Enhance Hiring Experience

A dashboard design to help employers manage the hiring process

Time: 2.5 Weeks

Team: 3 UX Designers

My Role:

User Research: research plan, screener survey, user interview, user testing

UI Design: wireframe, prototype, UI iteration

Project Management: SOW development, client management

Problem

Employers and recruiters are constantly looking for ways to improve hiring efforts

Finding the right talent is the priority of many employers. Whether faced with a high volume of applications or in need of assistance to source qualified candidates, employers need a way to quickly access and comprehend crucial recruiting information so that they can stay organized and efficient throughout the recruiting process.

Background & Goals

Creating a recruiting dashboard for employers on a job search platform to provide visibility

A Foot in the Door Website Image

https://afootinthedoor.work

A Foot in the Door is a job search platform dedicated to serve job seekers with 0–5 years of work experience, those who are often overlooked by employers.

It was a pleasure to meet the masterminds behind this platform: Keith Francis (Founder), Eddie Liu (Chief Engineer) and Daniel Barb (Scrum Master). We were all excited to support our client in humanizing the job search process for both job seekers and employers!

Process

I partnered with 2 designers on this project and while we split up the tasks, we all contributed to the project throughout the process.

I led user research and testing, and split the UI design tasks with another designer

Our goal is to create a dashboard prototype for the employer interface on A Foot in the Door. The dashboard will present recruiting metrics to allow users perform recruiting tasks more efficiently and gain visibility into their talent pool.

A Foot in the Door started this project with a hypothesis in mind:

Providing a visual dashboard will enable employers to access recruiting statistics and information more easily, which will make A Foot in the Door a more attractive platform.

Research

We executed a series of research activities to test the hypothesis and understand how the platform can provide value to employers.

I created a research plan which outlined the objectives and timeline for the following key activities:

  • Screener Survey

  • User Interviews

  • Analysis on Existing A Foot in the Door Data

  • Competitor Analysis on Job Search Platforms

  • Secondary Research on Dashboard Features

  • Research Synthesis

The biggest challenge for the research process was finding recruiters or people with hiring experience to share insights with us. While we distributed the screener survey on quite a few social media platforms, we didn’t have much luck recruiting participants directly through the survey. To make sure we hear directly from those in a recruiting position, we tapped into our personal network to source user interview participants.

Our persistence paid off, and we were able to interview 10 people even though we had only one week to focus on research. We talked to people with various hiring and recruiting experiences.

% of Interviewees by Job Title

Research Plan

% of Interviewee by Company Size

* An independent recruiter working with multiple companies

Key Takeaways:

  • Dashboard or recruiting metrics summary are standard features offered by existing platforms. Our market research indicate that recruiting metrics are offered by many job search platforms and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Recruiters use ATS and popular platforms such as LinkedIn and Indeed to perform recruiting activities and have access to the common recruiting metrics through these tools. While a dashboard is not mentioned as a critical feature during recruiting, A Foot in the Door may still want to offer it to match industry standards.

  • Recruiting goals and process vary and the ability to customize is important. Our interviews showed that the type of metrics and data that matter vary depending on the employers, the recruiters (agency vs. in-house), the positions, and other factors. Therefore, it is important to offer a sufficient list of metrics and provide the ability to select the relevant data points to appeal to a variety of users.

  • A diverse talent pool is a goal for employers but it is not actively monitored during the recruiting process. While employers care about diversity, for most recruiters, especially those working for smaller organizations, they rarely check the demographics of their candidate pool. However, a recruiter from a large size organization mentioned there were DEI goals that she monitored during the recruiting process.

  • Focus on desktop web app design first. From our screener survey, 85% participants indicate they mainly use desktop to complete recruiting activities and 15% indicate they use mobile devices. This is important for our project because our client indicated strong interest in having a mobile design for the dashboard. This insight helped us reprioritized our design focus.

  • The top priority for recruiters is finding the best fit. Recruiters go through a large number of applications and actively source talent. They spend a lot of time selecting qualified talent and coordinating recruiting schedules between multiple parties. Designing features to help recruiters do these activities well will be important consideration.

Problem Statement

Employers need a way to quickly access and digest critical recruiting information so that they can stay organized and efficient while working with a large number of candidates.

Design Vision

Style Guide

Based on our research findings, we envision our dashboard design will allow users to:

  • Gain quick insights through intuitive data visualization

  • Create a customizable dashboard

  • Select data points relevant to their needs

  • Share recruiting progress with stakeholders

We conducted a design studio to create sketches for the dashboard. We had similar vision in terms of the layout and features for the dashboard, so it was easy to combine our ideas.

We also drew inspirations from digital dashboards such as the Monday.com dashboard. We love the intuitive layout and the customization feature.

Monday.com Dashboard View

The client provided us with their existing branding guide and Figma files, enabling us to seamlessly adhere to their established design style. We incorporated their brand colors and utilized Roboto as the chosen typography. Recognizing A Foot in the Door's pre-existing web app, we collaborated with the client to ensure that our dashboard design aligned with the current layout, simplifying its implementation process.

