Can an app turn job hunting into fun?

Searching for ways to improve outcomes for job seekers, the Department of Employment has designed an app that helps them along their employment journey.

Stephen Moore readily admits that games aren’t the first thing that most people consider when they think of government services. But an open mind and a commitment to try something new have led the Department of Employment to new pastures as it puts the finishing touches on a mobile app that he hopes will provide a new way to engage and motivate the 750,000 job seekers his department interacts with on a daily basis.

The department was “looking at innovative ways of using technology to drive the sorts of outcomes the government wants”, Moore, the department’s CIO, told GTR.

Moore will present the app at ACE Events’ Technology in Government 2016 conference in Canberra in August.

“In our world our customers are job seekers, who are trying to get into work and have often lost their jobs and become dispirited quite quickly,” said Moore.

“In our department there is a lot of focus on being innovative and willing to try different things — and we thought we could pick up on global trends by giving them an app that encourages them to do the right sort of things to be successful in their search.”

The result is an app called JobFit, which borrows heavily from conventional fitness trackers that use a range of rewards, incentives and reminders to mould wearers’ behaviour.

JobFit has been designed to break down the many elements that go into a successful job search. Constant monitoring will track the user’s progress against those elements, offering advice about behaviours or possible career options that may not have yet come into the equation.

“There is plenty of theoretical evidence that these sorts of gamified approaches can influence consumers’ behaviour,” Moore said.

“In our case we were trying to stave off that slide in terms of their attitude when they don’t get a job straight away.

“If we can keep them engaged for longer and give them a better idea of the tools and practice that can help them be successful, we hoped that would actually provide a measurable difference,” he added.

The creative process

Designing and building the app proved to be a learning experience — gamification has been something of a blue-sky endeavour within government, so the department was mostly going it on its own when it began speccing out JobFit’s design.

“There are a handful of examples around the place, with a lot of focus on behavioural economics and the things that gamification takes its leave from, but there was no-one really in government with the expertise we needed,” Moore said.

Stephen Moore, CIO of the federal Department of Employment.

This led the department to look for those skills in the private market, where it soon encountered gamification expert 3rd Sense, whose business-focused app development efforts include apps for the likes of Pfizer, Gyprock, John Holland and McDonald’s.

That firm’s pedigree suited the type of outcome that Employment was looking for, so it was engaged to support the development of JobFit — starting a back-and-forth creative process that Moore says proved to be a learning experience for all involved.

3rd Sense “weren’t coming along with a particular solution in mind”, said Moore, noting that the mobile design firm was engaged for a consultation period before any design work was to take place.

“We were very conscious of being very open-minded about what the solution might look like,” he added. “On the basis of talking with our staff and to job seekers, we listened to what they recommended as an approach.”

This wasn’t always easy, he admits.

“I had some preconceived ideas where I bit my tongue and decided that we would listen to the experts rather than trying to influence the outcome too much,” Moore said.

“They have come up with some very interesting ways to deliver something, and many times they were things that I and my staff wouldn’t have thought of.”

Experimentation

After months of testing, the finished app — which is built around a point-scoring metaphor that combines individual goal-setting with advice on everything from interview techniques to CV writing — will go live in the second half of this year, with department-sanctioned employment services providers engaged to encourage job seekers to give it a try.

With a real gamified app completed and ready to go, Moore is enthusiastic both about the result and the process that got the department there.

Keeping the scope of the app focused on a particular user community, he said, helped limit the complexity and cost of the development work.

It also enabled Employment to build a functional framework that can always be expanded on as monitoring of job seekers’ activities highlights areas where new functionality can be helpful.

Screenshot from the JobFit app.

Getting a good sense of its real-world value will likely take until the end of the year. Yet, as usage expands and feedback begins rolling in, the department will be looking to measure an increase in engagement.

This will be made possible by data from administrative systems that tracks hard metrics such as the number of job interviews a job-seeker attends — as well as from what Moore calls “more qualitative measures around the impact we have on the way job seekers feel about themselves at the end of the day”.

“An important part of this is the experimentation,” he said. “In the past we haven’t been very good at how rigorously we have trialled these sorts of things. We are trying to influence attitude, and that’s not an easy thing to measure.

“But JobFit hasn’t been an expensive thing to build, and we will be working with consultants to see what kind of changes they have seen,” he added.

“With so many job seekers, even a small percentage improvement can make a very big difference.”

You can catch Stephen Moore’s JobFit presentation at the Technology in Government conference and expo in Canberra, 2–3 August. He will be speaking on the second day of the event, Wednesday, 3 August, at 11.50 am. Check out the Technology in Government website for the full line-up of dozens of public sector, academic and industry speakers who outline their experiences and insights into government ICT.