The Situation
For hourly employees, visibility and access to the weekly shift schedule is key to ensuring two things: that enough hours are worked in a given period to make ends meet and that others are available to cover shifts when conflicts exist or life happens.
As a leader in shift swapping flexibility technology, Branch provides a strong mobile-first option for hourly employees, and their employers, to gain the visibility and access they need, both to manage their work schedules and their paycheck options.
While Branch has a strong foundation to support the hourly employee, they believe there are opportunities to leverage their app to help these employees in another crucial area: the job search. They approached our team looking to explore features that might help them leverage existing app data and function to make a shift to including more of these resources in their current offering.
Current Strengths and Opportunities
A competitive audit allowed us to explore and understand the best functions of the current Branch app, existing offerings and features from competitor applications, and opportunities that Branch might be able to pursue moving forward.
While the current Branch app does offer robust self-service and messaging functionalities and interest free paycheck advance, these features exist in silos from each other and the app does not offer much to bring the two together. Additionally, though Branch would like to move into the job search space, there are no features that support this currently and this might feel like a sudden shift to current users, especially with such strong players in the hourly employee job search space to begin with.
Features of Interest
To better understand the direction Branch might go, A Kano analysis of low fidelity feature mockups was sent to current Branch users to help us understand how current users felt these potential job search features would add or detract from their overall experience with the app.
Feedback from the survey showed polarizing response, with some users intrigued by the addition of these features, while others were not interested in using Branch in this way—there are other platforms and services that they’d prefer to use to find new opportunities. We also noticed some variance in feedback based on role—some features that would distinctly benefit employees were meant with overall ambivalence by managers and some manager-specific features seemed unimportant to current employee users.
With this in mind, I created high-fidelity wireframes of the following key features to help illustrate how the might allow Branch to navigate into this new territory.
Seasonal Job Postings
Holidays or other known busy seasons may necessitate additional employees, but only for a short time. This feature allows managers to post seasonal specific opportunities which employees can then apply to to pick up additional hours at different locations within their company.
As the manager user begins to post the job, the current location of their store or business is populated on the form to ease the burden of data entry. Basic job information can be entered, with larger multi line text areas set up for the job responsibilities and requirements. The dates needed fields can either be typed directly into or have a date selected from the pop-up calendar.
The employee sees the job fully formatted, complete with job title, pay rate, dates of work, and location immediately in view. A single tap allows the employee user to apply to the job with their created resume link
Job Features Onboarding
To help promote and encourage adoption of the Branch App job related application updates, several onboarding screens alert and educate current users about the specific details and function of the new features.
The first visit to the app after the update populates the onboarding screen, allowing users to swipe through and learn about the various features. These screens can also be included in the current onboarding that populates for new users on first app open. A short title and one sentence description help orient the user to the overall idea of the new feature and how it might help them in their current workflow. Specific screen calls to action invite users to try out the new feature they are seeing described. In a future build out, this could lead to a more interactive “How To” tour.
Easy Apply Resume Formatting
Employees can currently create a profile that includes information that is also standard for most resumes. To simplify the work needed to apply for jobs, employees can create a formatted resume from their profile to download as a PDF or create a link that can be used to apply for jobs on the Branch App.
The Easy Apply resume formatting leverages existing profile information. Users can easily add a photo and personal summary alongside professional experience and skills in the current version of the Branch App. An updated three-dot menu alerts users that further action can be taken on the current profile page. This allows easy access to the feature without interrupting the existing experience unnecessarily. Once tapped, the menu displays options for the user to download as a PDF or create a resume link to be used on Branch App job postings.
Communicating Strategy
These features were packaged into a an annotated wireframe set delivered to the client, along with a customer journey map showing a current user’s experience with the existing app and how future features might fit into that experience.
Looking Forward
The employees and managers whose work revolves around hourly positions face some unique challenges that Branch has begun to solve for. Leveraging existing technology, data, and opportunity, the recommended changes could set Branch up to build on its supportive and flexible foundation and ultimately become a more meaningful part of the hourly employee’s experience.