User Flow

I created user flows for the major tasks that users will perform on the dashboard. In terms of the placement of the dashboard on the current web app, we put the dashboard at the top navigation for easy user access.

Design Studio Sketches

In terms of interactions, we pictured users moving metrics and data around the way they manage widgets on iPhones.

iPhone Widget Edit View

Olga created the overall layout and key components of the dashboard following the current design, and I created the look and feel of the data widgets, the list of metrics, and the the list of filters for customization.

Dashboard Overview Page

Metrics Customization

Data Filter Detailed View

Wireframes & Prototype

User Testing & Iteration

To make sure our design truly meets the users’ needs, we conducted 3 rounds of usability tests and collected feedback. We tested the prototype with 3 users, 2 HR professional and 1 UX designer. We were also able to collect additional feedback from a recruiter that we previously interviewed. 

We shared our Figma prototype with test participants and asked them to perform a few tasks to see how they interact with the dashboard. We created 4 tasks to test these features: customization, filter, saving changes and sharing.

First Round | Participant: UX Designer

Iteration

Based on the user feedback, we updated our usability test script to make the tasks easier to understand for users so that the test results are not influenced by any confusion on the usability test tasks.

For the filter experience, users were confused by the default state of the filters. In the original design, all filter options were selected by default and users needed to unselect the unwanted filters. Users preferred selecting the desired filters. Therefore, we updated the design to make it more intuitive.

To provide more clarity on the data widgets and help users understand the type of actions they can perform on each widget, we updated the look of the data widgets to include the icons for filter and information.

We conducted two more rounds of testing and continued to iterate after each round of user feedback. With the iterations, we saw major improvements in the test results in the final round compared to the first round.

Final Round | Participant: HR Professional

Key Takeaways:

  • The new filter experience is more intuitive

  • User is pleasantly surprised by how efficient it is to share the dashboard 

  • A fully clickable interface will reduce the learning curve

We were not concerned about the indirect success because when we fully build out the design, everything will be clickable and the indirect paths our users took would be as efficient as the direct path defined for this test. Our users also said it would be easy to figure out in real life.

The only step that the user felt unsure was the dashboard customization. She didn’t expect that a dashboard can be customized. This point can be easily addressed with a quick walkthrough of the dashboard to onboard new users. A Foot in the Door’s current website already has pop up windows for user onboarding. A dashboard onboarding can be easily implemented when the design is implemented.

More Iteration

We continued to iterate on the prototype after the final round of testing. We noticed that users sometimes didn’t realize that they need to click the “Apply” button to apply the filters to data. A user suggested that we update the color of the “Apply” button from green to the more noticeable orange. We took the suggestion and made the update.

We also collected some quick feedback from a recruiter who previously participated in our user interview. She shared that the dashboard view could be helpful for her quarterly review with the summary statistics. She also pointed out that it would be helpful for recruiters to quickly see their applicants in the pipeline for each job post. Based on her feedback, we condensed some of our metrics and created a table to make the information more accessible.

Key Takeaways:

  • Dashboard visuals are easy to understand and visually pleasing

  • Usability test questions can be clarified to help users better understand the tasks

  • Filter functionality design can be improved for more clarity and intuitive user experience

Overall, the user thought the dashboard was easy to read but there are a few improvement opportunities. There are two lower points in the user journey: 1) the user didn’t realize she can customize the dashboard, here she is a little confused; 2) when the user was asked to use the filter, she was confused by our task question and not sure how to find the info.

“This is a game changer compared to tracking information manually. I would use this tool!”

— HR Professional

Final Prototype

Dashboard Home Page

Use Filter to Customize a Graph

Customize Dashboard

Share Dashboard with Others

Client Feedback

At the end of the 2.5 weeks, we presented our work to Keith, Eddie and Daniel. They were impressed by the quality of the project output and excited about the dashboard design. 

“I am very impressed by the quality of work you produced within 2.5 weeks! This team has been professional and well-prepared from the beginning. At first we were just thinking about a simple dashboard; however, the decision to make it customizable makes so much sense! I also appreciate that you took into consideration of the current layout and branding style.” - Founder

“The design looks great! I was already thinking how I can build it.” - Chief Engineer

Additional Consideration

During our user interviews, we identified a few major pain points from recruiters and employers that are not relevant to the dashboard design. We believed solving those pain points will help A Foot in the Door stand out as a competitive job search platform. I created the table below to summarize the challenges and potential solutions for A Foot in the Door.

What’s Next

  • Conduct additional research to create a comprehensive list of dashboard metrics

    • Considering the availability and constraints of data captured on the platform

  • Design dashboard widgets for additional data visualization

  • Design additional dashboard feature not included in this prototype for different devices

  • Explore the potential for integrating with ATS