TRR (2019)

Matching employers with job-seekers

In 2019, TRR mostly helped employers during redundancies and recruiting candidates. But TRR realized they could extend their offering to employers by improving their current digital offerings. Therefore, my team was formed with the goal to identify these opportunities and execute on them.

Part I: Talk to employers 🕵️‍♀️

Initially, I conducted research by interviewing over 20 representatives from the employer side and developed 5 personas based on their needs, goals, attitudes, and behavior patterns. From this research, it became clear that there was significant potential for improvement to increase the value delivered to employers and their employees.

To prioritize our efforts, our product manager identified HR managers at medium-to-large companies as the primary target represented by one of the personas. I then facilitated workshops to further explore the needs and desires of this persona, using Impact Mapping sessions to identify key objectives and actions. Some of the challenges expressed in the persona was:

• Reskilling and upskilling employees
• Managing organizational changes
• Recruitment of the right candidates

Part II: Explore ideas 💡

The Product Manager determined that our primary persona's need for hiring qualified employees required a solution. To address this challenge, I facilitated a remote Design Sprint and invited the developers, the Product Manager, and other relevant stakeholders. Since the participants were located remotely, we used Miro as a collaboration tool to ensure that everyone had an equal opportunity to contribute.

The winner

After voting, the idea that received the most support was a recruitment tool for employers. Our goal was to match the competencies required by employers with qualified job-seekers from TRR's extensive pool of candidates.

To test the prototype, I evaluated the main concept's viability by conducting tests with 5 HR managers. Our riskiest assumption was that HR managers would be interested in recruiting job-seekers from TRR. The focus of the test was to determine if HR managers would use the recruitment tool in their daily work.

Fortunately, the HR managers were enthusiastic about our proposed concept. They found it particularly useful for finding competencies that are difficult to find and saw a significant benefit in contacting candidates through TRR before they entered the official labor market.

As a result of the Design Sprint, we developed a tested prototype and several new hypotheses that we needed to evaluate further.

Part III: Refinements ♻️

Based on the feedback received, I revised the prototypes and included more refined ideas as we progressed. The prototype was further tested with employers, which revealed that recruitment agencies were also interested in gaining access to TRR's candidates.

To develop the first iteration, we focused on including only the most essential features. At the same time, we continued to refine the functionality to determine which other features were most important and how the service could be seamlessly integrated into the user's daily work.

To evaluate our hypotheses, we conducted iterative user tests with prototypes and user interviews. Based on our research, we identified three key goals that we needed to achieve:

• Enable employers to find candidates with industry-specific competencies, such as programming languages or industry-specific software.
• Allow recruiters to quickly evaluate whether a candidate is a good fit for both the role and the company. Many recruiters expressed a desire to review the career goals of candidates before considering reaching out to them.
• Provide search results at high speed to avoid making users wait when adding or removing search filters.

Present the right candidates

A big challenge was to make sure the results of the search were perceived as relevant to recruiters. We needed to figure out if we should present candidates who fulfills:

• All of the criterias.
• At least one criteria from each category.
• Any of the criterias.

We explored different solutions to this challenge and talked to our target users. From my research we got the insight about recruiters often have a perfect profile with all the competencies required in the job description. In reality, it's difficult to find candidates who checks all the boxes.

Therefore we decided to separate the search results list in two, one with candidates who fulfilled all of the criterias and a second where we included the candidates who were missing some criterias. In the second one, the missing criterias were also highlighted to allow the user to quickly evaluate the profiles.

Result

Although we had a first basic version of the service almost ready to be released, we hit some trouble. Instead of releasing it to employers right away, the management team postponed the launch. The reason was because the functionality for employers to sign in to TRR wasn't yet ready. A huge learning for me has been the importance of identifying all dependencies early on. Instead of releasing it right away to our target group, the management team decided to make it available as an internal tool. This was a set back for us, but I know that we did a lot of good work, and are proud of what we achieved:

• A simle and smooth UI for searching for candidates. The user research showed that employers couldn’t wait to start using our service.
• A base of extensive user research to build upon. A huge part of the work I did was establishing a knowledge base for the organization to continue improving and identifying opportunities from.
• We were the first team at TRR to use the Design Sprint as a method to involve the stakeholders in the organization and solve problems together.
• Demonstrating the power of design where we showed the organization how to develop meaningful and valuable services using a user-centered approach.