NuLeep SaaS Recruiter Platform
UX Design Client Project
Overview
NuLeep is a startup based in Los Angeles, CA dedicated to building a game-changing digital platform for recruiters and job-seekers alike. My team was tasked with building the recruiter-facing SaaS portion of the platform, focusing specifically on emphasizing referred candidates and their skills+values
UX Research & Design Team: Joseph Routt, Anh Tang, Richard Cheng
Tools Used: Figma, Miro, Slack, Zoom
Time Frame: 21 Days
The Problem: NuLeep needs a SaaS platform for recruiters to discover, assess, and track job applicants throughout the hiring process - particularly those with referrals. The solution should be intuitive, visually appealing, and engaging for the younger generations who are quickly commanding a larger demographic share of the workforce.
The Solution: We delivered a desktop SaaS platform which...
• emphasizes job applicants with referrals
• allows recruiters to learn more about applicants' referrals, skill-sets, and values
• provides a variety of communication channels and resources for tracking applicants throughout the hiring process
Specific Client Requests: A social media-like feel for younger generations entering the workforce in the years to come, space for iconography to represent applicants' values, and use of color to quickly reference applicant status
Research
We began our sprint by researching several comparative platforms to NuLeep. While NuLeep sees itself more as an ancillary service than a competitor in the current market of hiring platforms, we wanted to inventory the functions of similar platforms to make sure that we weren't leaving any potential features on the table.
We then conducted interviews with 5 participants with backgrounds in tech recruiting/HR to learn about their work routines, preferences, and pain-points. We laid out all of our interview findings and organized them through affinity mapping. We used the range of sentiments extracted from our affinity map to crafted a user persona - Emily - who represents the combined experiences and attitudes of our user.
Hello, Emily!
Emily's Problem: Emily is a busy recruiter who feels overwhelmed by the number of job applications she is expected to sort through, so she prioritizes applicants with referrals to quickly find the most qualified candidates. However, Emily has difficulty identifying which applicants have referrals, and who those referrals are from.
Emily's Flow: Emily logs onto NuLeep to begin her day and browses through open positions with new applicant submissions. She clicks on a listing for a React Developer career opening to view new applicants. She notices a new applicant with a referral, and immediately clicks to view more about both the applicant and their referral. Emily reviews more of the applicant's provided information and documents before contacting them, updating their status on the platform, and repeating the process.
Design
Once Emily's primary problem had been identified, we were ready to begin the design phase.
NuLeep provided my design team with a color guide and some initial wireframes for their idea of the Recruiter SaaS platform. We made their wireframes into a prototype and our interview participants found the interface to be refreshingly minimal and lacking the clutter of platforms they had used in the past. We worked hard to maintain that simplicity in our design without compromising function and detail.
Initial NuLeep SaaS Mockup
Initial NuLeep SaaS Mockup
My team's first round of design studio and medium-fidelity wireframes iterated on NuLeep's initial designs, incorporating familiar aspects of popular social media platforms to make the flow familiar and quickly learnable.
I added several sort options to the top of the applicant listings page so that Emily has quick options to order her list of applicants, making sure to include a "Referrals" option that will only display applicants who have at least one. There is also a search bar for Emily to quickly locate candidate and job info by key words and terms.
We added a media player to the applicant info card with the idea that applicants could provide an audio or video file of their "elevator pitch" to accompany their application info if desired. Now that we are accounting for the global health crisis of COVID-19, we explored ideas such as this one that could supplement the interpersonal aspects of the hiring process that have been lost to social distancing measures (such as networking events, career fairs, etc). We eventually chose to omit the feature to keep the platform light and lean, but still kept the health crisis in mind with features to come.
We continued to build out our Medium Fidelity Prototype, making iterations to NuLeep's initial screenshots to best suit Emily's needs. Once we had prototyped the wireframes to match Emily's flow for finding new candidates, we had 3 users test the flow via Zoom calls with screen sharing enabled. The general success of our test participants validated our design decisions, while still gaining great insights as to our participants' wants and expectations as they traveled along Emily's flow.
Our testers provided us particularly helpful insights regarding their expectations for the hierarchy and alignment of candidate information, which we implemented in our final high-fidelity build. They responded positively to the lack of "clutter" in the UI that had been a pain-point on previous recruitment platforms they had used for work.
High Fidelity Prototype
Our final deliverable was a modern, learnable, and friendly feeling SaaS platform for recruiters like Emily to discover new applicants and comprehensively track them throughout the hiring process.
Jobs are listed in a single column of cards, with abilities to sort and search among them for keywords. Gold notification indicators give Emily a quick sense of where
Applicants with referrals are clearly noted with a bold, gold banner in the Applicant List so Emily can quickly identify them and process their information.
The Applicant Information Card is displayed with familiar and quickly learnable cues from popular social media sites, and the "Contact Now" button on the Applicant Info Card with the friendly NuLeep teal color encourages recruiters like Emily to follow-up with each candidate as they are either advanced along the hiring process or declined.
The efficient Contact Window that opens from the Applicant Info Card allows Emily to quickly contact applicants with an autofilled message. It also allows her to view more applicant resources, links, and communication channels.
Usability Testing: Round 2
After completing our High Fidelity Prototype, I created another usability test on the platform Maze to gather another set of user data, primarily quantitative. By the time of delivery, the test saw 12 participants combine for a successful usability score of 83 which validated our final design. Artifacts such as heatmaps and task analytics gave provided our team and client with comprehensive insights to how users interacted with particular tasks to inspire future iterations to the platform's functionality.
Project Highlights
Working on NuLeep's recruiter platform was a unique experience that pulled me out of my comfort zone. The world of recruiting was somewhat new and unfamiliar to my team, so diving deep into the research to understand our users and craft a persona was a
Next Steps
• Make referral information more intuitively expandable
• Complete the buildout for sharing applicant profiles and posting job listings
• Develop a brand guide to keep NuLeep's representation consistent
Thank you for taking the time to review my case study.
Please feel free to reach out to josephroutt@gmail.com with any questions or feedback, and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn!