Agrotrabajo
A recruiting platform for the agricultural sector.
A recruiting platform for the agricultural sector.
Agrotrabajo is a recruiting tool for the agricultural sector in Uruguay. The key to the project was, on the one hand, to find a way to actually get to people and on the other, understand how they interact with this type of technology, in order to create a successful product they would find useful. The thing is workers in this sector are quite distant from technology. To achieve these key challenges, we had to focus on Data, SEO and UX.
The agricultural business is the largest industry in Uruguay and it's
estimated to equal between 30% and 35% of the total GDP. However, Mauricio, our client, recognized a niche:
recruiting.
Turns out there are thousands of people looking for jobs in the farming sector and
thousands of employers looking out for them, but there wasn’t any specific platform for these people.
Recruiting was tedious: recommendations, phone calls, ads in local newspapers, etc.
Mauricio's
first idea was creating a Facebook page for them to connect, and it worked so
good he decided to take his
Facebook page to another level... That’s when he called us!
The platform works the following way: Employers post detailed work offers by
buying one of Agrotrabajo plans. Workers can register online and this will automatically create their CV. Once
they’re registered, they can apply for the jobs. Employers can choose between the different CV’s they receive
and contact their favorite profiles.
Voilà! That’s how Agrotrabajo does the job.
The platform was developed with Laravel for the Back-End and Vue for the Front-End.
The biggest challenge was about who our target audience was. We assumed that
people working in the Uruguayan countryside were not good with technology and reading text. We
investigated our target audience and our hunch turned out to be right: 53% of agricultural
workers have finished only primary school and 14% didn’t even go to school. This meant that 66% of our
target audience probably had a hard time reading and writing.
As we had made a validation stage with
an MVP, we were able to make gather more information with Google Analytics. Only 9.5% of workers have access
to a computer, so most of them (90%) would access the platform using their phones. Also, 90% of them have
Android phones. Moreover, the internet connection in the countryside isn't optimal.
All of these
insights shaped our platform: we needed a simple platform, with basic texts and design, fast enough for
people with a bad internet connection and designed 100% responsive to work out fine in old phones (but also
in new phones and computers because our clients, the employers, will access the same platform from the
newest devices).
The users were so different from us that even though we had plenty of
information about them it was hard to empathize.
We created a user persona and called him
José. A user persona is an imaginary character created to represent the different types of users that could
use a website. User personas aren't just demographic data: they are humanized characters (with their
history, family, friends, studies, personality, etc) so it's easier to empathize with them. Every time
we had a question we would ask José what he preferred.
We could gather lots of insights from the MVP's data and José. We, for
example, acknowledged that Facebook is the most used platform by them (many of them exclusively use Facebook
for online surfing), so we decided to use Facebook's language terminology. We also used this
information to advise our client to invest in advertising on Facebook.
Another example of changes we
implemented because of understanding our client was implementing native components in the forms, which are
much more comfortable for small and older phones, which they tend to have.
Another interesting thing to talk about Agrotrabajo is SEO. Since the beginning of the project, everything was thought and developed from a SEO perspective. Let’s take a look at the strategies we use to effectively perform in SEO:
We also developed an open-source package available on Github...
Platforms always have to be intuitive. In this case, because of who our users
were, intuitive meant basic and explicit texts.
We had to pay special attention to design: the
project's head designer decided that the best road to take was implementing a neat, clean and basic
design, that looked good but didn't mess with the final user's attention.
We also created
friendly custom pages for the 404 errors. Take a peek:
To improve Agrotrabajo's performance every day more, we integrated it with
mix panel in order to track the events that happen in the frontend, analyze them in the mix panner and
identify then data-driven improvement opportunities we should implement.
We also used Inspectlet,
which gives us access to the recording of the users screen when using our platform. This also gave us insights
on, for example, why users were quitting the registration process.
Agrotrabajo’s main objective was
connecting workers and employers. However, our client had a second objective: collecting data about the
sector. This is why in the administrator panel, our client can keep track of key performance indicators (KPI),
different relevant metrics for Agrotrabajo and for the whole industry. For example, our client can identify
the average number of applications for each job and then analyze why some jobs have better or worse
performance. At the same time, Agrotrabajo collects relevant information about unemployment, demographic data,
etc.
We're very happy about the results in terms of user experience, SEO and data recollection. It's one of those projects that makes you understand one more time how research and data are fundamental to achieve the best possible product.
Whether it's a quick question or a fantastic idea, let's start with a conversation.
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