and subsidiaries.

If a user searched for Amazon jobs in Las Vegas, NV, there would be no results since Amazon doesn't exist there. However, their subsidiary Zappos is based in Las Vegas so Amazon would want to promote this opportunity to jobseekers.

With the current employer profile product, Glassdoor was unable to support this type use case.

GOAL

How might we help companies better target their brand stories and job opportunities to jobseekers?

The goal was to develop a feature that would allow employers to showcase their vast company structures and provide jobseekers with a richer, refined content experience

Challenges

As a product that touched both employers and job seekers, the challenge was in balancing the needs of employers with the needs of jobseekers

We started the project with a number of questions:

How could we simplify the complex structures and showcase the parent-child relationships to jobseekers?
How could jobseekers find richer, more relevant content to their careers and job functions of interest?
How could we help employers promote job openings across their subsidiaries?

Additionally, we were limited in the type of functionality we could include and had to adhere to the current structure of Employer Profiles on Glassdoor.com

Validating jobseeker need

We knew employers had been asking for this feature but we didn’t have a clear understanding of how valuable it could be for our jobseeker audience

To better understand the need for jobseekers, we surveyed 700 users visiting profiles of employers that had complex company structures.

Results:

90% of respondents expressed interest in jobs and content within relevant company divisions
87% expressed interested in learning about job opportunities and content from the company's subsidiaries

This validated our assumptions of how jobseekers could use this feature and we moved into ideating.

Ideating & testing

Exploring different ways of funneling users through the company structures

Working with my PM, we mapped out the flow of information between the subsidiary, division, and parent profiles to identify what information would be shown on each. We brainstormed ideas under the question of how we could allow jobseekers to discover all opportunities and information of parent profiles, including their organization structure.

After a few rounds of iterations, we landed on a concept that would allow jobseekers to find the tailored information they seek.

To evaluate this feature concept, we ran a usability test with 11 participants to identify any points of clarity or confusion. This helped us identify whether the feature was an appropriate solution in aiding job seekers along in their job searching journey.

Although there were slight usability issues in the initial prototype, all users found the feature easy to use and found it to be a useful tool for their needs. As a result, we were able to moved forward with the concept to ultimately land on a finalized solution.

SOLUTION

Creating subsidiary profiles to nest in parent profiles

We created a new feature we dubbed "Nested Profiles" to encompass the new tools companies could use to showcase the breadth of their logos and divisions.

An overview of company org structures

As part of Nested Profiles, we created a new page dedicated to the organization structure of a company for job seekers to find information about the types of divisions and subsidiaries that a parent company had.

Profiles for divisions

We created profiles for divisions so employers could tailor their branding for their divisions and jobseekers would see a more refined content for that division. Division profiles were nested under parent profiles to highlight the relationship and allow users to see the breadth of the organization.

Cross-linking divisions

With division profiles, we gathered all content for that division into one profile. This made it easier for jobseekers to find the relevant content for the division of their interest.

We created contextual hooks in the content pages to link between the division profiles to make these profiles more discoverable.

Jobs at Related Companies

To help employers promote jobs across subsidiaries, we created a module that would pull in jobs from sister companies. This was especially useful for jobseekers when search queries came up empty.

This solved 2 problems: preventing a complete dead end for users in empty search result scenarios and helping employers cross-promote jobs.

Managing the nested profiles

Though the primary problem was focused on the jobseeker experience, employers also needed a way to manage their nested and linked profiles in the product. We created a new organization structure management page within the new employer center so employers could manage and link their affiliated companies and divisions.

Summary

Unlocking a new feature for employers and a new differentiating tool for our business

We launched the new feature with a beta group of 10 employer profiles in May 2019. The initial beta test informed any feature improvements needed before the full launch to all employer profiles at the end of 2019. So far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive as many employers have been requesting such a feature. As of October 2019, we have launched it to all premium employer profiles.