We have observed an organic increase in posts from small businesses regarding help wanted. Facebook has decided to invest in Jobs. How would you design a product for this need?

1. Clarify goals

Did i understand correctly that we plan to launch Jobs product specifically to adress emerging situation with small business posting about help wanted? Yes

When we say help wanted do we assume just temporary jobs, or it could be both temporary and permament jobs? Could be both 

Are we interested in any particular type of business or type of help wanted? No, we saw spike in all types of help wanted from all types of businesses

Do we have a specific goals for this product, for example do we expect to monetize it directly, or it could drive outcomes for existing FB product? Yes, we expect direct monetization

Do we have any other constraints or requirements i should know about? No, nothing in particular

2. Segment users

With respect to jobs there are 3 distinct segments of small business:

• Local restaurants, shops, hair salons - many locations have explicit seasonality paired with high turnover of employees
• Other b2c businesses - for example, lawn mawing companies, plumbing companies, drycleaners - some of them have high seasons, but they don't typically see as high of a turnover relative to the first segment
• B2B businesses - such as small accounting firms, lawyer firms, etc - have less expressed seasonality, and low turnover due to professional nature of services and high qualifications required from employees  

Even though i was not provided the data with actual breakdown of 'help wanted' posts by type of business and type of jobs, i would assume that the most important segment for us is the first one - local restaurants, cafes and retail stores. Due to seasonality and high turnover, they naturally have high demand for temporary as well as permanent staff. 

3. Define user needs

The overarching need of the segment is to have enough staff to compensate for high turnover, which is almost unavoidable for these businesses, and to satisfy customer demand during high season. We can further break down this need into several distinct needs:

• Attract as many people as possible to apply for the job
• Select best candidates who are a good fit for the job
• Do background checks and ensure that candidates have proper paperwork
• Onboard and train candidates to get them ready to work

4. Select most relevant needs

Out of these user needs, I suggest that we focus on the first two needs because they come first in the lifecycle of recruiting a person, and they align with some key resources that we have available as Facebook: wide reach of local audiences, rich data about each individual person, and ability to facilitate engagement between the business and the candidate. In addition, need # 3 is out of our area of competency and there are many specialized providers of this services (mature "red ocean" market), and need #4 presumably could be handled well by the business itself because it falls into their core competency. 

5. Possible solutions

Based on the needs we have selected, here are 3 possible solutions:

Step 6. Select the product

I would select product # 1 since it satisfies the most important need of the customer segment, has high reach, impact and confidence and moderate engineering effort. Product # 2 will most likely have lower value for customes (passive job seekers are arguably worse than active ones) and there is significant risk of running into dependencies with Ads team roadmap (and their roadmap will likely be a priority). Product # 3 makes sense only with product # 1, so i would choose it as a second priority after we implement product # 1, and if it has traction. 

Step 7. Build the product

First, i would validate customer need from both businesses of the segment that we selected, AND consumers. We are a platform and we have to consider both user types in all our product decisions. After going through initial discovery, i would iterate on prototypes to arrive at the MVP and roll it out in select regions with select types of businesses - even more narrow than our segment. For example, i would start with restaurants. Staring narrow is always a good approach to get the core value proposition right and to validate our product hypothesis. 

Job board product would have the following main user stories from the point of view of business:

• Inspect all jobs of similar type in the region to estimate competitive pay rate (could be done via report and monetized separatley)
• Post a job of given type. Fields of the job description have to be customized for each job type to take as much friction as possible out of the process of posting. 
• Modify job
• Cancel job

Since we are not implementing online application, functionality of the consumer would be limited to searching for jobs (by type, location,etc), saving jobs, and possibly adding notes to the jobs (like 'applied on this day', etc). 

For this product, we could start with very simple monetization model where fixed fee is charged for each type of job for a certain amount of time. For, example : waiter posting would be $15/month. We can further experiment with pricing and monetization after our soft launch, based on the results we see. 

Key metrics for this product are: number of jobs on the platform, avg number of jobs / business, job velocity (how fast they are filled), ARPU. Since we do not control the full life cycle of recruitment, it is important to pay attention to qualitative data about how well the product works from the point of view of businesses - does it satisfy their overarching goal (filling the jobs).

Summary.

We observed an uptick in 'help wanted' posts from small businesses, and after considering 3 segments of small business we focused on local restaurants, shops and hair salons because they have high staff turnover and always need to hire people. We focus on user needs of reach the candidates and helping them apply for jobs, and designed 3 potential products. We ended up chosing the product that has highest reach, impact, confidence and medium development efforts - the job board. Product will be monetized directly by charging business for job posted / month. If the product gets traction, we can think about adding another product - online application - to our core Jobs product. We will be monitoring ARPU as our core metric.