Background
Hiring processes for recruiters are complex and repetitive, due to evaluating hundreds of candidates and skills.
Context
Applicant tracking systems are complex SaaS products that companies use to seek talent, gather candidates, assess necessary skills, and hire for positions.
Hiring processes are a complicated process because not only does it involve job candidates and skills, but is integrated into a complex system of people management including employee engagement tracking, skills training, and organization maps/headcount systems.
The main problems can be summarized into three main points:
Time Consuming Tasks
Manual job listing creations create tedious and mundane tasks.
Multi-Screen Flows
Creating job listings require repetitive, input-heavy multi-screen flows.
Inconsistency & Accessibility
Lack of streamlining between ATS and people management platforms.
Research
Effective hiring processes are crucial for companies to attract the right candidates & drive business success.
Research
For this MVP, we focused on building out the prototype using existing research as our foundation. From researching the problem domain of hiring practices and discovering pain points, we found the following highlights regarding startup founders:
Market Research
42% of startup founders are concerned about hiring the best talent.
29% worry about hiring fast enough.
14% worry about not having the right talent
Competitor Audit
We analyzed strengths and weaknesses of existing ATS platforms, like Greenhouse, Lever and Workable.
Establishing Goals
Design an AI-driven ATS that ensures talent and qualified candidates to drive business success and organization development.
Objectives
Some core features my client was looking to validate were:
AI-generated job listing creation + job board
A candidate pipeline
Streamlining with organization headcount
Ideation Pt. 1
After creating personas based on research, we dove into the exploration phase.
Iteration
One of the main areas I constantly iterated on was the candidate pipeline page. There were many components to organize including interview schedules, resume, background, and skills.
This was also the stage I asked many questions on future implications on the product, such as, how will this scale with additional user types (HR, people operations, company size, etc.)?
Concepts
Overall sentiment of product
Task completion, errors
Time to complete tasks
Key Feedback
3 out of 5 participants thought the candidate pipeline page looked cluttered.
A participant voiced that they are confused at what point AI assists their workflow, creating an opportunity to design a more user-friendly experience with the AI tool.
Ideation Pt. 2
For the next part of ideation, I collaborated with my client to create a sleek branding for the UI. We put a big focus on the visual elements so that we can gain traction when we present and test the prototype to investors.
Minimalistic branding to reduce clutter and ensure usability
Visual Direction & Moodboard
I decided to go for a minimal, sophisticated look to reduce the clutter, especially for a complex product like an ATS & people management platform.
Minimal curvature
A card design to organize content
Simple and user-friendly font
Blues, grays, off-whites
Below are some snapshots of Jasper and Zendesk that displayed a similar visual direction.
Branding & Design System
Our design principles were to design for seamless integration, functional navigation, and ease of use.
Trade Offs
A simple typeface with a wide range in weight from bold to thin was selected to emphasize different layers of labels and statuses. High contrast colors were used for accessibility, tested with WCAG standards especially for text areas like candidate pipeline and candidate profile. Hues of blue match our user values of productivity and reliability.
After ensuring a sleek and consistent design system, I integrated it into the product and added interactivity to visualize the prototype.
