Zoho Recruit Redesign
Duration: 1 week | Role: Product Designer |Team: Kassie Ingalls (UXD) & Katie Hoang
Tools used: Figma & Miro | Methods: Current state evaluation, Wire-framing, Rapid prototyping, Competitive analysis, Moderated user interviews, Remote cross-collaboration
Problem
Zoho Recruit is a popular tool for hiring teams to streamline the tasks involved in moving applicants along the pipeline. However, Zoho lacks a feature that humanizes applicants, which reduces the potential for diverse team recruiting.
This leads to:
Group bias & group think
Limited team perspectives
Lack of soft skills acknowledgment
Quantity over quality recruiting methods
Purpose
To add an Applicant Scorecard feature that will help recruiters rate and ask applicant questions that are more meaningful, resulting in a sound hiring decision that will serve to benefit the team and the applicant.
Challenges
Data visualization
For a dashboard to be useful, users should be able to scan the high-level information and take necessary action swiftly. Recruiting software can get bogged down with applicants and numbers quickly, so it is crucial to have graphs be instinctive.
Scalable solutions
Understanding that recruiters have to sift through lengthy applicant pools, the solutions presented to humanize applicants should not add more to their plate. Instead, it should help them do their job more efficiently.
Team coordination
Team members involved in the hiring decision should be able to make decisions without group think bias, which negatively can harm the applicant’s chances, and view conversations about a candidate in a centralized location.
Discover
To get more insight into the needs of a recruiter to do their job with ease, we spoke with well seasoned hiring managers.
The outlining challenge uncovered from this interview was that conversations about hiring applicants are often not kept in one place. To design a time-saving user experience, the Zoho Recruit re-design must retain all traces of applicant feedback within the platform & encourage task automation.
Additional questions I asked myself were:
How can recruiters engage other team members in Zoho Recruit’s dashboard?
How can team members giving feedback on a candidate avoid group think?
How can recruiters prioritize their budget to source quality over quantity candidates?
Evaluation
I began by assessing Zoho’s Dashboard to see opportunities to improve the dashboard insights, humanize recruiting, and see where task automation could be added to make the product more scalable.
Competitive Research
I took a look at the competing products in recruiting software to gain a better understanding of each product’s competitive edge and their design patterns. This drew me into a recruiter’s world and I was able to propose solutions that would make their job easier.
Ideation
Miro was used to flesh out ideas about where to prioritize our efforts on reworking Zoho. Kassie and I delegated action steps after every meeting to move the project along the sprint we set forth. After doing some live sketches, we transitioned into making a hi-fidelity prototype of our redesign.
Areas to improve based on feedback received from prototype
Balanced Scorecard Overview
Recruiters do a lot of skimming. The insight of the scorecard was meaningful in tracking all feedback in one place but, it didn’t have an overall score for the applicant to bring under “Ideal Candidates” in the Job Openings dashboard.
Solution - I added a “Rated Most With:” line to highlight the rating used to describe the candidate.
Jobs Filled Status
Having a filter for the jobs filled status doesn’t serve much purpose because a recruiter wants to view a snapshot of how many spots they need to fill with candidates at a glance to instill a sense of urgency.
Solution - I made a legend for the jobs filled status pie chart that allows a recruiter to see at a glance where their priorities need to be for the day.
Design
After editing my prototypes with solutions that garnered positive reactions, I tweaked my screens and finalized the task flows in the prototype.
Slack Integration
Having a slack integration within Zoho Recruit keeps people accountable for tasks and maintains all conversations about hiring decisions in one place.
Candidate Quality
Team Feedback
To avoid group think, team members can individually complete their scorecards of applicants and are permitted to view other’s opinions after they submit their own scorecard.
Conclusion
Being on the applicant side of the hiring process, I think there is a middle ground for recruiters to value a well-rounded applicant and focus their hiring dollars on platforms that garner their highest conversion rates. In doing this project, I understood the value of API integrations and automating task flows. Especially for recruiters, there is a lot of managing involved and having “set it and forget it’ measures take a lot off their plate.
Improvements to be made in the future for this design:
Additional task automation for job listings to become unavailable when it hits a deadline or cap number of applicants
Ability to customize a balanced scorecard’s metrics and questions with AI assistance
Positive incentives to complete tasks and move people through the pipeline