UX Researcher
Exploratory Research for Indeed's Anti-fraud Team (2023)
Client: Indeed
​
Role: Associate User Researcher embedded in the anti-fraud team
​​
Methods: Remote In-depth exploratory interviews, data analysis
​​
Tools: Miro, Reduct, & Dovetail
​
Timeline: January-March 2023
Executive Summary
Context
The team wanted to compare the different reactions of Canadian, British, and USA employers to needing to verify their business before posting a job to Indeed. I spoke to Canadian and British employers to understand their reactions for comparison with with the large body of existing knowledge about those in the USA.
Prototype about uploading an official business document for verification
Findings and outcomes
No employer understood why they would use a personal ID to verify a company at which they worked, although British employers were more comfortable with it than Canadian and US employers. This confirmed existing research with US companies, reinforcing the need to explore ways to better explain the use of a personal ID for verification.
Employers were more able to understand the use of business documents to verify a company, but again as with US employers were not necessarily able to access the documents Indeed accepts. This was typically due to not having access to them, or the documents not existing for one reason or another. This confirmed existing research with US companies.
As with US employers, no employer believed that hiring was an industry in need of strong security, especially compared to finance, although those who had personally experienced fraud were more positive about the concept. This confirmed the need to continue exploring how to clearly and concisely explain the importance of verification and strong security on hiring sites.
Finally, this study made it clear that there were additional internationalization needs beyond translation to non-English languages. As a result, the anti-fraud team started discussions with the internationalization team to explore ways to have content differ for countries that speak the same language.​
Background
Successful job fraud results in job seekers being defrauded of money they cannot afford to lose when they are looking for a job to support themselves and their families. Sites whose business model is to connect employers to employees cannot afford the negative business impact of having job seekers being defrauded on their site.
Because of this and the terrible impact on those who were defrauded, Indeed and other job sites ask employers to confirm their legitimacy through verification. Employer verification allows a job site to have higher confidence that an employer account is a legitimate business rather than one created to defraud job seekers.
​
I ran this study to understand British and Canadian employer attitudes toward verification for use in reducing the friction involved and optimizing the experience to their needs.
Study Goals
There were three main goals for this study:
​
1) Explore how Canadian and British employers feel about verifying their companies to post a job on Indeed.
2) Learn how they feel about verifying their business by uploading an official business document or verifying their personal ID
2) Understand which official business documents employers in Canada and Britain have available to them
Prototypes
Below you can see approximations of the prototypes used to provide employers with necessary context for the topic of the study. The original prototypes are not shared for confidentiality reasons.
Prototype about uploading an official business document for verification
Prototype about using a personal ID for verification
Analysis
Post-interview debriefs
I provided a brief summary after each interview in a team-focused slack channel to keep the team appraised and to discuss any changes that might need to be made to the artifacts we used to spark discussion. Once I had enough data, I also started sharing patterns I was seeing in the slack channel.
​
Miro Analysis and Synthesis
Once the interviews for a country were complete, I took my summaries of the interviews to Miro to look for patterns in participant comments and reactions, as well as the rating scales we provided for terminology-related questions.
Findings
Verification reactions
British employers were much more comfortable with ID verification than Canadian employers, whose discomfort was similar to that of US employers.
​​
No employer understood why verification using their own ID would have anything to do with verifying their business, especially those who were not owners of the company.
​
Employers were more able to understand the use of documentation as a form of business verification compared to ID verification. As with employers in the US, however, not every hiring professional has access to the types of documents we request. The reasons vary from documents only being available to those higher up in the chain of command to companies being remote-only or non-profits who do not have particular types of documentation.
​
Terminology
In many cases, the terms used for US employers did not match well to what other English speaking countries needed for clarity. For example, we adjusted the words for British employers mid-way through the sessions due to confusion with some of our wording. They preferred the clarity of "Registered business address" over our original “Headquarters mailing address”, and "Choose one of these verification options" was clearer than our original "Choose a way to verify".
​​
Security needs for hiring
Much like employers in the US, employers did not think of hiring as an industry in high need of security, especially as compared to financial industries. Employers did not have a good understanding of what can happen if someone steals their account, nor if someone creates an employer account pretending to be them. Most did not understand the kinds of fraud that illegitimate businesses enact against job seekers, nor did they understand that this would affect their reputation if it's believed to be their company's doing.
​
