Product Experience

Problem Space 

Problem Background  

In today's competitive job market, recruiters struggle with efficiently managing the recruitment process while providing a positive experience for candidates. The current process of manually updating candidates in real-time is time-consuming and results in communication gaps, leaving candidates feeling unfairly treated and ultimately choosing to drop out of the process.

• Key Insights: Our initial research helped us identify some insights to understand the market size, pain points and possible solutions. 

• The global recruitment market, led by the US, is valued at approximately $200B, set to reach $216B in the US alone by 2023.
• The global software tools recruitment market is US$2.5B and it's set to reach US$3.5B by 2030.
• Around 86% of recruiters interviewed reported losing top candidates due to poor communication or slow hiring. 
•  71% of recruiters stated that managing candidate expectations is the biggest challenge they face in efficiently managing the recruitment process.
• 50% of job seekers are still waiting to hear back after 1 to 2+ months, leading to frustration and uncertainty. 
• 85% of job seekers stated that clear communication about the hiring process with timely and informative feedback from the recruiter are the most critical aspects during their job application experience.

Our hypothesis:

• By creating a recruitment tool that manages and streamlines their candidate communication we will be able to save recruiters time and create a better candidate experience.

Problem Statement: 

How might we help recruiters update candidates in real time about their recruitment process and set expectations so that they can provide a fair and consistent candidate experience?

Research and Validation

Our hypothesis was tested through three initial research methods:

1. User Interviews: Interviewed 5 HR professionals and 5 job seekers to better understand their existing pain points.
2. Surveys: To quantify these pain points  and validate their frequency, we conducted a 14-question survey that received 180 responses from these two users.
3. Usability Testing: We confirmed our design solution's effectiveness by conducting usability tests with our users, then refining the design based on their feedback.

Landing on the Solution

Here are the 3 key product principles that we established for our product to be considered successful and deliver value to our users. 

1. Functional: Provide real-time updates to candidates about the recruitment process in order to reduce the back-and-forth between them and recruiters.
2. Practical: Recruiters need to be able to add the product to their workflow without being a burden in the whole process. 
3. Emotional: Candidates feel calm as they are aware about the process, expectations and timings. Also, they have a positive experience overall even though they are not selected as they received feedback from the recruiter.

Throughout our brainstorming sessions and taking into account our research, we narrowed down the core features for our MVP that would bring the most value for our users.

• Recruiters: 

1. Create a recruitment process timeline for the job they are hiring for.
2. Share the link to a general timeline view so that everyone can see the recruitment process. 
3. Invite potential candidates to be part of the timeline so that they can see all candidates per phase. 
4. Manage selected candidates across the timeline phases.
5. Provide feedback to candidates when they are not selected to move forward to the next phase.
6. Have access to all the timelines they have created for different job posts anytime. 

• Job Seekers:

1. They can see the recruitment process timeline even though they have not been invited yet. 
2. If invited they can see themselves in the current phase they are in.
3. If they are not selected to move forward, they receive an email with the feedback that was provided by the recruiter. 
4. They can see all the timelines they were invited to be part of. 
5. They can withdraw from process if they want to.

Solution Explanation

Lofi & Hifi Mockups

Here is our Lo-fi prototype

Iterative Design Learnings

Iteration #1 : Removed the set ‘current phase’ option as most recruitment processes go through the timeline with separate batches of candidates that may be placed in different phases at the same time. 

Iteration #2: We combined the entry points for inviting and moving candidates into a “Manage Candidates” feature as a separate page instead of a pop-up. We also allowed recruiters to easily move candidates across multiple phases.

Implementation Details 

Technical implementation

We are currently hosting Jobline in Netfly (Front-end) and Vercel (Back-end). 

To build the Jobline webapp, we used the following Techstack: 

• Front-end: Flutter Web, Dart and Hive Db.
• Back-end: Node JS, Express Js and MongoDb.

The back- end and front-end of Jobline work in tandem to create the interactive, user-friendly timelines you see on your screen by retrieving necessary data (automatic login and API requests) from our database upon request and displaying it to our users in an easy-to-understand, interactive format.

Technical challenges

• What was the hardest part of development?

• It was a blocker issue with the CORS(Cross-origin resource sharing) and Cookies where the frontend was not able to make API calls. 
•  We needed to replace Cookie based authentication -> To Token based authentication with changes in CORS configuration.

• Does your app have any scaling issues?

• Currently we are using a free tier version of Vercel and Netlify for hosting the front-end and back-end respectively which handles around 10k - 20k visitors per month
• Email service providers(Mailgun) with 100 emails per day. 
• All the above hosting platforms and service providers' plans will be upgraded according to the user traffic.

• What are some key takeaways?

• While addressing the CORS and Cookies issue, we also faced time constraints that affected the project's sprint planning. However, we recognized the importance of troubleshooting the issue swiftly to maintain development speed and meet the project deadline. 

Future Steps

• We have our “Crazy” backlog full of potential ideas that could enhance our users' experiences. Here are some of the possible iterations that we have collected from users feedback and that our mentor Selena has suggested for our future implementations.