RFC: Improving vacancies

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

In the past partners informed us that vacancies at Thalia are not as successful as at other associations. This is something that needs to be improved and a part of the solution lies in improving the vacancies in Concrexit.

RFC

This issue is a request for comments. I have suggested some solutions and you can help by thinking with me under this issue. If you think something could be improved, leave a comment!

Current situation

We have a vacancies page under the career section of Concrexit. It shows five different categories of vacancies and a page with all vacancies. Under each of these tabs summaries of vacancies with an image of the company can be found. When a member clicks on the vacancy, they are taken to the vacancy text on the page of that partner or to the vacancy text on the current page if there is no partner page.

Improvements

Subscribe to new vacancies

Members are unable to automatically receive updates of new vacancies on the site. It would be nice if members could subscribe to vacancy categories so they automatically receive an email when a new vacancy in one of their subscribed categories is added.

Add a subscribe button next to categories to which the member is not subscribed.
Add an unsubscribe button to the categories that the member is subscribed to.
When a new vacancy is added to the site, send an email to all subscribed members containing a message: There is a new vacancy from <partner>: <vacancy title>. <vacancy text>. <apply>. <view on site>. <unsubscribe from vacancy category>. <unsubscribe from all vacancies>.

More prominent place on the site

The vacancy page is not hard to find, but you do have to look for it. It would be nice if the vacancies had a bit more of a prominent place on the site so users don't need to search for it. There are multiple ways to do this, this is what I came up with:

Show some vacancies at the bottom of the home page, under the upcoming events.
Move the vacancies link in the navbar out of the career section and onto the main nav bar.

Improve the layout of the vacancies page

The vacancies page seems a bit 'clumsy' to me. I think this might be because we have a 3-column grid of vacancies, and under that we have the vacancies again.

I think it would be better if we displayed the vacancies in a simple list of items like this:

[...partner image...] <title> 
<partner name> - <partner location> <optional tags> - <vacancy category>
<summary>
<learn more>

So for example:

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[infocaster.png] junior .NET (C#) ontwikkelaar
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Let me know what you think!

se-bastiaan commented 3 years ago

I think it is a good idea to improve the vacancy pages based on feedback from the partners. The layout and giving it a place on the homepage seem no-brainers to me. We can definitely try to improve that.

I am not sure about a subscription service, hardly believe that anyone will use it. And we already have the opt-in list that is meant for these things I believe.

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

I think it is a good idea to improve the vacancy pages based on feedback from the partners. The layout and giving it a place on the homepage seem no-brainers to me. We can definitely try to improve that.

Good to hear!

I am not sure about a subscription service, hardly believe that anyone will use it. And we already have the opt-in list that is meant for these things I believe.

The opt-in list is a list that partners can just send mails to. Currently this mailing list is not split into categories and so a bachelor student looking for a job might get an email from a company looking for a master student, and vice-versa. Another issue is that only very few vacancies are actually sent through this mailing list. The idea of these categories is that you will just automatically receive an update if a new vacancy for a category you are interested in is posted. If only 20 people use this feature, it would still be really useful for them and also for the partner because they are more likely to receive new candidates.

se-bastiaan commented 3 years ago

But is it worth for us to build this feature if only 20 people use it? For me that is 'hardly' everyone. Maybe something that would reach more people would work better?

What if we start putting the vacancies in the newsletter for example? We have never done that before, I think that is an idea that may reach more people.

DeD1rk commented 3 years ago

Just throwing #1642 in here. I feel like in general people hardly ever visit the vacancies page (perhaps we can get some logs on this?). In fact I think most people only visit the website as opposed to the app when looking for something specific such as old exams or summaries. The vacancies page on the website can definitely be improved, but I think the UX on the website is less of a problem than visibility in general, which can be improved indeed by adding vacancies to the newsletter and the app.

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

But is it worth for us to build this feature if only 20 people use it? For me that is 'hardly' everyone. Maybe something that would reach more people would work better?

Of course I hope more than 20 people will use this function, but if we get 20 vacancies filled that is a LOT of vacancies and I'm quite sure that partners would be really happy about this.

What if we start putting the vacancies in the newsletter for example? We have never done that before, I think that is an idea that may reach more people.

I think this is also a good idea.

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

Just throwing #1642 in here. I feel like in general people hardly ever visit the vacancies page (perhaps we can get some logs on this?). In fact I think most people only visit the website as opposed to the app when looking for something specific such as old exams or summaries. The vacancies page on the website can definitely be improved, but I think the UX on the website is less of a problem than visibility in general, which can be improved indeed by adding vacancies to the newsletter and the app.

Maybe adding vacancies to the app is a good idea as well yes! I have no idea how much trouble that is, but I think it would probably be used more than the website. @pingiun is it possible to get statistics of how much the different pages on the website are visited?

DeD1rk commented 3 years ago

I have no idea how much trouble that is

Once they're in the api writing a little screen for them is pretty much trivial. I think it shouldn't be in the first release but adding some relatively simple UI is very little work.

se-bastiaan commented 3 years ago

I think we should consider adding vacancies to the homepage like Synergy is doing: https://www.synergy.nu/en

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

I think we should consider adding vacancies to the homepage like Synergy is doing: https://www.synergy.nu/en

I agree, see the 'More prominent place on the site' point.

se-bastiaan commented 3 years ago

I know, was just adding the example. Think that could become an issue on it's own already. Don't really see a good reason to not do it.

wdoeland commented 3 years ago

Ah okay, I was hesitant already adding all the issues, but I guess I could do it.

DeD1rk commented 1 year ago

@JasmijnB do you have any idea of how happy partners are about vacancies right now? I've heard of quite a lot of people who have applied somewhere based on a vacancy on the website. Also it looks like some vacancies have been there for a long time? Are boards jsut forgetting to remove them, or do companies keep paying for vacancies with covid-specific texts?

DeD1rk commented 10 months ago

@Sophie2104 same question now for you?

Sophie2104 commented 8 months ago

I think making vacancies better visible is something partner will be really happy about. They dont complain about this, but it would definitly be an improvement. I think indeed back in april the page wasn't up to date, however I have been working on this and it now it is. (Even though partnercie members easily forget to update this)

svthalia / concrexit