The Talent Hub needs major UX improvements inorder to be feasible for professional users

[Meqolo]

As a Roblox developer who is aiming to earn a living from developing for Roblox, the Talent Hub has continuously been a user experience nightmare. From talking with others who have tried to use it for hiring for professional developers, they have faced similar issues.

As a developer who has used this, I have had to sift through double digits of pages, glanced over 100s of postings, read through maybe 10 postings inorder to find work which I believe to be suitable for myself (in other words, well paying work that is based on actual prospects for a reasonable employer - 100s failed to pass the first step of being well paying, then the others lacked any sort of prospect owing to what appeared to be shoddy project management or shoddy financing).

Currently, I have to take multiple steps to actually vet that I’m applying to reasonable postings, having to search through the games they’ve produced, current developers, investing reports, and social media; just inorder to guarantee that the company will have the finances to provide pay, that they actually provide pay, and that they treat employees with dignity and respect.

When I do apply to positions, you can expect to receive no response for a month and then find that you’ve been declined for the position (most likely because any well paying work will post in multiple places, and you can guarantee that well paying work will be taken in a month).

Applying is made even harder by the fact that you are expected to convince a person to hire you through one tiny textbox, the contents of which will be mangled by censoring and left unreadable in the majority of cases (censoring which you don’t even know how your message is affected by until it’s sent), and the inability to send any further messages until you receive a reply (which you won’t because your message was mangled by a robot filter).

On the other hand, hirers complain that the replies of developers are often inadequate, poor and that many people who reply are wholly inexperienced and unqualified.

Inorder to fix these issues, I propose the following solutions that should improve the experience of both developers and hirers:

• Provide the ability for developers to sort the postings by date created, or last time checked by poster, or by pay
• Require posters to provide numbers for compensation, whether this is an exact figure or the range available (the number of posts which don’t actually state any numbers but instead “up for negotiation” is inconceivable)
• Require posters to outline the schedule on which you can expect pay (weekly, bi weekly, monthly, upon completion, amount upfront, amount on completion, etc)
• On posts, require the posters to provide details of the sourcing of finances (require monthly revenue to the nearest 100,000 [or 10,000/1,000 for lesser amounts] robux and amount of investor funding if applicable) - myself and other developers seeking high-paying jobs are often worried that the posters cannot properly provide pay (usually due to the massive number of postings that offer literal pennies, the massive pay ranges given, and the general poor quality of the majority of postings)
• Increase the number of specialties available to programmers, programmer is meaningless for many high paying work, and the ability to use external editors or resources such as VSCode, Rojo, Git and others is highly valued in those areas, allow for tagging of posts as object-oriented, frontend, backend, fullstack, etc
• Allow posters to tag with such details as the above as many programmers are quite specialised in such areas
• Improve the notification given to posters, everytime I use it only to receive a notification a month after having applied that I was declined makes me lose further hope in it’s worth
• Improve the application process, a tiny box that is filtered after being sent, where links which are allowed in descriptions are forbidden, where you can’t send further messages after your message was mangled is worthless and the main issue

In the current state of the Talent Hub, it’s left as an afterthought by the professional user (developers and hirers alike) because of it’s largely poor quality in both postings and responses. The professional user needs some way to filter out poor postings while the professional hirer needs some way to filter out poor responses.

The Talent Hub has shown it’s use in serving the amateur market, but without major improvements it will not serve to attract professionals.

[Sticksdacat]

I cannot agree more with this. Nearly every post I see has compensation that is either “based on how well you do” or “will be discussed in private”. Both of these are usually:

1. Complete scams
2. Signs they can’t actually pay

Furthermore, once restrictions are (hopefully) implemented, there should at least be minor repercussions for being extremely unspecific. As you’ve said, many of us use the platform professionally and make a living from it- it is not only infuriating to see post after post saying “you will be paid based on work quality” (and then provide no range of payment), but it also just wastes our time.

Additionally, the Talent Hub is full of 13< users- despite it being a replacement for #collaboration , which took place on a 13+ forum. A significant portion of posts on the talent hub are made by users under 13- it is glaringly obvious given their grammar and unspecific compensation, or even avatars- usually a combination of all 3. A simple solution would be to lock the talent hub to forum users, or at least users over 13 (but that would leave room for people who just lie about their age.)

I applaud you for making this post- it’s an issue that has stood for too long that Roblox needs to act on.

[Abcreator]

@Sticksdacat

A simple solution would be to lock the talent hub to forum users, or at least users over 13

This is already the case, non-forum users should receive a ‘not qualified’ page.

[FxllenCode (fallen)]

I couldn’t have been more disappointed with the talent hub after using it for the first time to hire users and to display my own work.

It is currently impossible to try and hire users on the talent hub without extreme delays and significant inconveniences to the hiring manager.

After opening a job posting, I assumed my post just sat vacant with zero responses. I had received no emails, and no notifactions on the talent hub, either.

After even more days without responses, I assumed I was misusing it, so I opened the dropdown box:

I was greeted with zero notification or icons telling me I might have something in my inbox.

I decieded to open my inbox, and was still greeted with nothing, strangely enough. After doing a bit more searching, I found you must select a “dropdown” box to select the specific post:

• This is not how any other inbox works.
• This is very annoying if you have many posts.
• This is extremely unorganized.
• This is not user friendly at all.

I would expect an inbox to work by showing me everything… in my (mail)box. Instead, I am shown the following lovely screen that is not helpful whatsoever in telling me that I am looking at jobs I applied to, and not my entire inbox (which is the button I clicked).

