Recruiting Platform
How might we help recruiters manage candidates and track recruiting performance more easily?
Overview
🖇 Project Details
-
Timeline: January 2025 - Present
-
Team: UX Design & Research, Business, Product, and Engineering
📌 Goal
Understand pain points and opportunities in the recruiting tool to inform solutions and strategies to improve the recruiting management experience
📌 Impact (so far!)
Led the team to design and deliver companion solutions that addressed key pain points in the tool, with more enhancements & funding pending
CONTEXT
Recruiters use a third-party tool to manage candidates through the hiring process, from outreach to job offers. In late 2024, the company changed vendors, requiring recruiters to switch to a new tool.
To assess the new experience, the team conducted a survey to measure the recruiters’ perceived usability and satisfaction with the tool. However, these scores were very low, indicating significant usability challenges and a poor overall experience. The team wanted to understand why this was the case and figure out how to create a better experience.
Recruiting Tool
GOAL
Understand how recruiters perform key recruiting tasks using the tool, and the challenges that contribute to a poor experience
IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW
We wanted to understand how recruiters were doing their core tasks, with or without the tool.
APPROACH
WHAT: How are they doing their core daily tasks, such as adding candidates to the tool, communicating with candidates, scheduling interviews, and taking interview notes?
HOW: 60-min remote in-depth interviews combined with light contextual inquiry to capture a realistic view of recruiters' current workflows for each core task, including their workarounds and use of external tools, and to layer behavioral observations onto their perceived experiences
WITH: 7 recruiters, balanced across network offices
Time to learn how things get done!
ANALYSIS & SYNTHESIS
Data was analyzed using thematic analysis, tagging them by participant and pain point type, to identify key challenge areas in using NM Talent. This was also used to provide the team with a comprehensive list of all participant-reported issues to review and prioritize.
Issues were tagged by feature & usability issue type
INSIGHTS
We identified a number of challenges with using NM Talent, which could be grouped into the following primary themes:
-
Excessive steps, clicks, and navigation to complete routine tasks
-
Repetitive data entry
-
Technical issues, such as slow page load and frequent page refresh
-
Missing information and functionality needed to work efficiently (e.g., email templates)
Specifically, there were major challenges around adding new candidates to the system and logging recruiter activity. Once they added candidates to the system, they became “floating candidates” that needed to be manually added to the specific requisitions, or job numbers. The process of logging activity also required many clicks to sort through requisitions and candidate profiles to navigate to the right page.
IMPACT
As the tool was third-party, there were limitations in the improvements and configurations that could be made. This led the team to explore companion solutions that could address the most critical pain points without requiring major changes to the tool itself.
Within a few months, the team delivered a companion app that enabled recruiters to add new candidates directly to requisitions. With roughly 200,000 candidates added each year, the app could save thousands of recruiter hours annually. It also tackled another key pain point: the process of identifying existing candidates in the tool before adding them had been clunky and error-prone, and the app made the process significantly smoother.
Next up: activity logging. Recruiters consistently flagged it as a frustrating part of their experience, but the problem was less well-defined than adding new candidates. The team needed a clearer picture of how recruiters were actually logging activity — and what they were doing with that data.
IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW
We wanted to zoom in on the recruiters' activity logging experience - up close, in detail.
WHAT: How are they logging activity today? How are they using or tracking the logged activity? What external tools or workarounds are they using? What works well and doesn't work well in the current experience?
HOW: 60-min remote in-depth interviews combined with light contextual inquiry
WITH: 7 recruiters, balanced across network offices and roles
Learn, learn, learn
ANALYSIS & SYNTHESIS
Data was analyzed using affinity diagramming to map the current experience and surface recurring themes. Analysis was organized around five core questions:
-
Why do recruiters log their activity?
-
What specific information are they logging?
-
How are they logging the information?
-
How well does the current experience actually support their needs?
-
What pain points exist in the experience?
🖇️ A note on how I approached synthesis:
The team already knew the current experience was broken. The goal of this research wasn't to prove that. It was to go deeper: why it was painful, what it cost recruiters, what it meant for the business. It was about building a clear, grounded picture of the problem space, so that when it came time to build, they'd know what mattered most and why. This context shaped how I framed the insights.
INSIGHTS
Recruiters primarily log activity for performance tracking, task planning, and documentation. But the current tool didn't support those needs, leading them to work around it or replace it entirely with physical notes, templated documents, and custom spreadsheets.
There were four key pain points with the tool:
-
Inefficiencies in navigation and the data entry process (e.g., manual date entry)
-
Lack of automation and integration within the tool & other tools they frequently use alongside
-
Limited note-taking capabilities (e.g., templates, formatting, sharing)
-
General usability issues (e.g., not-so-visible buttons)
IMPACT
This research helped the team reinforce the importance of solving this problem with leadership (stronger buy-in) and determine the scope and direction of the solution, shaping product requirements. Then we started ideating!
