Booking.com

Figma

Miro

Atlassian

My role

  • Research planning

  • Workshop facilitator

  • Interview facilitator

  • Research documentation

  • UX strategy

Who I worked with

  • Project manager

  • Content strategist

  • Brand strategist

  • Booking.com’s global recruitment team based in the Netherlands.

Confidentiality

This project is confidential which limits how much specific content I am able to share.

The Problem & Context

The Problem & Context

Booking.com has been dealing with a shrinking talent pool for key hires over the past few years. As global hiring soared, Booking.com was loosing marketshare to companies like Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Spotify, and Miro.


Booking.com’s global recruitment team is responsible for managing hiring costs, time-to-hire, and candidate-offer-acceptance.


My agency was engaged by Booking.com to improve these key metrics and fill in knowledge gaps about Booking.com's key role peronas.

2016

2021

Research Strategy

As a team, we started with competitive audit of 16 competitors as well as stakeholder workshops to help gain a deep understanding of the market.


Once we felt we knew the context, we launched a global survey that uncovered multiple problem and opportunity themes for each of our target personas.


We then enriched the qualitative data from our survey with internal and external interviews, speaking with direct competitors when we could.


All of this data funneled toward tangible artifacts that impacted Booking.com's metrics.

Workshops & Audits

Surveys

Interviews

3rd Party Data

Discovery

Tangible

Artifacts

Competitive Audit

Competitive Audit

Competitor 1

Competitor 2

Competitor 3

Etc.

As our first step in research planning, my team and I took a close look at 16 local and global competitors collaborating across UX, brand, and content to deeply understand the market.


We took note of what Booking.com’s competitors did well and what they did poorly. This information guided our understanding of Booking.com’s market position and competitive advantage.

Competitor 1

Competitor 2

Competitor 3

Competitor 4

Etc.

Usability

Aesthetics

Flows

Content

Systems

Brand

Accessibility

Sourcing & Data Flow

We recruited research participants through Booking.com’s internal channels as well as third party resources like survey monkey, userinterviews.com, etc. Our sourcing strategy prioritized quantitative data first which we then enriched with qualitative interview data. After our survey and interviews were complete, we still had some gaps remaining across psychographics and user behaviors. We solved for these gaps by using high quality 3rd party data bases.

Synthesis & Artifacts

Synthesis & Artifacts

We synthesized our data in Miro through rounds of theming, discussion, and analysis with the team. Once grouped, we moved the data into visual formats such as personas, journey maps, and candidate narratives using Figma. We pursued the highest level of specificity without making the artifacts prescriptive.


In order to help Booking.com improve its metrics, we included strategic UX, brand, and content recommendations for each persona.

Summary

We took Booking.com’s global recruitment team from a limited understanding of their candidates to a robust understanding of their competitors, market environment, and candidate experience. Our research gave Booking.com the tools to decrease hiring costs, decrease time-to-hire, and increase candidate-offer-acceptance.


Since the specifics of this project are confidential, I am unable to share specific metrics impacted.

16

Competitors Audited

4

Stakeholder Workshops

14

Interactive Interviews

6

Personas, Journey Maps, Narrative Sets

Copyright Josh Meyers 2023