Smooth Recruit
How I tackled Dell Design Challenge with a 15-20 hours time limit.
TIME
Winter 2019
In total of 15-20 hours of work
GOAL
Design effective, smooth, and simple-to-use recruitment software for big tech recruiters
Design Challenge Prompt
Recruiters at Criterion Technologies are expected to manage an enormous amount of candidates (1000+) for a large number of job openings (40+) at any given time. The Criterion UX Team has received feedback that our recruiters struggle to track all the moving parts and fear that talented candidates may be getting lost in the flood. You have been assigned to design a user interface the Talent Acquisition Recruiting team can use to track and manage candidates throughout the recruitment process.
My Battle Plan
Final Design Submission
For hiring managers and recruiters on the go
My Design Process
01 Research
User Interviews
To understand the users, I conducted 5 exploratory user interviews with Recruiters and HRBPs in various Tech companies. After hours of interviews, I not only learned about recruiters work process, but also discover the potential hidden users who also makes a significant amount of decisions and differences in the hiring process — Hiring Managers.
Target User: Recruiters at Big Tech who are in charge of giant amounts of openings at a time with enormous numbers of candidates
Hidden User: Hiring Managers — A lot of times, what slows recruiters’ work down is the complicated back and forth communication recruiters need to do in between hiring managers and candidates.
Workflow Analysis
Based on all the workflows I have learned from different recruiters, and eliminated rare special circumstances, Big Tech (in this case Criterion Technology)’s normal recruitment/hiring process is shown as below.
User Journey Map
In order to better understand at what stage of the process, recruiters encounter the most issues and frustrations, I made a user journey map based on my conversations and interviews with my participants. This helps me to clear up the air and be able to zoom in and focus on what I need to design in order to target those key problems of the hiring process.
Narrowed-Down Use Scenarios
With limited time on this challenge, I narrowed my design scope down to 3 key user scenarios that actually influences the effectiveness and ease of use of a recruitment software.
Scenario #1
Recruiter who manages more than 40 openings with combined 1000+ candidates arrives at work and would love to assess today’s work priorities based on how are all the active openings going, what needs to be updated or to follow up
User’s Goal
Directly head into the top priority of today’s work while getting a general idea of how’s everything going
Product Feature Ideas
A Home Dashboard with panoramic view of all openings status + interview schedule + new applicants in the last 24hours
Scenario #2
Recruiter wants to quickly sift through a large amount of new Applicants and pass them to the hiring team to review before he/she can contact the viable candidate and set up interviews
User’s Goal
Smoothly pipeline and select viable candidates to pass along for hiring teams to review
Product Feature Ideas
Screening page with tagged candidate information + Sharing with others function (download as excel? Directly sharing through email?)
Scenario #3
Recruiter would like to quickly move forward with the candidates that are already being interviewed
User’s Goal
Make sure they don’t lose talents in the hiring process and can get back to candidates as quickly as possible about interview results
Product Feature Ideas
A companion app for hiring team/manager to give feedback right after the interview and keep recruiter in the loop
Competitor Analysis
Consider User Environment
Inspired by my own experience during recruiting seasons as a candidate, I decided to make my design deliverables in an iPad version. I remember often seeing recruiters wandering around in a room full of more than 30 candidates, with a print-out of candidate information in one hand and a phone in the other. An iPad version of my deliverable would be able to show how easily this recruitment system can be used on the go and make recruiters’ job on an interview day easy like a breeze. I also contemplated to transfer it to desktop version once challenge is over, thus the Redesign 2.0 (at the end of this page).
02 Ideation
#High Volumes of Information & Multi-directioned Communications
(information of candidates, hiring teams, job requirements, communication with managers, etc)
How do I distill dense information and present them to recruiters in an effective way?
During my 1 hour long interview with recruiters, I used google slides to engage them with a quick wireframing activity.
In order to understand the differences between key information needed to be shown during each stage of the recruiting process (new applicants, schedule an interview, making an offer, etc), I let them move around some common information component cards and give them a blank card to fill out if anything is missing.
“I don’t use the home dashboard at all. It’s too much and not helping me to get the job done.” — most of the recruiters
During the interview, I also provide them a dashboard and have them reimagine what they would put on the dashboard if limited to 3. This activity gives me a very good idea of what recruiters need to see, want to act on first thing at work, and what they constantly concern about the most.
03 Scoping
Step 1: Identify Design Problem
I have clues of problems listed out in the challenge prompt, but those are not the real Design Problem. The real Design Problem only reveals itself after informative interviews and users-engaged activities ——
“How Might We Help Recruiters Better Organize and Act on Critical Candidate Information?”
Step 2: Set Design Strategy & Goals
Use simple yet actionable interface design to direct recruiters to slay all the top goals at work.
Actionable + Responsive + Effective
Step 3: Make Design Decisions
A Home Dashboard with top priorities of recruiters’ day to day work on active job openings.
An Active Recruitment Page with streamline recruiting stages laying out with different candidate information critical to each stage
Customizable tags can be add onto candidate information card for better info recognition. Privacy settings can be allowed to make the tags viewable for others or the account owner only.
Easy to preview resume, CV, or other attachments without downloading
Compare job requirements side by side with resume for faster initial screening
One click for offer letter template
Save rejected candidate information to talent database
A Companion Interview Feedback App for hiring managers and interview teams to record and save feedbacks & comments on each candidate
Faster decision making process during competitive hiring season
Efficient communication loop between hiring managers and recruiters
Better feedback for candidates to provide a positive hiring process
Step 4: Get my hands dirty — Sketch & Iterate on wireframes
Always put the content up before deciding on a certain layout. You would be surprised how much content (text, link, images, icons) makes a difference to a layout.
#Sketching out overall layout of information
#Arranging candidate information and debating how to filter or screen new applicants
#wireframes & ideations on home dashboard
#Interview Feedback App wireframes
04 Design Round 1
Showed on the top of this page
05 Design Round 2 — Desktop Version
Home Dashboard on Desktop
Clear, Simple UI Design yet Help Recruiters Slay All the Goals At Work
Filter All You Want
Better Information Card Expansion with All the Information You need
Solved previous double sliding problem. Now with only one slide gesture and all the information you need in one card.
06 Key Takeaways
Battle Plan is the Key.
Considered this was my first Design Challenge, I am proud of my battle plan. With limited time, you always want to make sure your design is actually targeting on solving the problem, not just pulling information together.
Plan it out, dig out the key problem, narrow your design scope, and only make a few pages into high fidelity.
Focus, focus, focus. If you do a good job at research and talking to your users, you will soon seeing the core issues revealing itself. In this case, is finding out the hidden persona — hiring managers. It may not be the same problem portrayed at the front or described in the design prompt. But this would be your focus and your key to the magic box.