HireEZ
Implementing a hiring manager feedback tracking system for recruiters.
45 sec skim | 6 min read
Skills
Design lead
User research
Prototyping
Team
Product Design Intern (me)
Project Manager
Senior Product Designer
2 full-stack engineers
Duration
2 months, 2022
Tools
Figma
Whimsical
Overview
Summer of 2022, I joined hireEZ as a product design intern working on the EZ Collaboration product line. HireEZ is an outbound recruiting platform that connects talents to organizations. I was tasked with understanding the problem of low collaboration efforts between hiring managers and recruiters on hireEZ.
Role: Product Design Intern
Conduct user journey audits for identifying loopholes in current designs. Lead the design for the new shared candidate tracking feature. Drive stakeholder alignment meetings during time of pivot.
Solution Summary
my evolving role
Every process is unique
Navigating ambiguities
Joining HireEZ post Series B was an exhilarating ride; the buzz of growth resonated a sense of unmatched ownership as a designer. However, five weeks in, my adaptability was tested as a major pivot in business vision led to a rescoping of our project. This marked our project with new constraints and ambiguities, which then pushed me to shuffle between stakeholders, ultimately successfully delivering a final solution.
The shifting undercurrents of business needs forced me to take a leading role. My responsibility began with uncovering journey gaps and improving collaboration, but grew into driving stakeholder meetings and delivering new designs to leadership.
The problem
of recruiters export candidates to other platforms when sharing with hiring managers.
Recruiters in organizations are responsible for moving candidates across their talent pipelines. Without hiring manager feedback, recruiters cannot move candidates across the pipelines.
With communication taken off of HireEZ, this significantly reduces the efficiency of recruiter workflow as well as the stickiness of our platform.
Initial approach
Diving into the user journey, I found blockers and disruptions in the current flow that we were causing recruiters to miss out on feedback, therefore driving them away onto other platforms. The cause? Engineering difficulties and design details lost in translation during change of hands. I quickly mapped out how we could address the disruptions in the current user flow.
Discovering a new user need
The more we dived into user complaints, the clearer it became that it wasn't just about closing loopholes, the root cause was a lack of system in place to track shared candidates. When hiring managers were less responsive to shared candidates, recruiters needed a way to know which candidates have been shared in order to remind hiring managers to review candidates.
A way to…
Quickly view the status of all candidates in the pipeline.
Because of the need to…
Easily access hiring manager feedback.
In order to…
Move "Good fit" candidates down the pipeline.
Initial HMW
How might we make sure recruiters are kept up to date with feedback from hiring managers?
New HMW
How might we shorten the time it takes for recruiters to access hiring manager feedback?
Design strategy
A new direction
Is this problem worth solving?
Before we dive into ideation, my PM and I set to understand how our designs would fulfill business needs and the guiding insights we gained from research.
User retention
Our platform’s success is mainly defined by one metric: user retention, or more specifically, weekly active users (WAU).
Collaboration increases WAU
Higher HM response rate prompts recruiters to share more via HireEZ, positively impacting the stickiness of our platform.
Guiding design values
"Simple" is broad. The simplicity we're looking for are mainly defined by 4 values:
Discoverable.
Unambiguous.
Transparent.
Action-prompting.
Defining success
Goal
Recruiter share more
Signal
Increase in profiles shared by recruiters
Metrics
% change in profiles shared per week
Add new users via share
Increase in new users joined via sharing
Weekly % change in new users joined via sharing
More profiles reviewed
Increase in profiles reviewed by hiring managers
Weekly % change in profiles reviewed by Hiring Managers
Improve User Satisfaction
High user ratings/feedback, lower report/complaint rate
Average user rating, weekly % change in report/complaint rate
Diverging widely, converging quickly
I kept 2 key insights from research in mind when sketching out initial concepts: a discoverable yet non-disruptive entry point is optimal. Simplicity is key.
Concept 1
Home / Quick access
Concept 2
Project / Activity log
Concept 3
Projects / New tab
Concept 4
Projects / Pipeline: More filters
Concept 4: Pipeline: More filters
To align my designs with the mental model of recruiters, I looked at all the creative ways recruiters are building their own tracking systems on hireEZ and found it important to locate our design directly in the pipeline. Keeping simplicity in mind, I iterated on the user flow and slimmed it down to 3 steps:
First round of testing
With a high-fidelity prototype, we invited both internal recruiters and our users to test.
PIVOT
Uh oh… Shifting project scope
Just as we finished our first round of testing, a daunting message from leadership trickled down:
The problem?
My designs were built on the old pipeline design. On top of that, the new pipeline design was in early stage development with no specific designs set yet.
My approach
Realign goals.
Reevaluate constraints.
Reassemble the pieces.
Pushing despite ambiguities
01 Realign goals
02 Reevaluate constraints
Working closely with the pipeline team, I dissected all pipeline features into three categories, defined by their new information hierarchy:
03 Reassembling the pieces
Taking our findings with the pipeline team to the dev team to understand how my designs might pave the way for the new pipeline designs.
Iteration
Implementing feedback from testing
Users reflected 2 main issues: unclear select options ["What is Added new note doing here?"] and Single vs. multi-select ["What if i want to see candidates I haven't shared?"].
Tested iteration
Explorations with different components
Final design
Impact
Soon after the end of my internship, our new pipeline design team reorganized all the filters in the pipeline. Ones that are necessary and action-oriented were moved to candidate cards as status tags from the Pipeline: More filter I designed on, so unfortunately I was unable to capture results. However, I am immensely happy that my communication with dev allowed my design to pave the way on the backend for the pipeline transition.
Unique challenges
[01] Storytelling in driving business alignment
During time of pivot where we had to rescope our project, it was up to me to drive the conversation of how to push forward. However, I realized that by communicating with only design goals was not sufficient to convince stakeholders. I realized good storytelling requires you to think not only about user needs, but also business needs and how to best serve the future of the product.
[02] Scope creep
EZ Collaboration was a relatively new product line with lots of areas of development. The urge to fix everything made scope creep a risk. By analyzing each step of the user journey, I defined the root cause and intervened at just one step of the candidate sharing process, which targets the speed of filtering candidates based on feedback.
Presenting my project to the entire design team and our CEO Steven!
So much fun working with the team!
Learnings and reflections
Always be ready to adapt and sprint
Searching for one "perfect" design process is less important than knowing how to adapt to new challenges and tangents.
Ownership is important
Assume that you're the person to push things forward. A reactive approach does not work in fast-paced environments.
Ask, ask, ask for critique!
You can't expect others to watch over your work. So to get feedback from other designers, take a proactive stand in presenting work and ask for feedback.