Leading UX Strategy and Vision for Hiring Managers Screening Experience

2024

The Mom Project

Design Strategy
Conceptual Design
User Experience

Impact

Aligned the applicant review experience to how hiring managers actually make decisions, which increased usage of the feature following release.

Background

Hiring managers on The Mom Project were usually entrepreneurs or senior HR staff at small and mid-sized companies, juggling hiring alongside a handful of other responsibilities. They couldn't rely on the existing experience to manage a growing list of applicants, so they fell back on spreadsheets and email threads, abandoning the product more and more as their talent pipeline progressed. If we couldn't give them a reliable way to review, organize, and act on candidates inside the platform, we were going to lose them before they ever made a hire.

My Role

I pitched this project to leadership. I'd seen the pattern in our data and user feedback: hiring managers couldn't rely on our applicant review tools, so they worked around them, and we were losing them before they ever made a hire. I conducted internal research interviews with our operations and sales teams, the people closest to our customers day to day, and combined that with the data and user feedback to make the case that this needed to be treated as core experience work, not a peripheral fix. Once leadership agreed, I led the strategy and vision, building the mental model that shaped our direction, running the workshops that turned it into a roadmap, and creating the conceptual designs a researcher used to validate it.

Constraints

Research surfaced dozens of small frustrations hiring managers had with the applicant review process, far more than we could fix in one release, which meant we had to be disciplined about what we tackled first.

Partway through the project, I went on maternity leave. Because I'd already produced the conceptual designs, and because I'd co-led our design system, most of the UI components this redesign needed already existed. That groundwork meant another designer could execute the high fidelity UI without the work stalling or the underlying strategy changing.

The Design Process

I started by building a mental model from prior research to represent how hiring managers actually expected the review process to work, organized around keeping track of applicants as they moved through review, taking quick action once a decision was made, and assessing a candidate's relevance at a glance. I used that mental model to build a tradeoff framework, so the team could rank potential fixes by user impact instead of by whoever advocated loudest, which surfaced the three problems we prioritized: organizing a growing applicant list, enabling quick action, and making relevance obvious at a glance.

I led a design thinking workshop to turn that direction into a shared roadmap, working with the team to generate use cases and align on the project's goals. I generated task flows for each use case, which gave engineering a way to estimate scope and surface dependencies early and shaped how we sequenced the release. From there, I created the conceptual designs a researcher used to validate the direction with hiring managers directly.

Solution

The redesigned experience gave hiring managers a talent profile card built around relevance instead of raw data, improved list and filtering tools to organize candidates into stages, and a profile layout with scannable highlights up top and clear actions to advance or decline, so a hiring manager could make a decision without digging.

Hiring managers can quickly review applicants with the improved talent profile card highlighting candidates’ relevancy. When they are interested in an applicant, they can easily organize candidates with improved lists and filtering. Talent profiles are easier to review with scannable highlights at the top of the profile, sections to learn more about the applicant, and intuitive actions to advance or decline the candidate.