Supporting Hiring Managers Hire More Diverse Candidates
Designed the Diversity Dashboard to help Hiring Managers track and understand how they can close their diversity gap.
Project Overview
This was another time-critical project where we were already late to deliver the product and a product that was not needed by our end user, Hiring Managers.
PageUp in 2021 focused on the US market for their growth where after Covid and BLM, DEI became the front and centre for c-suite, board and external stakeholders. Organizations were seeking talent acquisition providers to do more to improve their diversity by removing the bias in the hiring process. Although there is a gap between the buyer and the end user on the importance of diversity hiring.
So we build the “diversity score” supporting the hiring managers to close their diversity gap.
As a lead designer on this project, I was accountable and responsible for doing exploratory research to deliver a validated market fit product in a lean methodology, identifying the gap in the market which can be the competitive advantage for PageUp from the competitor lens. This project was carried out in 6+ months in July 2021, working very closely with the Cross-Functional team (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success) and the project team (PM and Engineers).
Challenges
It’s not the user’s need - From the previous many years of user research we’ve learned that Hiring Manager’s (HMs) need is to hire the best applicant quickly based on the applicant’s experience and skills and diversity is not the factor HMs counts on.
Timeline - To launch a DEI product in the market ASAP, we had to ideate quickly with the existing user problem before consolidating exploratory research. Apart from doing qual and quant research parallelly, we also had to do competitor analysis to get ahead and create a competitive advantage.
Adoption - This was(is) the biggest challenge. DEI is a susceptible subject that needs more knowledge sharing and behavior change than just functionality, so how do we find a balance to meet the user's needs and help them adapt to the change?
Time management - It was a crucial aspect of this project. With so many research activities happening parallelly, I had to reach out to team members from the research team, marketing team, and PM helping me to deliver this project on time.
The Problem
Hiring bias in recruitment results in less diverse teams. And companies started looking at their talent acquisition providers to help improve diversity hiring. That’s where DEI was identified as a theme for our team, focusing on generating more sales.
And from the user research, we identified a gap between the buyer, HR, and the user on the importance of diversity hiring. This gap contributes to a lack of internal alignment, a valuable competitive advantage for PageUp.
Audience: The end user for this product is Hiring Managers, Recruiters who need to support the hiring managers, and HR.
Goals
User Goal: After consolidating all the research, we identified the Jobs to be Done for the User as “To enable the hiring managers to hire the best candidate fairly while proactively closing their diversity gap.”
Business Goal: Allowing PageUp to close more deals.
Design Process
Explore it.
For this new functionality, I kicked off with exploratory research using these methods;
Stakeholder interviews
Market research and trend analysis
Competitive analysis
ODI (outcome-driven innovation)
Design it.
After identifying 2 JTBD (jobs-to-be-done), I took the ideas to the design exploration phase of doing;
Ideation
Feature prioritization
Low fidelity wireframes
Collaborating with other designers
Validate it.
Did multiple rounds of usability testing to make sure the design is right for the market fit? Usability rounds were done to:
Validate the idea and hypothesis
Validate the UI
Explore it…
For this new functionality, I kicked off with exploratory research;
Stakeholder interviews - The focus for this project was US enterprise customers, which sadly we didn’t have when we kicked off this project, so we had to do internal stakeholder interviews. It took me 2 weeks to prep and run the interviews to understand the needs and expectations of this product. Understanding what challenges they face when talking to the buyers about this tool.
Market research and trend analysis - Working closely with the Marketing lead to understand the market trends around DEI and going through research papers (Gartner, Aptitude Research, etc) to identify the user’s need to fast-track the exploratory research.
Competitive analysis - To get ahead, I had to collaborate with Sales and pre-sales team members to know how our competitors are closing the DEI deals and what tools they are using to meet the user’s needs.
ODI - to understand how customers measure the success of their job to be done. Also gives us the confidence to make bold, product-shaping decisions. We took a few weeks to design the survey, got 500+ responses, analyzed the data, and wrote up the findings.
Competitive analysis
ODI results
Research Summary
After combining all the research, we identified a gap between the buyer and user on the importance of diversity hiring. This gap is contributing to a lack of internal alignment that it's a valuable competitive advantage.
So, “how can we enable the hiring managers to hire the best candidate fairly whilst proactively closing their diversity gap?”.
We got our 2 Jobs To Be Done
For Hiring Managers: Help me improve my diverse representation within the screening stage.
For Recruiters: Help me identify Hiring Managers needing more support in meeting DE&I targets
Design it…
Ideation - As soon as we identified our 2 JTBD, I immediately scheduled and ran a 2-hour ideation design workshop with our cross-functional team to come up with different ideas to meet the user needs. Ideation resulted in the top 7 ideas.
Idea/feature prioritization - With the top 7 ideas, the Trio (Designer, PM, and Tech Lead) had to prioritize all the ideas to identify which idea/s would be most viable, usable, and deliverable at the minimum effort/cost.
Conclusion
With the ticking time, we decided to prioritize the idea of the Diversity Dashboard, as with the guidance of the other team (already working on the dashboard), the effort required to build the DEI dashboard is low and super quick. Now we don’t have to build the dashboard from scratch and can use the existing template, reducing the time to build. So we decided to skip the experimentation and quickly validate the dashboard with the users.
Lo-fies
Even though the effort to build the dashboard was less, I still wanted to quickly validate the idea of the DEI Dashboard with a few identified early adopters if the solution would meet their needs and is the right market fit.
Validate it…
Hypothesis
We believe that: When Hiring Managers/Recruiter is informed of the number of male and female representatives in the current pool of a job,
Will result in: Hiring Managers/Recruiter taking a conscious decision to hire a diverse applicant when screening and selecting
The measure of success: Gender breakdown improves from baseline at crucial stages: All applicants ratio to interviews, ratio to hire.
Usability Testing
To validate our hypothesis and design, I did 16 sessions of usability sessions. As this was the new functionality it required some behavior change and training around closing their diversity gap, hiring managers (HMs) were confused with the whole new dashboard, it seemed like a whole new additional step for the HMs slowing them down.
I then refined the UI helping HMs to consume the information on diversity easily and reducing their cognitive load when hiring the best applicant I took the lean MVP approach of displaying the gender only to begin with. And got the confirmation on the UI from the end users that it will be a great value add in their journey of hiring and meets the criteria of being the market fit.
Final UI
Feedback from user testing and fellow designers contributed to developing the final user interface using the design system in Figma. Insights from the users revealed that guiding early adopters, particularly hiring managers, through the new process is crucial to instilling confidence and comfort with the additional feature aimed at increasing diversity in the applicant pool.
To simplify the new feature and make it more manageable, I focused on showcasing gender breakdown initially using a minimum viable product (MVP) approach due to its ease and speed of implementation, which was well-received by hiring managers. The UI includes a sliding drawer displaying gender breakdowns at each stage, accessed through diversity stars. A key feature is a highlighted text box at the drawer's bottom for sharing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) information to aid hiring managers in making informed decisions.
Collaborating with the marketing team, we ensured a continuous influx of fresh content for the knowledge-sharing section to engage hiring managers effectively.
Next steps
Sadly, I had to move on from PageUp and couldn’t see the adoption of the product to see it grow. However, as a next step, I’ll study the data on the usage and adoption every week and would have worked on evolving the design (functionality) to deliver more user value using continuous discovery. Moving from the project mindset to the continuous mindset, I want to continuously ship the value to the users (more user value = more business value), getting better every week in delivering those user values.