How 58 Recruitment Redefined Its Discovery Page with a Content‑Driven Community

Background

Recruitment is a key business of 58.com, aiming to provide comprehensive talent information. As the recruitment business expands, the team explored new product forms beyond traditional recruitment, using the discovery page to deliver more valuable services. Users showed little awareness of existing recruitment features but paid more attention to the news module, prompting a content‑centric approach.

Confirm Goals

The team questioned the positioning of the discovery page: should it serve pure content consumption for job seekers or enhance job‑search efficiency across multiple dimensions? Analysis identified several issues: 58 recruitment dominates the blue‑collar market, but users stay briefly during job search and perceive promotions as ads. The discovery page, located on the second tab, is underutilized and its purpose unclear.

Key insights from user needs: job seekers lack professional information channels, and valuable user‑generated content has no platform. Small‑and‑medium enterprises and HR lack diverse promotion channels beyond recommendation bias.

Design Exploration

The discovery page aims to let users browse and find good jobs. By combining content with existing services, a new content community is built to satisfy strong‑need users while allowing weak‑need users to explore more recruitment information.

Content + Service: scenario guidance, user empathy – Offering full‑process job‑search services, but single‑track promotion feels like ads. Using a content community framework, services are wrapped in content to guide users empathetically, allowing them to learn about services while consuming content.

Content + Business: new recruitment format, connecting B&C – With the shift toward video and live streaming, short videos convey recruitment information more effectively than text. Enterprises and HR can operate their own content, reaching job seekers via video or live streams, providing richer information.

Design Implementation

The recruitment community framework was initially built with recommendation and follow modules.

Recommendation module – Due to limited initial resources (career news, UGC), the page is divided into three parts: quick news (tags and scrolling text), strong‑push content (personalized videos and topics), and a feed (news and curated UGC). This structure supports future expansion to topics, courses, circles, etc.

Follow module – Displays user‑generated content by account, encouraging following of industry influencers. Content cards support video, image (up to 3 images), and text. Video cards map to related positions to boost applications; text cards maximize information density. Keywords link to recruitment services, promoting business while users consume content.

Data validation – After launch, DAU and click‑through rates increased significantly, with higher user activity, job and service conversion meeting expectations, and continuous growth in content volume.

Conclusion

In the recruitment scenario, a content community must be integrated with business goals, satisfying strong job‑search needs while increasing user stickiness and driving platform traffic, fostering healthy interaction between the platform and its users.