After finding that I needed to select the job posting, I was immediately hit with over 40 messages in my inbox, cluttered extremely unorganized:

This ratio of space used to unused is horrible UX. This makes it cramped for me to try and skim through the absurd amount of responses I have. I would like this to be just like any other inbox (even the Roblox inbox!):

This inbox, on the other hand, is extremely user friendly. When I open the page, I am greeted with a wide, centered, and obvious inbox containing every message I received, without having to click any buttons!

When I open the message, I am given a full-screen new page that again is clean and user friendly:

Meanwhile, the talent hub shows me the following:

This is terribly unfriendly. Firstly, it’s too distracting to look at when the left has distracting text, name, sizing and colors. In addition, the fact that it is uncentered distracts me even more. I would prefer if this was designed just as the Roblox messaging system is designed; with it not trying to be cramped.

Finally, going back to the message at the start, it is impossible to tell when someone applies for your jobs. I received no emails or notifications on the site that would have alerted me to do the following workflow:

All in all, I am very disappointed in the tooling used to create the talent hub. It makes it nearly impossible as a hiring manager to properly screen candidates.

[Sticksdacat]

This isn’t the case, looking up the username of someone who made a job post on the forums shows no results:

Posting

Creator page

User search on the devforum

(Neither the display name or regular name yielded any results)

[Meqolo]

To add further to this post, myself and others have noticed that our profiles (such as mine linked here) have been placed under moderation and hidden. I did not receive any notification of this happening, I have not made any changes to my profile in the last month or two, and I do not see any reason for why it would be under moderation.

My profile does not link to any forbidden sites or use any words which would be conceivably censored. I have links to carrd.co, github.com and YouTube.

In addition to my UX issues, one other major hurdle is how jobs are displayed, if you use any of the filters and click on a posting, and then exit that posting, half of the time your filters will not be applied again.

This is further hurt by the awful scrolling behaviour which I have complained about multiple times in the past. I can see one posting at a time, because the website has a scrolling container, but then the postings themself have a scrolling container…

[FxllenCode (fallen)]

My profile has also been put under moderation, making it impossible for people to vet I am legitimate. I have not linked a single non-roblox website to my profile and I am continuously moderated for having off site links. This is extremely frustrating and makes it impossible to get hired.

Even though I am ID-verified, I still am (and still have been since day 1!) shadow banned from appearing on the search.

The lack of what I’m assuming is context-based moderation is hurting my reputation and business as a for-hire developer.

I believe the word “discord” is causing my ban, however I need to put it onto my profile as my job as a programmer is working within Discord. This leads me to believe that the word is put on a blacklist regardless of context as a simple check of my profile by a manual moderator shows I am not using it in any blacklist context (i.e. “send me a message on Discord”) but instead “I work on a Roblox-centered bot on Discord as my main job”.

[cnr123451 (Cnr)]

Then the Talent Hub is age restricted independently of the DevForum. <13 people do get a “not qualified” page. The people who are <13 are probably lying about their age, just like they do in the DevForum.

From an <13 account I just made

[zNeonStranger (NeonStranger)]

This happened to me as well. I think I put my discord on my bio, and from then, without a warning or message, I wasn’t able to add messages to my applications anymore. It’s outrageous.

[cnr123451 (Cnr)]

I’m not someone who has done hiring or has been hired, but I’ve got a few things to say about the Talent Hub.

The Talent Hub looks terrible on computers with a small screen. This is all I can see when browsing through the “Find Jobs” page:

(Not in fullscreen)

I have to scroll down to see the other aspects of the page:

The fact that I can scroll down is so confusing - There are 2 other scrollable sections in the page, and it’s easy to mistake them for the entire page’s scrollability. Not to mention that it is almost impossible for me to see that I can scroll down in the place it says “Looking for work?” to get to “Looking to hire?”, although these two things are pretty useless.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed about the Talent Hub is that the “Find Creators” page lists the users in a specific order: The recently modified ones are the ones listed high up, whereas to find ones which haven’t been modified, you have to go to the next pages. This is also (kind of) how #collaboration worked like, but in my opinion, modifying my creator page shouldn’t change where it’s listed in. It could be randomized slightly. If comments get added, that should be another factor, which would match how #collaboration worked like.

I just realized that it has been stated on a really easy to see place, I guess I didn’t really need to test it to notice that lol. But I still do think that doing it by putting the “most recent on top” isn’t a good idea.

[CountLoops]

Wanted to say thanks for sharing this detailed feedback – it’s super helpful and the Talent Hub team is looking into many of these areas. Please continue to post any other ideas or feedback you have around this!

[CaelanHyperionRBLX (Caelan)]

They should also remove the job expiration, thats really weird. Why we should be creating lots of different job posts for an experience every 3 months and not using always the same posts?

[cnr123451 (Cnr)]

I am not sure if this is the case, but as far as I can see, it’s not possible to invite people who are not ID verified. Why? There are many people including me who don’t find the process of getting verified comfortable. Apparently incorrect

Or I misunderstood that part (likely did), and inviting is blocked to people who don’t have a job post. If that is the case, this is something to improve. If this limitation will stay, or until this limitation is removed, we should be notified of this when hovering over an invite button.

[Abcreator]

Users are able to disable the ability for others to invite them to jobs, it’s likely just a coincidence that all the non-ID verified creators you came across had the option disabled.