If there was one good thing that came from COVID-19, it was space. All that time void of restaurants, exercise classes, and parties forced people to be alone with their thoughts. It forced people to reevaluate their priorities and figure out what’s important to them.
Over the last few years, more job seekers have expressed the desire to make a difference with their work. We had an inkling that COVID exacerbated this preference shift, and it got us thinking about how people find their next job.
Research for this was quick – over the span of 2 weeks, I sent out a survey to candidates we had spoken to regarding opportunities with our executive search clients – and 63 responses later, we saw some interesting patterns.
Career sites and job boards, as we know them, focus on titles. They don’t differentiate between company missions.
We saw an opportunity to create a user experience that would enable job seekers to find jobs based on problems they were passionate about.
The key objective with this project is to allow job seekers to browse job postings based on their impact, then function and seniority.
In order to get something up and running as quickly as possible, we leveraged Airtable as a database and embedded it in a WordPress site.
Once we could see enough web traffic to validate that job seekers were intrigued by this purpose-first approach to job seeking, I created custom post types, fields, and templates in WordPress.
We wanted to use colour to distinguish different types of impact – there are four GreaterGood categories – blue is for Health and Wellness, green for Environment, yellow for Education, and red for Team Canada.
I created indicators for jobs that are less than 7 days old, and since we established remote work is clearly an important perk, I added an indicator for remote possible jobs as well.
The jobs within each function are sorted by seniority so the user can quickly see which jobs are relevant.
We grew our community to over 500 subscribers in the first two months.
Most job boards are sterile and corporate. We wanted to create something that was friendly and approachable – something that wouldn’t look like other job boards. We used a lot of rounded shapes, rounded typography, inviting blues and greens. And incorporated the greater than symbol into a little smiley face.
These foundational elements are applied across all marketing assets to create a cohesive brand.
