As a public-sector job-seeker in Wallonia, Le Forem has a duty to remain at the cutting edge of job search, to enable everyone to position themselves in the job market. Following in the footsteps of other independent players on the market, such as Indeed, Stepstones or even Linkedin, Le Forem wants to strengthen its expertise and offer a quality product aimed at an increasingly mobile public.

The challenge was to position a product on the mobile application market that was easy to use, user-oriented and pleasant to interact with. To achieve this, jobseekers and Le Forem employment advisers were asked to deliver a product that best met the needs of users.

In a context where we aim to increase the employment rate, which remains low, it is important for Le Forem, as the reference body in Wallonia, to enable jobseekers to find a job that suits them best and within a reasonable timeframe. That's why Le Forem has embarked on the adventure of the mobile application.

Encouraged by the government via the Minister for Employment in function at the time, Le Forem will launch the first version of its mobile application in November 2022.

‍The initial objective behind the project is to create a new channel of communication between Le Forem and individual users by producing a mobile App for citizens.

Data shows that more and more users, and jobseekers in particular, are using their smartphones to surf the web more frequently than their computers. What's more, most of them own a mobile phone even before they invest in a computer.

That's why Le Forem has been chosen to launch this mobile application, to offer a quality service to this particular audience at any time of the day.

The solution chosen was to create this new communication channel, a mobile application that allows users to find the job that suits them.

After several workshops with internal staff, citizens, jobseekers, trainees and stakeholders, the project team worked hard to build a product that met all the objectives we had set ourselves.

Creating such a new digital product required a strong identity to enter the market. We helped the team translate their brand identity from the web to the mobile app. Although a design system was in place when we started the project, everything had to be reimagined through the prism of the mobile application.

To deliver such a valued product, our in-house Movify expert worked with the project team in place to build their strategy, their mobile brand vision and lead the project as UX/UI designer.

First of all, a product vision has been build to ensure that all the future iteration of the product will always fit the initial vision, that will ensure not overlap the initial goal of the app.

Le Forem app product vision is :

As often as possible, when we think of a new feature or an enhancement to the application, we ask our target audience to ensure that this feature meets their needs. At the same time, we obtain valuable feedback that enables us to correct errors and unexpected behaviour in the application.

This is how we work:

- We send at least 3 times a year marketing email survey’s to le Forem users to catch up information about their digital behavior and expectations for our online services.
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- We encounter the public in le Forem offices or “Maison de l’emploi” to challenge with them the new features we want to release, to test prototypes to improve the user experience.

Finally, these approaches will also help to raise awareness of our brand and our application among users.

Of course, data is essential to our work today. Although we don't have a data tracking service in place, due to the sensitive topics of the GDPR, we continually review the data we receive from our services, both for desktop, mobile and app usage. These key figures help guide our work and future developments.

At the time of writing, the application has released 4 major versions on the stores, constantly evolving to encourage users and make their searches easier.Since the first version of the application was published, over 75,000 downloads have been made*.

A number of features have been introduced to help jobseekers find work, including:

- Access to thousands of job offers thanks to an elaborate job search service
- Apply directly to a job offer
- Daily in-app notifications when new job offers match your research
- Bookmarking job offers
- Filter by profession, geographical area, type of contract, etc.
- Share job offers with your contacts
- Locate Forem offices near your current location using a in-app map
- Save searches and launch them easily
- …

Thanks to a great team of experienced people, both internally and externally, we overcame obstacles and pushed our limits, but in the end we launched an in-store application and have maintained its use and longevity for almost 2 years.

*This number has been calculated using the numbers we receive from the main application stores on the market (Play store and Apple store).