Candidate Engagement Redesign
Improve the experience of emailing candidates for recruiters
TEAM
Designer
Engineer
Data Analyst
MY WORK
UX Design
​UI Design
Prototype
You can view a product demo here.
THE PROBLEM WE ARE SOLVING
Feel difficult to write a cold email? Wondering why someone you reach out to does not reply? Not sure when to follow up?
Recruiters run into these situations every day, and Hiretual engagement redesign is to improve the emailing experience to be more effective and efficient.
# THE USER
We are targeting at general recruiters who send out cold emails to candidates every day
At the beginning of this project, I wanted to get a wholistic view of our users before focusing on the phase of engaging candidates. It helps answer the question of why we are redesigning this feature and if it is worth doing.
Research methods I used include literature review, user and stakeholder interview, and data analytics .
Research Findings
By research, I not only understand the eco-system of recruiting better, but also identify one main persona for the candidate engagement: general recruiter, the person who contact candidates through the whole process of hiring. Hiring manager, another main type of user, who have specialties to evaluate the qualification of a candidate, are usually not the people who contact candidates directly. Therefore, not a focus for this project.
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The following is a simplified persona for general recruiters.
Two main findings related to Candidate Engagement from user research are:
1). Recruiters cares a lot about the response rate . They use different ways to improve it, such as writing personalized emails or sending follow-up emails.
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2). Our current experience of emailing candidates is not user-friendly. For example, they cannot check the candidate's profile while writing emails.
# BRAINSTORM
How might we increase the response rate of candidates?
From the user research, we decided one important goal of the redesign is to increase the response rate. I began brainstorming with asking a lot of 'HMW' questions. Then I read articles about recruiting strategies, analyzed our competitors, and researched on AI writing apps to come up with a few potential solutions to move forward with.
# FEATURE ENHANCEMENT
Sending Follow-up Emails
We already allow users to send follow-up emails, however, many users report that the experience is not user friendly.
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Some complaints are about functionality, for example, they cannot reuse a sequence of emails they sent before.
Some are about interactions, such as not able to look at user profiles while writing an email.
New Function:
Allow users to save a sequence as a template
After mapping out the flow of sending emails, it's easy to see that users are frustrated by the inefficiency: they need to manually apply a template to every email in a sequence. Therefore, there is a strong need for a sequence template.
Design Iterations
Improvement on Tracking Emails
Adding sequence template also impacts how these emails are tracked. Not only it requires a new page for managing sequence templates, but also we use 'Outbox' to replace 'Tracking' to better match user's mindset when managing emails.
Final design looks like the following:
# DEISGN SOLUTION
Best time to send
According to research and analytics data, time of sending does impact the response rate. For example, there are a higher reply rate on Saturday than Sunday and at night around 8pm than in the morning. Hiretual has rich data on this, however, the existing solution does not use the data to make any suggestion. It only allows users to set up a time to send the email later.
Design Iterations / Wording / logic of calculating days
When designing this feature, my main considerations focus on how to pick a time and how to recommend a date or time. Some ideas are as following:
How to make a suggestion?
Final Design
# DEISGN SOLUTION
Follows the best practice of writing emails
We want to give suggestions as recruiters are writing emails and suggestions can change dynamically according to the content wrote and other criteria.
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My first step is reading research articles and getting advice from professionals about best practices on writing recruiting email. My goal is to come up with potential useful tips on writing emails as many as possible. Then I divided these tips into two categories: tips based on industry research and tips based on users' previous data.
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Consider technical feasibility
The next step is to discuss with engineers whether these tips are implementable using machine learning on our current data. We will implement the low hanging fruits now, but I also keep very insightful tips that might be worth exploring in the future.
# FINAL DESIGN
