Recruiters Recruiting: A Foot in the Door

Designing a recruiter’s dashboard from 0 to net new

Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer - Hypothetical dashboard design

Responsibilities: Concept Ideation, Usability Testing, Competitive Research, Wireframing, Prototyping

Deliverables: High-Fi Prototype

Tools: Figma

Timeline: 2 weeks (October 2024)

Team of 3

Summary

Upon discovering that scheduling interviews and sifting through candidates were the biggest time sinks for recruiters, my team and I designed a dashboard with detailed filtering functionality and a scheduling system that allows for bulk rejection and scheduling.

The Challenge

Recruiting is a grueling process, especially for the hiring team. My team was tasked with building out a dashboard for recruiters and hiring managers who use A Foot in the Door, a job board specifically for entry-level positions.

In order to create an effective and relevant design, we had to understand the hiring process from the recruiter and hiring manager’s perspective.

Recruiting Recruiters

A screener survey was sent out to identify human resources personnel who had recruited for entry-level roles in the past year. Our team then conducted 7 user interviews with recruiters and hiring managers across the country and across different industries.

The biggest challenge was getting individuals in the specific field to respond to us after cold-contact and it quickly became a numbers game.

To synthesize the interviews, we conducted an affinity map and received the following results:

57%

of users said scheduling interviews is a “bottleneck” in the recruiting process

71%

of users said called screening candidates another time sink when recruiting for a role

86%

of users mentioned good character as a criteria used to screen entry-level candidates

The recruitment process for entry-level candidates is difficult given that many resumes look similar due to a lack of experience. Sifting through candidates and scheduling interviews is tedious and is compounded by the fact that it is difficult to differentiate good candidates from an ordinary one.

Problem Statement

The Opportunity

How might we showcase the relative strengths of candidates and rapidly schedule them for interviews?

Understanding What Recruiters are Looking For

The interview scheduling and candidate screening pain points were the most frequently mentioned and were issues my team could directly address with our dashboard tool. 

Conducting research on competitor’s job boards, though few sites were specific to entry-level individuals, I observed common features that to consider in the design, such as: 

  • Usage of hiring-specific verbiage

  • Bulk rejection of candidates

  • Messaging/E-mail features to communicate with the candidate

Sketches During our Working Sessions

Each team member presents their sketches.

Ideating The Dashboard

Luckily, after our team created our sketches during our design studio, we found we all had the same idea of designing scheduling and screening automation functionalities for the dashboard. After creating a user flow for our prototype, we delegated design tasks and I focused on building the home page and the job description pages.

In the design we provided an AI option where recruiters and hiring managers could filter for candidates, where I also advocated for a toggle on or off option depending on users' comfort levels.

Maintaining Uniformity in a Team Design

To ensure our design was as uniform as possible, I created components for the header and footer, established the grid columns and margins, and created text styles to be applied for Headings, Subheadings and Body text. I then proceeded to componentize repeated elements, reviewing team designs every other day of the sprint.

Even with components, uniformity was still a challenges so, as a team, we would regularly review each other’s design and leave comments and suggestions.

Getting User Feedback on our Dashboard

After completing our prototype, we ran usability tests with individuals who were involved in the hiring process. The feedback revealed that a couple additional affordances and labels were needed so that was added to the second iteration of our design.

Learnings

Standardize as much as possible in the beginning.

Standardizing your design across different people requires knowing when to work together and when to work independently. In the future I would create as many components as a team as possible in the beginning, standardize object grouping methodology, and build out a more detailed user flow to minimize room for confusion. It was frustrating and time-consuming having to rebuild items across our designs.

It’s much harder recruiting interviewees when your criteria is more specific so try different things.

There were definitely a couple of times where I just wanted to give up but my I saw that my teammate was more successful when reaching out to recruiters and hiring managers through email rather than LinkedIn, my initial contact method.

Next Steps

Conduct further research on openness to using AI for recruiting

While our solution had an AI option, one of the recruiters I interviewed expressed reluctance to employ AI in recruiting due to ethical reasons. I’d love to hear more from other individuals.

Refine Filter Criteria Options

With more time, I would have conducted a survey or additional usability testing of our prototype to refine our filter criteria based on needs of the hiring side.