Artisan Talent: NAVIGATING the hiring process in a virtual space
Simplifying interview and hiring process for hiring managers/reqruiters for desktop and mobile
THE PROBLEM
Our client, Artisan Talent, is a boutique creative staffing agency that connects job seekers with opportunities from small agencies to major corporations. In addition to serving job-seekers, Artisan helps companies maintain job listings and source the most sought-after digital and creative talent, handpicking the best applicants to fit freelance, contract, and full-time staffing needs.
Due to the impacts of COVID, unemployment rates have soared, forcing many people to search for new jobs. One particular difficulty has been transitioning to remote interviews between candidates and companies. We’ve been contracted by Artisan to establish and create a prototype that enables hiring companies to conduct remote interviews with applicants.
Hiring managers and recruiters need a way to make a confident recommendation in a timely manner so that she can help both her company and her new-hires achieve success.
TIMELINE
The duration of the project was about three weeks.
INTERESTING FACTS
A project with 4 UX designers! Full of collaboration and teamwork, lots of passion, and smart ideas to share during the project time!
MY ROLE
Conducting a full experience on user research
Experience design of the flow
Conducting user testing interviews and design iterations
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
Our goals were to
Understand how interviews are currently being conducted and the level of experience individuals have with the interface.
Discover how interviewees are sharing their resumes and portfolios with potential employers.
Learn about the pain points users, both interviewees and interviewers, are currently encountering during the interview process.
Understand how users are scheduling and documenting interviews.
Discover what other platforms applicants and companies are using to conduct interviews.
Affinity mapping
After we conducted our user interviews, we gathered together as a team via a Zoom call and wrote relevant user comments using Miro.
From there we organized the comments into major themes and narrowed it down to three main pain points for our users that come from their quotes during interviews.
“I want to feel confident that someone I hire will be a good fit and fit in with the office culture”
“We use group interviews because it helps the whole team get a better sense of the candidate”
“It’s the best feeling when I find out that one of my new hires is a top performer six months out”
Competitors and prioritizing features
Based on our feature analysis that I did with the interview portals named VidCruiter, Breezy, and My Interview some of the features were so clear to be necessary to include.
In order to prioritize these features, we conducted an analysis of must-haves, expected, nice to have, and unexpected features.
Based on our proto-persona, we decided to focus on a Take and share notes/messages, Compatible with outside software and enhanced the Recruitment feature.
Comparative Analysis
We conducted a feature analysis across three of the major online video call services. I reviewed Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangout features which are the most popular services. Many of our users also mentioned they used Zoom during interviews. Zoom was definitely considered more user-friendly among our users and easier to work with.
PERSONAS
From the main pain points, we conducted a user persona and followed the path with her and her needs and goals.
Meet our persona, Evelyn!
Wants to hire qualified individuals who fit in with the office culture so that she can positively impact her company and the lives of her new-hires.
Regularly spends her day emailing coworkers and attending meetings - She is comfortable with in-person and virtual (online) communication.
Stressed when the process becomes too time-consuming or when one of her new-hires leaves the company after a short time.
How to fix it?
Make sure every applicant is the perfect fit
Boost Evelyn's confidence
Schedule more effectively
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
I worked on the user flow and information architecture for our team.
Click on image to zoom.
User Flow-Click on image to zoom.
We defined and designed our prototype navigation based on the information architecture that I finalized after tree testing.
Site Map-Click on image to zoom.
USER TESTING
We ran 3round of testing and I did help the team with interviewing users. Below is the summary of them.
Merging the steps-Click on image to zoom.
Reducing the steps of setting up an interview
We tested our mid-fidelity prototype with users and we tried to cover multiple tasks as a potential hiring manager.
Our observation led us to:
Merging the steps of interview set up the result of the feedback that we get from users with experience of hiring who mentioned they prefer fewer steps for setting up an interview for quicker action
Clearer Copy and Design Solution -Click on image to zoom.
Clarification in setting up a hiring timeline and applicant tests as job posting steps
More detail and state of action for adding hiring timeline and applicant test
More clarification on UX copy
A/B Testing -Click on image to zoom.
A/B testing regarding UX copy
We also did A/B testing that is a research method to compare two different options. We made a B version to do the test between our new copy and the original website copy. The targeted copies were Talent vs. Applicant and Work vs. Job. The result showed us clearly that we are on a right path because here is a quote from one of our user:
• “’Work’ is a little confusing. Maybe use ‘jobs’ instead?”
And we find out
• “Talent” is not the best word choice
The high-fidelity prototype was the final deliverable that you can explore. I was responsible to design the UX and UI of the desktop version.
Lesson Learned
Teamwork is always a win! With the highly collaborative team, I was able to do the research and jump to the experience design, apply the changes after each iteration based on the human-centered design solutions.
Sometimes the best solution is just in front of you, you just need to design, test, understand, improve and redesign. You just need to trust the research and design a solution for a widespread problem that can be used and appreciated by a broad audience.