HiredHippo – Cathy Zhang

INTRODUCTION

Role: User Research, Ideation, Sketching & wireframing, Branding, UI Design, User Testing, Iteration

Timeline: 11 months

Platform: Respnsive Web Application

HiredHippo is the fastest growing network that matches talent to jobs without the need to search. Using artificial intelligence, candidates and employers are able to browse through a pool of selections that are already prescreened based on their profile. It intuitively replaces the traditional method of job hunting such as resumes and job boards.

I was brought on as the lead product designer to redesign the entire Hiredhippo product.

LIVE PRODUCT

Please Visit: http://hiredhippo.ai

THE CHALLENGE

Desirable matching between employers and job seekers can be extremely challenging at times. There are gaps in the traditional hiring methods which create pain for both parties.

For employers, recruiting the right talent requires a lot of time and multiple resources to attract, assess and align a candidate’s skills and motivations with the needs of an organization. There are many inefficiencies in the process that cost time and money, yet often still leads to poor results.

At the same time, job seekers are experiencing difficulties finding the right opportunites through job postings and often face endless response times or do not receive a response at all.

"How might we improve traditional hiring methods to ensure better alignment and eliminate the time and cost spent for both employers and job seekers? "

RESEARCH

With wide connection, the HiredHippo team had the privilege to chat with employers and job seekers from all kinds of industry to find out about their experience with recruitment and job seeking. I was responsible for organizing and analyzing the information extracted from the research. Here's what I found out.

Employers:

96%

of hiring professionals wish they had better access to qualified candidates.

79%

of hiring professionals find it challenging to post to multiple job boards simultaneously.

86%

want their hiring tasks accomplished in an efficient and time-saving manner.

Job Seekers:

22%

of job seekers have preemptively rejected a potential employer due to Glassdoor reviews and other public company reviews.

82%

of job seekers do not get a response back after applying

INSIGHTS

Based on analyzing the research results, I found out the reasons why conventional methods dont work. These insights helped me to understand which area of the recruitment process we need to improve on.

Search-based method

Search based recruiting and job discovery are the most common methods to use, but it’s not the most effective way. Search options on job boards are tied to keywords within resumes and job postings which could be unreliable. Resumes and job postings are not updated in real time and often lack information since there is no strandardized format.

Unecessary Time & Cost

Employers spend most of their time going through hundreds of resumes and most of them do not end up to be a good match. Job seekers spend hours reading job postings and applying, but recruiters only spend 6 seconds revewing them. Other options such as using recruiting agencies are too costly for a lot of companies. Both parties reflected trust concerns toward recruiting agencies.

Missed Motivation Alignment

Alignment is actually the most important at the beginning, not the end. For employers, there’s often lack of insight into candidate’s motivators just by reading resumes. It is also not possible for job seekers to discover opportunities based on personal motivators. Most job postings are lengthy but do not capture the most important attributes of the role.

Passive Candidates

90% of Job seekers are passive candidates. However they can easily lose motivation by the amount time and effort they have to spend on searching for a better opportunity. They are also drawn back by the lack of privacy when looking for new opportunities or a career change. Employers lose some of the most appropriate candidates because the passive candidates might fall outside of their radar.

PERSONA

I often hear from UX designers say that they do not think persona is necessary and they don't actually use it at work. I personally think it's extremely important to establish the personas at the early stage and share them with the team. They provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities. In the case of Hiredhippo, our targeted users are pretty complex and diverse, especially for job seekers. Without personas, the team would get lost in all of the different use cases and user goals during the design process. In the end, I established 4 unique user groups for job seekers and 1 for the employer. These personas help me and the team to be more empathetic and focused when each decision is made.

Employer Persona

Job Seekers Personas

EXPERIENCE MAP

Before diving into creating user stories and sketching out ideas, I created experience maps with the team which helped me to understand what exactly the users go through to reach their goals and what their pain points are. I worked with the user research team to really get a holistic view of the user's journey. This process helps me to discover areas of opportunity where I can design something that truly helps them to tackle those problems. I asked a lot of "How might we" questions to both myself and the team which challenged us to think about all the possibilities.