One of the UK's most recognisable job platforms needed a mobile experience that kept up with how people actually search. We redesigned around the journey, and the numbers followed. Plus won an award!
Reed is the world’s largest family-owned recruitment company, connecting jobseekers with thousands of companies across 20+ specialized sectors. The firm operates over 180 global locations and launched the UK's very first commercial job board, reed.co.uk, in 1995.
session-to-applicant conversion
more applications per user
monthly stickiness
Job apps all look alike. Search, filter, save, apply. Reed had the brand and the listings, and an experience that gave a jobseeker no reason to pick it over anything else.
We rebuilt the mobile journey around how people actually searched, saved and applied for jobs. Conversion rose 27% and applications per user more than doubled.
Reed’s problem wasn’t a shortage of jobs or of people looking at them. It was that the app had grown feature by feature while the market filled up with tools doing the same thing.
Applying is the only thing a jobseeker actually wants to do, and it sat at the end of a journey designed around browsing.
The mobile experience hadn't kept pace with how people searched, saved and applied
Nothing distinguished the app in a category of near-identical products
Brand presence on mobile was inconsistent with the rest of the business
Drop-off was concentrated at specific points nobody had isolated
Session-to-applicant conversion rose 27%. Applications per user went up 112%. Monthly stickiness improved 7.4%.
The app won an award, but the more useful outcome was internal. Reed’s teams came out of it with a shared view of what the brand needed to be on mobile, and the confidence to keep changing it.
Clearer interaction models across the tasks that matter
Job listings presented for scanning rather than browsing
Visual and illustration principles that modernised the brand without splitting it from the wider ecosystem
Work sequenced to fit existing release cycles rather than interrupting them
01
Workshops with product, design, engineering and marketing, to surface internal constraints before designing against them.
02
Analytics and existing flows to form hypotheses, then research to check them.
03
Experienced candidates and people new to the market, focusing on why anyone picks one app over another.
04
Integrated with in-house teams and shaped delivery around Reed's release schedule and marketing commitments.
Thunk brought world class design to our mobile app, they listened and provided us with the ideas and the tangible results that we needed. Their collaborative approach had a wide and lasting impact on the businesses overall design maturity.”
Phillip Rinn, Managing Director, Reed
A disciplined hunt for value — the structure to explore the unknown without the usual cost of getting it wrong.
1-hour (remote)
Bring us the thing everyone in your organisation disagrees about. We'll tell you what we'd do, whether that involves us or not.
1-day (in person)
One day won't solve everything, but it'll tell you exactly where to start. 'Too many ideas' become one clear plan with the evidence to back it.