Some context
Project managers, talent acquisition leaders and entrepreneurs often struggle to find promising talents and support to execute a project. With the lack of trustworthy facts on existing recruiting platforms, finding the right talent can be time-consuming.
Hence, the goal was to create a centralized platform that brings together people and businesses to engage on projects globally aided by AI to show promising talents for collaboration (think tinder but for professionals seeking to work together).
Research
The big question
How might a recruitment app deliver match accuracy and demonstrate real value in assessing person-to-project fit?
Competitive Analysis
We looked at some of our friendly neighbours like LinkedIn, Indeed, Toptal
- Realized they were unintuitive for recruiters
- Manually writing job descriptions, lengthy forms to fill and plethora of questions to answer before actually looking at potential candidates. Doesn't really sound convenient.
Hypothesis
Using match-making criteria built around specific professional roles (thinker, planner, doer, donor) will help uncover effective teams and increase the likelihood of project completion.
Thinking about the stakeholders
Our partners at Hello xLab were kind enough to provide us with potential audience that we wanted to build the product for. Categorizing these stakeholders into four key profiles helped us understand the pain points better.
Planners
Public sector departments, chamber of commerce, trade organizations, private sector
Donors
Individuals, startups, grad students and think tanks
Doers
Business/organizations seeking projects/people to fund
Thinkers
Private sector businesses
THE RESEARCH PLAN
One of the first things we did as a team was write our research plan, keeping with the recommendations in IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit. Some of the benefits we had by following this;
Writing it helped us to define our goals and identify our desired learning outcomes
It kept us organized as one of the requirements was a timeline for the project
We used it to identify our desired study participants and create a screener for suitable candidates
We were able to formulate our research questions and pair them with suitable evaluation tools
Interviews & Insights
Conducting remote interviews of about 9 participants was my initital learning experience in doing ethnographic user research. Our team paired up in groups of two, alternating between taking notes and asking questions to cover the four categories of users. The following were some of the important highlights
We are usually looking for people who complement team's weaknesses.
Soft skills > Hard skills.
Lack of consistency in job postings.
Define
What's the problem?
How might a recruitment app deliver match accuracy and demonstrate real value in assessing person-to-project fit?
User Personas
For the scope of this project, our team decided to address the needs of the planners profile of users. Another constraint I noticed was the end product we would build would primarily used by talent seekers and not the actual talents themselves. This meant creating two different products and hence, we decided to focus on the recruiting module. We referred the following user personas often to remind ourselves of the pain-points and needs.
User Flow
Iterating on the user flow for discoverability of candidates in a hiring process. This is in the perspective of the recruiter.
Ideate
Crazy 8s
Since it was the first hands-on project for majority of the group members, I decided to use the “crazy 8” method to do some quick and dirty concept drafting which we learned in one of our courses. We voted on some of the useful screens that we could bring into our medium fidelity prototype by pinning a square on each sketch.
Low-Fidelity
Prototype
Usabilty Testing
We conducted two rounds of tests on usertesting.com. In the first round, we presented 3 testers with a medium fidelity version of our app. In the second round, we used a high-fidelity prototype.
Style Tile
Iterate
Analyzing feedback
We used a Feedback grid to collect all the results we got from demonstrating our app to different users. Categorizing feedback allowed us to identify the elements that were the highest priority to address before the final handoff.
High Fidelity Prototype
Retrospectives & Takeaways
Although the end product was just a small part of the whole experience, I personally believe a lot could have been improved. I have mentioned a few points that I am curious to explore in the future;
- Continue to reiterate and execute solutions for other issues like candidate onboarding
- Complete a full end-to-end user experience for all types of stakeholders
- Implement a design system to make design execution more efficient
With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating on this project and work with other designers. Applying research methodologies and converting them into usable designs proved to be a learning experience.