Polite People
Service Design experience
Role overview
From November 2021, I have been working as the national recruitment coordinator for a staffing agency working in the promotions sector. In this role, I was in charge of not only managing the recruitment of new casual staff across all of Australia, but also reviewing and improving the recruitment process in a whole in order to make it as seamless as possible for both applicants, as well as the hiring staff. In order to effectively succeed in my role, I chose to apply my design process to the entire recruitment process, with both applicants and hiring staff as end users.
Tools Used
My Role
Timeline
Figma
Typeform
Recruitment coordinator
3 months
How I tackled this problem?
By identifying the applicants and hiring staff as end users, I was able to then analyse the existing hiring process to identify any pain points (for both end users) and provide solutions in order to streamline the process. In order to gather background research into the existing process, I conducted informal semi-structured interviews with the existing staff (including the old recruitment coordinator) in order to understand how they approached recruitment previously.
I then created a user journey map to understand the process on a whole, beginning at the initial introduction to the company, to the completion of the applicants first shift. Along the journey map, I identified pain points for both users to understand what parts of the process would require attention.
Once these were identified, we conducted a brainstorming session with the staff in order to come up with solutions. We came up with a range of solutions that revolved around using existing programs to incorporate to improve the overall efficiency of the process, and coming up with strategies to increase awareness of the company.
In order to properly assess the success of these solutions, we A/B tested them with a handful of new applicants, using new programs each time, to measure the success rate of each.
Brand Awareness
In order to improve brand awareness, our strategies included incorporating a referral bonus for existing staff to refer friends or colleagues who they believed would be a good fit for our company, creating flyers for staff to provide to any people that enquired about the work when on a campaign, and teaming with a marketing agency to develop targeted ads to help boost the outreach.
Overall we discovered that the referral bonus led to a constant stream of new recruits who were up to standards and very rapidly became great additions to our company, with them later referring more friends and colleagues of their own. My role here was to help design and manage the results of the form.
While the referral bonus did appear to be successful, we found that the most successful strategy was working with a marketing agency that helped us develop targeted ads in Australia, with control on which locations to target more based on the frequency of our work. My role here was to liaise with the account manager, assess any design work that was completed, and manage the influx of applicants we received. This solution proved to be the most effective, as it led to the hiring of more recruitment staff needed to help interview and onboard the volume of applicants we received.
Streamlining the hiring process
In order to improve and streamline the hiring process for both applicants and the hiring staff, different software was tested and implemented determined by their success. Due to the need to be able to assess and interview a large volume of applicants as efficiently as possible, the three possible solutions included Sparkhire, VideoAsk, and Calendly alongside Zoom.
While Sparkhire and VideoAsk both provided an easy way to assess applicants by having them submit recorded answers to interview questions, our team found Sparkhire to be too formal, whereas VideoAsk felt more casual and conversational with how their user experience was structured. Overall, when observing the drop off rate of applicants, we found that not many applicants would complete the interview stage if they were invited, and the ones that did failed to really show their personality, which was a huge factor that played in the hiring of new staff, as the ideal candidate would demonstrate an outgoing, bubbly and approachable nature.
Due to these factors, I decided to improve and streamline the existing hiring process, which used email and phone calls to assess applicants, and incorporated Calendly's booking software to have one-on-one zoom calls with applicants.
By implementing this, hiring staff could have more organisation throughout their day, by having pre-booked meetings auto-populate their work calendars for applicants that were considered, while applicants had a chance to have a proper conversation with the hiring team, and show off their winning personality.
Overall, despite being able to assess more applicants more efficiently using VideoAsk, out team decided that the streamlined and improved hiring process should use Calendly and Zoom, in order to not lose that communication between the applicant and the hiring staff.
Key Takeaway
This role was truly a memorable one that taught many many things, not only about working in a field and with people I generally would not interact with, but also how the design process could be applied in other aspects outside apps, websites and physical products.
Design can be everywhere
Despite there being next to little design work in this role, it was surprising to see how I was able to implement design strategies to assess the effectiveness of some strategies and how I could use the design process to find ways to improve processes within the company.
Not everything has to be a new creative solution
I initially had a misconception, that in order to deliver the best solution to problems, I had to design and create innovative solutions. This role helped open my eyes to the ability of utilising existing solutions, and how to work with others not only within the company, but outside the company as well in order to provide effective solutions. Bring able to use other programs (almost as design tools), in order to help provide a more polished and effective solution made me think differently about what it means to be a great designer!