Rozee.pk — The work of K. Siddiqi

Reinventing Pakistan’s Largest Job Site.

Funded by the likes of Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn’s founder) and DFJ Ventures (investors in Skype, Tesla, Twitter and many more), Naseeb Networks tasked me with modernizing and growing their entire product portfolio as their VP of Products. The immediate focus was on their star product Rozee.pk, Pakistan’s first and to date - largest employer/ job seeker portal right after raising $6M+.

Taking a very mature product into a new phase of design, engineering and growth is a mammoth task. The real challenge in taking a mature organization back into startup mode is actually the human-human interaction that goes into improving products’ outward human-computer interaction, and make new teams ‘backward-compatible’ with legacy teams who’ve done all the groundwork. This is important to acknowledge - because startup culture glorifies irreverence for ‘the old’ at times - and I made it my first order of business to understand how previous teams built the company by venerating the old guard.

I hired, grew and cultivated a diverse cross-functional team of engineers, designers, product managers and content creators and editors in order to institutionalize product management within the organization.

With this new approach, we not only completely revamped the trusted by aging old web apps/ websites, but created 6 more mobile bilingual apps (for jobseekers and employers and the sales CRM). A whole new brand identity was rolled out and baked into the products for improved aesthetics and overall utility.

Along the way, we were invited by the likes of Facebook, GSMA and Telenor to integrate tools like chatbots and gateways to greatly improve customer user experience. In fact, we were one of the earliest beta testers of the chatbot push to give extremely detailed, step by step feedback on the user experience then (it was in a most fledgling state back then). I also piloted some novel features, as well as discussions with Coursera and Udemy to integrate self-learning modules for job seekers.

A complete overhaul.

The platform consists of a job seeker side, and an employer side with the former seeing much larger traffic. I wanted the redesign to be clean, but not alienate users. Keeping this mind, the main UX mantra became designing to minimize noise, but not become a minimalist website.

Landing Page - before/ after:

Reducing Friction. Then making it stick.

Both job seeker and employer signups were all radically redesigned
for faster user onboarding, CV submissions and job posting.
Below are videos explaining the power of the redone personal profile
and the employer signup+ job post in one functionality.

Employer Combined Sign up + Job Post

Jobseeker Profile Intro

Employer Dashboard Intro

Job Listings now allow users to apply directly to the job. The hardest part about changing a results page is always the filter mechanism.

Filter terms were also challenging to change, because how Apache Solr was set up to scour resumes, job listings and all other text through the site.

Some additional innovations at the time.

A. Wit.ai Natural Language Chatbot Prototyping for F8

We were approached by Facebook to help roll out wit.ai powered chatbots; automated and ‘autonomous’ customer support is something that was picking up pace at the time. It was fun getting to work on, then present at local F8 developer events. The technology at the time was just enough to begin a linear conversation, and has come such a long way. Users were able to search for jobs by location and type - and either or apply or save them for later.

B. Facebook Zero - Primary Participant

Facebook also launched their ‘Zero’ initiative in partnership with telcos Jazz and Telenor in Pakistan, allowing users to access a select band of ‘zero-rated’ websites for free, as network subscribers. This meant rethinking the UX based on analytics borne from actual user traffic, and being very judicious with the final UI. Though designing light for the web is a core tenet (goes without saying really), our analytics allowed us to justify and be confident in the design tradeoffs we made for the skinniest version of Rozee.pk we could make.

C. VX design for Rozee Audio Interview - IVR based screening question

Monis had a great idea for helping employers screen applicants effectively. He suggested a dial-in service that employers could attach screener questions to jobs through. Candidates would then dial a UAN and enter a job-specific code to complete that part of the application. To give our engineering team and partners as much clarity as possible regarding what the voice-experience would be, I designed visual pathways, and even recorded audio for what it should sound like (please ignore the fake British accent I had to pull, in order to pose like the British Council - which was our first customer)

D. Rapid User Onboarding With MobileConnect

Facebook and Google login functionality was common then, but after adding it in, we were approached by Telenor Pakistan on behalf of the GSMA to add user authentication through phone numbers (keep in mind that FB and Google only started working on this much later - but won due to sheer user base). We found an early, dramatic increase in user onboarding, before the two giants rolled out stable versions of phone number signups as well.