Growing click revenue... without hurting apply and signup rates

The Problem

Talent.com is a global job board operating on a pay-per-click model, where revenue depends on user engagement. Job Description pages sit at the final decision point: users are deciding whether to apply or leave. Related jobs exist to recover intent when the primary role isn’t a fit, but at Talent they were buried below the full description. Fewer than 10% of users ever reached them, wasting both user intent and monetization at the moment of highest value.

Goal

Increase meaningful engagement with Related Jobs on Job Description pages, recovering value from sessions where users didn’t find what they were looking for, without compromising apply rates or user intent.

My Role

I was the lead product designer, responsible for defining and sequencing experiments with product and engineering, and making UX and business tradeoffs explicit before implementation.

Impact at a Glance

Grew revenue ~5x without hurting apply or signup rates.

Carla brought Recommended Job Cards above the fold and maximized both user intent and revenue. Her redesign contributed to the highest revenue this feature has generated in over a year.

Visibility Without Distraction

I explored multiple placement strategies across desktop and mobile to expose a single core tradeoff: how to increase recovery paths without competing with the primary apply decision. These comparisons helped the team align on solutions that improved visibility while preserving decision focus.

The resulting changes were intentionally subtle. Rather than redesigning the Job Description page, the work focused on re-balancing action hierarchy at decisive moments in the journey.

Desktop: Parallel Evaluation

On desktop, Related Jobs were relocated to a side column and visually de-emphasized through more compact job cards. This allowed users to evaluate the job description and alternatives independently, without fragmenting attention. Primary actions were anchored in a sticky header on scroll, preserving decision focus while keeping relevant alternatives accessible.

Mobile: Jump to Related Jobs

On mobile, limited screen real estate made competing actions especially risky. We introduced an explicit, user-controlled entry point to Related Jobs that remained available without interrupting job evaluation. As users scrolled, primary actions moved into a sticky header, freeing the bottom of the screen for a secondary “View related jobs” trigger. This maintained a clear hierarchy between applying and exploring alternatives.

Outcome & Validation

Increasing visibility drove a ~40% increase in CTR, validating discoverability as a critical lever for engagement. On mobile, this also revealed a ~5% dip in signup rate, signaling that deeper exploration was competing with existing signup prompts.

In response, the mobile experience was adjusted by making the signup prompt sticky while users explored Related Jobs. After this change, signup rates stabilized and recovered, enabling the experiment to scale with confidence.

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Redirect Logic

All Related Job clicks initially routed internally, even for sponsored jobs with external apply flows. This added friction at the moment of highest intent and delayed monetization.

I collaborated with the PM to visualize and simplify redirect logic by job type:

• Sponsored, non-TalentApply → external apply (opened in a new tab)
• Organic & TalentApply → remain internal

This change resulted in:

• ~40% increase in human engagement with Related Jobs
• ~9% increase in related-jobs revenue
• No negative impact on apply or signup rates

This reinforced a key principle: monetization and UX are not opposing forces when routing, intent, and trust are aligned.

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Thanks for reading!

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