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Vitae

  • Challenge

    Help the Chronicle of Higher Education expand their product line, while continuing to support higher-ed professionals.

  • Solution

    Create an online career hub where academics could network with each other, apply for jobs, and display their work.

  • Results

    A custom web application that supports the career development of 800,000 higher-ed professionals across 4,000 colleges and universities.

How to succeed in academia. For over 50 years, the Chronicle of Higher Education has been academia’s leading news source. With a keen understanding of the rewards and challenges of the profession, the Chronicle is committed to helping academics develop their careers in what can be a fiercely competitive environment. We partnered with the Chronicle’s in-house innovation team to bring that idea to life as Vitae — an online career hub for higher-ed professionals. Vitae offers career management tools, resources for finding jobs, and a growing network of more than 800,000 users across 4,000 colleges and universities.

View the Site

User Experience

Prolific Profiles

We based Vitae's UX on a thorough understanding of academic culture, drawn from the Chronicle’s decades of experience. The CV parser we built allows users to generate profiles by simply uploading their CV. Users can also import information from LinkedIn, as well as drag and drop features like publications, courses, and grants to best reflect their specialization and area of study. Profiles also allowed users to search for and connect with colleagues in all areas of academia.

Updated Features

Joining the Job Hunt

The Chronicle already had a job board built into their publication platform. While it was extremely popular among higher-ed professionals, it was outdated and difficult to use. We were able to integrate the job board into Vitae, modernizing it so users could access thousands of jobs postings using multiple metrics. Users could also save searches for later, and receive notifications when there were new jobs that match their interests.

Development

Built to Be Big

Ruby on Rails provided a scalable foundation for Vitae, allowing the site to accommodate a huge number of profiles as the service grew in popularity. We built an authentication system that works with Vitae and the Chronicle's existing news site, and integrated with 3rd-party services — including a job application service that lets users apply for jobs directly in the sites where they are published.

Strategy

Going to Market

We worked closely with the Chronicle's marketing team to plan Vitae's introduction and rollout. In addition to designing a landing page to generate interest, we helped make the email marketing a success through extensive testing and revisions.

Summary

We partnered with the Chronicle of Higher Education, to develop an online community that helps 800,000 academics advance their careers through networking, job resources, and career management tools.