Better, Faster, Stronger, Scalable Recruitment.
We started by opening up the Brief..
We received the brief and had a Zoom call with the founders and product development team at Utopicode we started to understand the scope of the project as well as the key areas of focus and the deliverables. by the end of the call we understood that:
The existing recruitment process is lengthy, inefficient and expensive, where communication between parties is manual and spread across several platforms.
The objective of this project is to design a solution that allows hiring companies to easily source and hire skilled tech talent.
To understand the team’s frustrations further we asked them to outlined the full journey that a developer, hiring company and Utopicode go through before a position is fulfilled. It was easy to see that not only was this process manual, clunky and a terrible experience for everyone involved, it was not scalable.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the existing clunky process yourself.
The current recruitment process visualised. It's just not scaleable.
So, what’s the problem?
Speaking to the founders we understood the process of matching a candidate with a hiring manager better. They also told us that they had already completed some research, but it wasn’t organised or documented.
We decided to interview the team to gather the core insights they had already gained before conducting any further research. These were the two key problems they had identified through their initial research:
Skilled tech talent is difficult to find - The market is saturated with Juniors who do not have the required skills for open roles.
Hiring at volume is difficult - Utopic0des lengthy, complicated and tedious hiring process is increasing the amount of time it takes for Hiring managers to find the right candidates.
Narrowing our focus
We realised trough our initial research that we will need to narrow down our scope as we will not be able to solve both Hiring manager and Candidates problems in three weeks.
As a team we decided to focus on the Hiring managers and companies user segment.
Talking to the users
We sent out a series of surveys and used the findings to build a series of user interviews that dove deeper into the problems that were raised in the surveys.
Sorting through it all
After 30 survey responses and 6 in depth user interviews we had a lot of raw data that needed to be sorted. We grouped all of the findings into an Affinity map and grouped them into 6 categories.
To make the data more manageable and to humanise the responses the core findings were converted into ‘I statements’. This helped us to empathise with each users problems.
Who is Antonio?
Using the pain points identified, we put together a primary persona. Meet Antonio:
A hiring manager at a rapidly expanding scale-up is eager to swiftly recruit software developers for the team's expansion. Time is of the essence, and he finds the need to recall aliases particularly inconvenient.
Problem statement
Antonio needs a complete and consolidated view of a candidate and the hiring process so he can connect and engage with anonymous pre-vetted talent in an efficient and personal way.
Design studio - Cross collaborative design
With a view to bring in multiple view points and in the spirit of collaboration we ran a Design ideation session with the founders, recruiters, and developers.
From ‘How might we’s’ and Crazy 8’s through to ‘Prioritisation’ the Collaborative design session helped us to analyse the problem and come up with solutions.
One of my favourite and most insightful ‘How might we’s’
“How might we do zero work and automate everything?”
Separating the wheat from the chaff
We used a prioritisation matrix that to sort the ideas based on effort to build and customer value. This was an important step that helped us to filter down 30+ ideas into the essential, must haves for the MVP.
Sketch, sketch, sketch
Let’s see what these ideas look like. After a long collaborative design session it was nice to see the ideas finally come to life through sketches. These ranged from hyper zoomed in Candidate profiles to Fully fleshed out Dashboards.
Putting the pieces together
With so many ideas to connect, we took a zoomed out view of the whole journey. We collaboratively put together a user journey that started with the Home page and ended in the Users primary goal of Shortlisting a candidate.
So, what are the solutions?
All in one dashboard - “A tedious hiring process using Slack, Google Sheets, endless email chains, and PDF candidate profiles”
The all in one dashboard creates:
- a one stop shop for all of the Utopicode clients,
- aggregates all communication into one channel,
- and automates the entire recruitment process from sourcing to hiring.
Before
After
Affinity scores - ‘Juniors who do not have the required skills for open roles.’
Affinity scores were a product of the Design studio session and directly from a Hiring manager. They are a quick, glanceable, and sortable way to determine a candidates suitability. Speeding up the time to hire as the hiring manager doesn’t need to manually sort through tons of unsuitable candidates.
Revamped candidate profiles - By revamping the user profiles and making the data easier to read, we aimed to reduce the amount of time and cognitive load required to pick a candidate.
Before
After
Skills web - ‘Skills wheels are difficult to make sense of’
Users can make quicker decisions about a candidates overall profile of skills using the Web of skills, something that came out as a major pain point and usability issue with the current ‘Skills wheels’.
Before
After
Check it out!
What were the results again?
What did I learn in this project?
By bringing all of the key users, stakeholders, and developer’s ideas and thoughts into the design process we were able to improve the accuracy and impact of our solution for our users.
By focusing in on one user segment early and confirming the approach with Utopicode’s female founders, we were able to pay attention to what matters and work fast towards an MVP.