How to design build and maintain a career website
that receives 10'000 applications per day
While on the Google Webmaster Team (names chaned a few times so I’ll stick to the original name) I was responsible for keeping all of Google’s careers site up and running, plan improvements together with People Ops and add additional sites, as the need arose.
One of those special sites was the Google Diversity site, where for the first time a Big Tech company would disclose their demographic data.
One of the iterations of the careers home page, back in 2014
Some information about how hiring works. This structure is still kind of the same today
At some point the number of applications got so large that the existing system to handle the job postings could not keep up, so I worked with People Ops to roll out a fully integrated system. Not an easy feat of you need to support 42 languages, including some right-to-left. Oh and some point it was decided to rename the site from “Google Jobs“ to “Google Careers” – which was fine, a few hundred redirects took care of any orphaned pages.
While the engineering was handled by eng teams I worked with another Information Architect to restructure the whole Google About site, of which the Careers site was a part of. We eventually re-launched all Google About pages with a unified structure and navigation, in order to create a coherent site instead of a mess of individual pages.
The at the time new unified navigation for all of Google's "Corporate" sites. All these sites had to be redesigned and relaunched as well.
Starting on one end (the careers site in this case) some times leads to bigger things, like relaunching all of Google’s Corporate websites. This was a true grass roots effort, but approvals were relatively to get back in those days.
Early on one of our mantras were “no lorem ipsum“. Since the design needs to convey the content, just making something pretty and slapping some lorem ipsum on it ain’t flying.
So while we redesigned everything, I also wrote the copy. We wanted to present a product ready to launch and it needed some copy that was passable.
I expected that some experienced copy writers or Google PR would take care of that but that never happened and so all the copy I wrote went live as is.
Which goes to tell you that you need to put love and care into everything that goes into the design – it might go live as it was on the mocks
