Company: HubSpot
Project: Careers Site Redesign
Teams: Web Strategy & People Operations
Role: Lead UX Designer
Key Responsibilities:

• Project Management

• Content Strategy

• Information Architecture

• User Research

• User Experience & Visual Design

The Problem

The HubSpot Careers website featured outdated content and needed to be redesigned to reflect HubSpot’s brand design to create consistency with the rest of the website experience. Conducting a redesign also presented opportunities to update the infrastructure and overall usability.

Additionally, the old Careers site was difficult to update for internal stakeholders and content owners. The redesign included a business goal to create an efficient, user-friendly back-end experience built to scale, while also creating an exceptional, intuitive front-end experience for candidates who navigated to www.hubspot.com/jobs.

project Goals

Our experience objectives included:

• Update the visual design to comply with Canvas (design system)

• Update content to authentically reflect the HubSpot brand and culture

• Improve the internal user experience of the admin panel

• Simplify the information architecture to reduce choice-paralysis and incorporate accessibility best practices

Our business objectives included:

• Increase visibility into the visitor-to-applicant lifecycle by implementing full Greenhouse and Google Analytics tracking

• Increase traffic to the Careers Diversity & Inclusion page

• Combine and reduce number of pages to maintain to reduce tech debt

Together, the People Operations and Web Strategy teams set out on a collaborative mission to create an exceptional candidate experience that authentically reflected our amazing employee experience.

Initial discovery

We began by gathering inspiration via competitive research. Some initial patterns that emerged included:

• White space and candid, diverse photography

• Social proof like employee reviews and social media account integrations

• An open, human, and positive tone of voice

My team and I began meeting with stakeholders to understand how the Careers site should work and scale. As we conducted stakeholder interviews, we also completed click-tracking and heat-tracking analysis on the existing Careers site to establish baseline conversion and traffic metrics.

The next step was to gather information on our external users: job seekers. We collaborated on a survey of 27 new and recent HubSpot hires. The survey included questions about the interview experience, their experience with the Jobs site, and the information applicants need to prepare for an interview at HubSpot. Some of the recurring themes included:

• Culture is key: 13/27 participants specified “culture” as a top reason for wanting to work at HubSpot. Participants also noted that the talent pool, professional growth opportunities, benefits and compensation, and Glassdoor reviews contributed to their decision-making process.

• Filtering woes: Survey participants noted it wasn’t always clear which roles belonged to which departments, or what the difference was between mid- and senior-level roles. Additionally, the inability to filter both by department and office location was frustrating. 

• Content overload: Participants rated the value of the 128-slide Culture Code extremely highly. However, they didn’t find the Careers blog or videos included in the Jobs site as helpful during their evaluations.

the design process

As we moved into the design phase, our top priorities included 1) simplifying the site map and overall information architecture, 2) organizing pages into “core” and “template” categories, and 3) leading with mobile-first designs. Some of the changes that took shape included:

• Consciously switching “jobs” language to “careers”

• Adding a button to the Careers navbar so candidates could easily find a complete listing of open roles

• Simplifying the bespoke Careers blog design to reduce internal maintenance

• Combining the Culture page with the Careers homepage to set the tone for the rest of the site

• Integrating workplace awards as social proof

Upon reviewing the final prototype with stakeholders, there were still some questions we wanted to validate with actual prospective candidates. We also wanted to compare the usability of the old Careers site to the redesigned prototype, to ensure the changes would actually resonate with our target audience. So I set up an unmoderated usability test with a mix of qualitative task-based questions and a SUS questionnaire.

High-Level Takeaways from usability testing

We found some recurring patterns in the participant responses, including:

• Most users chose to explore the About Us page before diving too deep into the Careers site

• Users wanted to know what HubSpot is and does; users who couldn’t find that information were less likely to want to apply

• Users expected to see Locations and Benefits linked in the Careers navbar

• Users who saw the list of office locations praised the company for being so growth-oriented and flexible

Overall, participants gave the Careers site high ratings for usability. To give us some quantitative data, I used the System Usability Scale questionnaire created by usability.gov. Generally, a score of 68 and above is considered passing, with an 80.3 or higher being a highly usable website that people will recommend. The average score for the Control was 82.75, indicating amongst this set of users that it is very usable. Even better, the Variant scored an average of 89.25. Additionally, I asked users for their net promoter score (NPS) to indicate whether they'd recommend HubSpot to a friend looking for a job. The Control received an average NPS of 80, while the Variant received an average NPS of 93. Overall, we started strong and managed to improve the usability of an established above-average experience.

Final Improvements

After analyzing the user research, we decided on final key refinements to the Careers user experience:

1. Introduce HubSpot: Reduce friction for users who couldn’t find the company mission statement by linking to About Us right on the homepage.

2. Provide transparency: Provide answers to common questions by adding an FAQ section to a brand new Candidate Experience page.

3. Use clear language: Users naturally referred to teams as "departments.” Users who saw the "Teams" link in the prototype were confused by the language and didn't know what to expect from the page.

4. Improve wayfinding: Update the Careers navbar to include links to the most important pages identified by users: Locations, Benefits, and Diversity & Inclusion.

We made substantive updates to the content strategy and visual design. The copywriters rewrote nearly every single paragraph on the Careers site with an eye toward reducing and clarifying content. They coordinated with the recruitment, culture, and employee programs teams (to name a few) to ensure each team was accurately represented. They then collected employee quotes and testimonials, candid photography, and supporting blog posts and videos.

The visual design now reflects the HubSpot design system. I relied on white space to let the content breathe — form does follow function, after all. I also incorporated more of HubSpot’s signature orange and contrasted that warm color against cooler tones to ensure users could easily locate the primary “See all open positions” CTA. The design now better supports photography and employee content, which allows HubSpotters to tell their own stories.

Looking Forward

As with any project, we had to limit the scope of this redesign. However, we intentionally built the redesign to scale as HubSpot does. With the new self-service capabilities, the People Ops team can easily update the content and photography, create new template pages, and provide more persona-specific content to job seekers at different stages in their careers. We’ll also continue to track and measure key metrics like number of applicants, traffic sources, social media engagement, and collect word-of-mouth feedback from interviewees, recent hires, and internal stakeholders.