Identifying the Problem

Inspired by recent work creating an inclusive meeting design framework and recent coursework in DesignOps frameworks, the Culture and Communication crew opened a discussion with the rest of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee to identify an approachable roadmap of enhancements to improve hiring practices at R2i. Throughout our committee discussions, we noticed a few existing problems identified by other teams that persisted across the organization, regardless of role.

• Feedback of insular systems for hiring
• Looking for ways to remove bias from our hiring process
• Roadblock of the recruitment tech

Equitable Hiring Practices Brainstorm

We hosted a series of workshops intended to embrace candidate diversity and build equitable hiring practices among the teams. We brought all team leaders, HR, and any interested members of the DEI committee to brainstorm on a task list for improving our job descriptions and recruitment processes. The first session focused on ideation, with the team coming up with as many ideas as they possibly could within a limited timeframe. The second session was an affinity mapping and dot voting session to group and prioritize our recommendations. Once the workshop series was over, we assigned action items to the interested parties to keep tasks moving along across the entire hiring journey. Thinking specifically to the XD team’s specific needs and where I had the most influence/insight, my initial efforts focused around improving screening and interviewing practices for the active roles within my team.

Mapping the Current and Future State Workflows

We highlighted the weak points in our interviewing process, bridging gaps between key points in the customer journey, and proposed new and standardized processes for applicant tracking and interview ratings. Within the workshop, we identified a few key issues: lack of standardization during screening and interview feedback, a delayed response time for applications, and losing candidates in the shuffle for popular roles. To effectively blueprint the experience, we broke the journey out into chunks to map out manageable parts of the process. Once we had two adjoining sections of the blueprint, we reconnected them for a more holistic understanding of the potential employee's experience with R2i during hiring. In our current state service blueprint, we identified a few key places where data could be shared and collected faster, so our future state included potential automation activities to ideally share new candidates as soon as they applied.

Building a Custom Applicant Tracking System Prototype

We prototyped an applicant tracking system that would meet the specific needs of our team for screening and interviewing. My role here included:

• Taxonomy & Content Modeling - We used sample data to build proper workflows
• Sketching & User Flows - We sketched and wireframed quick screens to better understand the overall layout of the app
• Interface Design - We used existing brand guidelines to build this prototype, since it’s an internal tool
• Prototyping - We used Bubble (a no-code app builder) to make the prototype fully functional in its initial pass, so we could also demonstrate the data collection and scoring capabilities built in

The tool proposed included the following features:

• Standardized rating criteria at the role level - Since different roles require different skills, each team can select their priority skills before candidates apply to align on standard metrics for assessment
• Add a candidate and assign interviewers — Once the candidate passes the initial screening, we add them to our database and assign an initial set of reviewers to begin scheduling their interviews
• Email and in-app notifications — To ensure teammates review incoming candidate information as soon as possible post-interview, we included email and in-app notifications that were set to display when there were available actions to take
• Personalized feedback forms — Once a candidate has met with their interviewers, each interviewer receives a personalized form to fill out about their meeting
• Collected feedback page at the candidate level — Once all reviewers have submitted their feedback on a specific candidate, we proposed creation of a view that includes a holistic view of the team's thoughts on the candidate