Grace Experience Product & Marketing UX Design

Well done is better than well said.

Web Application Design

Candidate
Tracker

Interview candidate with informed, effectively, collaboratively.

Project Brief

I’ve got the idea of creating a candidate tracking tool when I was interviewing candidate for our company, as one of the 5 interviewers, I didn’t always get notified by HR and we are using legacy system Taleo, and sometimes I didn’t even have a chance to take into the candidate resume. Sometimes, I felt more nervous than candidates (because of the lacking of information and communication.)

Check out the prototype here.

Project Analysis

The need is to make a right hire quick. Many HR professionals had time during the recession to deliberate over candidates' qualifications and conduct multiple rounds of interviews, but competition is heating up once more for great talent. In addition, many companies are growing so fast and need to fill multiple positions at the same time that recruiters no longer have a lot of time to recruit workers

As for Interviewer, it is hard for them to make sure the new hires need to be able to integrate into a team and work well in the company environment- after all, reading candidate's drive is part of HR's skill. Also, how to avoid bias and standardize the interview and evaluation process? And how to gather the feedbacks for several rounds of interviewers and how to qualify the result and helps us finding the most suitable person? Obviously, a simply yes or no won’t help. So how can they work together seamless? Moreover, miscommunication, delayed updating interview schedules always slow down the process. The interview room always the first place an interviewer see a candidate’s resume. 

Reception Rachel:  Hey Joe, your interviewee is waiting for you, are you ready? 

Lead developer Joe:  An interviewee? Never heard about it. Are we hiring?

Personas

Ideations

The candidate tracker is designed for small to medium sized company. The target audience is HR recruiter, interviewer and other internal personnels. I listed four key value propositions:

  • Intuitive candidate based tracking flow and manageable pipeline
  • Efficient rating and evaluation system 
  • Administrator login and visitor login funnel. Team tools for sharing, scheduling and feedback collection
  • Recruiting intelligence, highlight candidates in keywords and descriptions.

Other considerations are, this tracking tool should seamless integrate with Gmail, Outlook and Calendar. Connect with mainstream job posting platforms (Linkedin, Monster) and automatic resume parser but also accessible to original files.

User Flow

The three groups of user who will access the system with different privileges: HR recruiter(mark in green), the interviewer(mark in yellow) and visiting personnels(mark in blue who are employees in this company and would like to know more about the candidates and openings).

Interviewer Flow

In the first two screens, interviewer sign in and click on the certain position that he'd interviewed. Then he or she will be presented to the candidates list on the position and the process of each candidate. The interview should also be able to review the resume and give scores on the candidates that had been interviewed. 

One enhancement I've made here is the the notification next to interviewer's avatar- it encourages all user to complete their rating assignments with fair and objective evaluations for candidates. There always is a series of criteria for rating to ensure the visibility of a candidate's merits/weaknesses.

Detail: Reschedule Interview

The interviewer is also able to reschedule the meeting(using giving calendar API). So that the interviewer can usually find the time slot by him or herself without coordination from HR, but if there really isn't a match, then candidate tracker will inform hr for additional arrangement.

Success State

Failed State

HR Recruiter Flow

Same as the interviewer, the HR recruiter sign in through the same portal but with a higher privilege to add new candidates information or positions; HR recruiter is also be able to coordinate time slot from the candidates and interviewer; and by the end of the route, the HR recruiter can summary and share interview results with the team and potentially make a offer. Candidate tracker should have the Candidate Bank page to store the information of previous candidates who are appreciated by the team but not currently available.

Detail: Progress & Status Indicator

Design Iterations

I’ve shared this project with company’s HR and other interviewer and I’ve got positive feedbacks.

Where the task-oriented help should be positioned?

The task-oriented help is a utility control for presenting the steps involved in candidate registration. It is a sub-navigation and is not frequently-used control, which is better placed to the right.

BEFORE

AFTER

Why I removed the calendar from the tracker?

There was such a calendar module for scheduling interview, which is supposedly to sync with the user's Google Calendar data. I took a retrospective look at the this design and keep wondering: Is there another way of choosing the interview date than looking up the numbers on the actual calendar? I found out that with Google Calendar API, the computer program is capable of figuring out the available days for the user behind the scene. The user will only need to click a button to find out the next appropriate time with the great ease of the API.

BEFORE

AFTER

What I've Learned

Project like Candidate Tracker is a good exercise for me. I’d like to create low-fi wires on paper very quickly and skip hi-fi wires and directly design visual mockups with components, it is harder than it looks because I need to concentrate on flow and sometimes feels distracted by exploring visual possibilities. The right logistic for me is- make it work first then make it better. It took me 10 hours for the ideation to final prototype delivery.

In the future, something further for me to consider is this: Is interviewing a subjective process? If so, how I can improve Candidate Tracker to be a more suitable tool?

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