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Creating a "one-stop-shop" experience for candidates in regards to their application and interview process.

Disclaimer

Unfortunately, due to confidentiality reasons, I cannot share a bulk of my work that I have done or am currently doing at HubSpot. For now, you'll have to trust that, as the lead designer, I am doing quite a lot during my time here.

HubSpot- Candidate Experience

Overview

We aim to create a ‘one stop shop’ experience so that candidates can take all necessary actions from one page. Additionally, this experience streamlines communication between candidates and recruiters, automates recruiters’ workflows, and reduces recruiter administration efforts.

The Problem

Currently, HubSpot does not provide a way for candidates to keep track of their applications. While the inability to keep track of applications is a pain point in itself, there are other pain points that arise from this experience, such as digging through your email inbox to find the job requisition, looking for your recruiter's email, or disclosing information you're not comfortable sharing.

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Additionally, due to my team and I's strong relationship with the recruiting teams, we were able to learn some of their pain points in regards to candidates and their interview process. Many of these pain points boiled down to manual and repetitive tasks and communication on a day to day level. 

Research

For this project, I gathered and conducted user interviews with new HubSpotters (as we were not allowed to interview external candidates and recognized our newest employees have the freshest memory of their interview process) to learn about their interview experience with HubSpot. Not only did we learn pain points and user stories, we received a lot of feedback regarding how many interview processes, both in and outside of HubSpot, is not highly sensitive or curated in a way that ensures psychological safety, which was an enlightening finding. We heard our new hires voice their opinions on how they would like to see HubSpot's culture code (HEART) be reflected in their products and processes. 

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I also spoke with recruiting teams and people operations to learn their pain points to draw design opportunities on how we can solve for both candidates and recruiters at the same time. 

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Towards the end of the research stage, our question went from "How can we create a great candidate experience?" to "How can we create a candidate experience that is inclusive to all groups of candidates?" and "How can we solve for both candidates and recruiters?".

Exploring Big Opportunities

How can we ensure psychological safety to our candidates? How can we automate manual processes but still have the interview process feel humanized? Which tasks can be automated to decrease points of friction for our recruiters? How can we scale this product to be more than just an "application tracking product"?

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These are the types of questions my team and I discussed in core meetings and in calls with the recruiting department and any other department recruiters came into contact with for these tasks. This helped us prioritize the most important features and workflows for the MVP product and to keep a list of future features we would want to bring into this space over the next few months and years.

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We generated a lot of ideas and concepts from our brainstorming workshops before landing on a solution. 

The Solution

Again, I cannot talk about the key findings and the actual solution we landed on. However, I can highlight some of the work I did.
Note: You may notice that this section is close to identical as my New Employee Onboarding project. That is because these two projects are very closely related but, for the sake of organization, I have split it up on my portfolio.

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  • Scoped the requirements of this product and organized conversations with relevant teams to cross functionally collaborate to ensure we are delivering a wholistic experience that has little to no friction.
     

  • I led the entire design process, which not only consisted of user interviews with end-users, multiple design iterations, and usability testing but also synced with various stakeholders for road mapping and requirement gathering, driving strategic vision of seamless workflows for recruiting and people operations departments. 
     

  • Responsible for navigating conversations and gathering requirements in regards to making this experience truly inclusive and move away from "one-size-fits-all" process.
     

  • Designed the first iteration of an internal job tool, which automated recruiters' daily tasks that saved up to 5 days of work. Since returning as a full-time employee, I have conducted further research to learn what parts of the tools/experiences can be improved and is currently leading new design solutions. 
     

  • Decreased the amount of manual work on the recruiter's end that went into engaging with a candidate.

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While I would be delighted to show my designs and talk more in-depth about my key findings and solutions, I hope my explanation were helpful! If you would like to learn more about this projects, please do not hesitate to reach out.

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Reflections

So far, this has been one of my favorite projects to work on! I love how this team and I care about being inclusive in any future products we build and I feel honored to have navigated sensitive topics that will be assist our goals in building inclusive processes, not just inclusive products. 

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As someone who has been in and out of the interviewing scene as a candidate, I, admittedly, have forgotten many of the pain points I've encountered in the past. These pain points were coming up in every interview process that I've "normalized" these pain points and didn't realize these are things this team and I can solve for. The research stage of this project helped me remember how the interview process can be improved so that we are meeting each group of candidates where they are and advocating for them as a company on their behalf. 

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