Identifying many weaknesses in the past recruiting process (a general application followed by team lead "draft"), Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD) decided to move to a roll-based recruitment process. In support of this, I created a dedicated recruiting website (joincusd.org) over the course of about a week, for the purpose of supplementing our general website with more information about the CUSD student experience and our open positions.
As a first step, I sat down with the heads of strategy, operations and marketing/communications for the organization and generated purpose, mission and vision statements. By clearly articulating our vision of the organizaiton, we hoped to create a consistent image of CUSD throughout the recruiting process.
Lo-fi mockups of various pages for the site. We ended up declining to implement individual role pages.
Layouts and architecture for the site were fairly straightforward and based off of fairly traditional job sites. This project aimed to ship something extremely quickly that would match expected user behavior and fit in with a cross-media campaign, therefore we relied very heavily on convention.
Ideations for various ways to approach the projects page of the site.
The final layout for the projects page. The colored square motif mirrored our print campaigns, info session slide decks and social media graphics.
Usecase analysis suggested that our users would likely be:
- At least somewhat familiar with CUSD, having been referred by print media, a social media post or an in-person information session (very little organic traffic).
- Using a modern browser (mostly students, on persnally-owned devices purchased in the last three years).
- On mobile (checking the site in response to a visual or verbal prompt while away from the computer, ex at an info session or walking by a poster).
As a result, the design heavily prioritized performance and load time by avoiding large images, making heavy use of SVG/CSS wherever possible and lazy-loading large files, such as videos.
The homepage. Videos are lazy-loaded based on user interaction, and the video previews are progressively encoded JPEGs (at low resolution and with a gaussian blur filter applied) to reduce load times.
Mobile and desiktop views of a project listing page, showing off the use of SVG icons.
Following recruiting season, the recruitment site was adapted to be used as the main CUSD website while a redesign occurred. The visual changes will be migrated back to the recruitment site when the main site is re-done.
Adapted version of the CUSD recruiting site used as the general CUSD homepage. The main adaptations were the more explicit value statement at the top (for users less familiar with CUSD), the visual refresh so that the two sites wouldn't be confused and the email newsletter CTA, which replaces the recruitment-focused content.
View the live site on joincusd.org