Time to generate some ideas
CONCEPT TESTING
After a few weeks, we were ready to test concepts
WHAT: How well do the concepts match the way recruiters actually think and work? What are the remaining gaps or unmet needs? What value do recruiters see in the concepts?
HOW: 60-min remote concept testing sessions to walk participants through the concepts, capture reactions, and probe deeper where needed
WITH: 8 recruiters, balanced across network offices and roles
Moment of truth
ANALYSIS & SYNTHESIS
Data was analyzed using affinity diagramming to uncover major themes. Analysis was organized around these questions:
-
How useful is bulk logging of activities, including outreaches and interviews?
-
How useful is the ability to set, edit, and track follow-ups and next meetings with candidates?
-
Does the candidate list view give recruiters enough context for task planning?
-
How intuitive are the new input fields?
-
How well do the touchpoints between the main tool and this solution fit into their workflow?
INSIGHTS
Overall, the concepts were well-received. Recruiters saw them as a clear improvement over the current experience. The areas they valued most were a consolidated view of candidates across requisitions, easier access to a candidate's activity history from the candidate view, the ability to track and edit upcoming touchpoints, and bulk logging for multiple candidates, particularly during high-volume outreaches.
However, there were also a few gaps. Recruiters were uncertain about what setting a next meeting would do and expected it to integrate closely with the main tool, wanted to view key details like referral source in the candidate list view, and needed the option to add next touchpoints after logging an activity, not just during. Overall, their expectations around integration with the main tool were high and largely beyond the scope of the current solution.
IMPACT
This research validated the team's direction and directly informed the next round of design iterations, including a clear, prioritized list of improvements to address before launch.
More specifically, these insights influenced design decisions, such as prioritizing the ability to bulk log outreaches, adding missing key details to the candidate list view, and providing the ability to add touchpoints at any point in the workflow. Clearer communication around the purpose of the solution and its relationship to the main tool was also identified as a priority, to avoid setting the wrong expectations with users.
Following the research, we held multiple working sessions to align on priorities and make key design decisions, deciding what to tackle in the MVP and what to carry forward as day 2 improvements.
QUICK FIELD FEEDBACK
As we refined the designs, we took a leaner approach to validation by leveraging our business partners' existing monthly touchpoints with recruiters to gather quick, directional feedback on lower-risk design decisions. While this effort was largely led by our business parnters, it was a collaborative process. I stayed closely informed throughout, reviewing what they learned and supporting their efforts where needed.
BENCHMARK SURVEY
We conducted a survey to establish a baseline for the experience ahead of a major release, as part of our effort to take a yearly pulse and track the impact of improvements over time, including continuous, research-driven enhancements the team made year-round.
WHAT: How satisfied are recruiters with the tool? How easy is the tool to use overall? How easy is the tool to use for key workflows? What are the biggest pain points? How does the experience compare to the previous year's baseline?
HOW: A survey distributed to ~1,600 recruiters who have access to the tool
Another moment of truth
ANALYSIS & SYNTHESIS
CSAT and UMUX-Lite scores were calculated at the tool level to establish an overall baseline. UMUX-Lite was then calculated separately for each key workflow (e.g., sourcing candidates, adding new candidates, logging activity, moving candidates through the pipeline) to get a more granular view of usability across the tool.
Open-ended responses were analyzed using thematic analysis, with pain points coded and clustered into themes based on shared underlying issues. These themes were then mapped against multiple-choice responses about top challenges to identify convergence and divergence across the two data sets and further validate findings.
INSIGHTS
We learned that perceived usability improved compared to last year! Perceived usability scores for key workflows tracked closely with the overall score, with no single workflow significantly outperforming the others. While the overall year-over-year improvement was a win, we also learned that recruiters continued to face challenges with excessive clicks, cumbersome navigation, manual data entry, technical issues, limited candidate visibility, and inefficient candidate search.
IMPACT
While the score itself revealed that there are still opportunities to continue improving the experience, it was still a win and time to celebrate all the work the team has done to move the tool experience in the right direction! It meant that enhancements made throughout the year drove a meaningful change in the experience.
These findings also directly shaped the product roadmap, confirming existing backlog items, surfacing new ones to consider, and helping re-prioritize accordingly. This gave the broader team a shared, evidence-based view of the top challenges to tackle. At the leadership level, showing a meaningful year-over-year gain in perceived usability made a compelling case for sustained investment. The data demonstrated the work was paying off and made a clear case for continued funding.
Moment of celebration
NEXT STEPS
Beyond the internal team, findings were presented directly to the third-party vendor, who engaged with the research and is now working on targeted enhancements to the tool, as well as configurations, based on our research insights. On top of that, a companion solution for activity logging is in the final stages of development and is expected to ship within the coming months!