Carousell Careers Site Revamp
What is it
Carousell’s Careers Site had not been significantly updated or improved since it first launched during the early days of Carousell. With Carousell expanding rapidly, it was time to make sure it did its job well by attracting the best talent.
What I did
After the success with the Carousell Blog, I was called upon to redesign and rebuild the Careers Site. So I did all the research into recruitment and job-seeker trends, rewrote all the copy, and added new sections and pages to make it a more holistic experience.
What job-seekers want
The first thing I did upon starting the project was dive into research. I went through pages and pages of HR articles and looked at the stuff people tend to share on LinkedIn.
I also stalked a ton of other recruitment sites to find ideas. Because Picasso said great artists steal.
Then for good measure, I sent out an internal survey to everyone in Carousell to find out what they like the most and least about working here.
At the end of the research, I figured out that the top 3 things a job-seeker wants are:
A feeling of purpose
Ownership of projects
Good working environment
Compare this with the very first promise in the old recruitment site: “We’re a fun place to work because we play Counter-Strike in the office.” Playing Counter-Strike is nice, but it was an epic mismatch with user expectations.
Giving them what they want
So to build the new site from a user-first perspective, I structured it to emphasize these three selling points:
Carousell’s grand mission
The trust placed in our team and the level of autonomy they enjoy
The people you’ll work with here
The Mission
Carousell wasn’t created to be the best classifieds platform or to move products; it was created for one reason: To inspire everyone in the world to start selling.
By selling your preloved items, you prolong their usefulness, help the environment, and make more room in your life for new experiences – both in terms of finances and physical space.
Since Carousell had this pegged down, I was going to drill it for all it’s worth! It’s now the very first thing you’ll read after the title and main menu. This was followed by the 5 core values; always a hit when we recite them at recruitment events.
Freedom of ideas and great people
If you work in a place where going for a coffee break requires filling out a form and 3 levels of approvals, you’ll likely yearn for somewhere you can express your ideas and not have them squelched by the founder’s paranoid and obsolescent inner circle.
To convey the freedom you will enjoy at Carousell, I went and took a ton of testimonials from everyone in the team from interns to team leads.
People don’t always trust flowery copy from a company’s communications team (sad but true!), but they respect the honest opinions of front-line staff.
Much of the benefits at Carousell was communicated this way: through the individual voices of the people who worked there. Even the team structure was introduced by the members of the respective teams.
In executing it like this, we felt that it ticked off both points 2 and 3 – readers not only understood the flat hierarchy but also got a good introduction to the many friendly faces in Carousell.
All the info you need
To really round out the experience, I added new sections of information to give the job-seeker everything they could want to know about working in Carousell. I spoke to the Talent Acquisition folks to work out what we can reveal about our recruitment process for greater transparency; people like transparency.
Since we were now recruiting from all around the world and region, I added a section to give some useful information about life in Singapore. Continuing the trend of using staff stories, I included anecdotes from two team members who had moved to Singapore from Kazakhstan and Taiwan.
Also generously peppered around the site were candid photos of the team at work and play. Again, to really drive home how people-centric this company was.
