Connect+
Acelr8, an hiring agency based in Berlin wanted a platform for Connect, a hiring solution that adapts to every company's need and saves time in filling in-house vacancies.
The result of this project is an intuitive and dead-simple hiring interface that abstracts all the hard work from the hiring manager, capturing candidate qualifications and review process, and decision making.
Problem
Filling a position takes an average of 42 days. This is longer than the statutory notice period of four weeks, and often longer than most companies can endure to fill new vacancies. Quality of hire is also often a challenge to measure and optimize, though many recruiters try to take care of this by interviewing an increasingly higher number of candidates, adding pressure to busy recruiter’s schedules and inevitably resulting in lower quality of hires.
My Role
I worked on the project as the Principal Product Designer, and was responsible for forming a strategic vision for the product, developing the product brand, and partnering with product (Annie), engineering (Boris) and management (Micheal, Isabel) to deliver a product that fits right in with the user. I was also tasked with developing a design system and design guidelines for future products.
Goal
Our customers want to hire great people fast.
This means we need to
• Reduce the time to receive qualified candidates
• Increase quality of candidates
• By increasing screening call passing rate
• By increasing % of interested candidates
• By increasing accuracy of sourced candidates
We want to do these while not adding to recruiters' already busy schedules
User Research
Research methods employed included Focus groups, User interviews
We conducted 5 rounds of user interviews, 2 pre design, 1 during the design phase and 2 more on usability testign of the designs. The participants included Talent Acquisition Specialists, Head of Recruitment teams and founders from notable startups such as Blinkist, Contentful, Hotjar, and more.
Key drivers after research
• Time efficiency: Recruiters are hella busy, Not enough time to source
• Right-fit definition: Understanding ideal profile, Not knowing how to assess for the right fit
• Tools are not glued together / don't match the workflow needs
Other concerns include Diversity hiring, Bias in assessing profiles, Unpredictability in candidate responses, and difficulty in Assessing candidate motivation.
Final Designs / Solutions
• SaaS platform with optimized onboarding and new job creation flows
• In-house, recruiter portal for efficient handling of candidates across multiple open jobs
• Slack Integration
Tools Used
Notion, Figma, Figjam
Impact
Post launch, the internal recruiters have seen an average of 22% fall in time to fill positions with quality hires, while reducing interview-to-hire ratio and shortening time in process step.
Companies using Connect for filling internal positions include Hotjar, Contentful, Robocorp, CareerFoundry, Unbound, and some other leading startups in Europe.
