Overview
Proj Name: Bridge Labs Candidate Search to Hire
Platform Web Browser
Key Performance Metric: Conversion Rate, Time spent
Methodology: Competitor Analysis, User Market Research
Role: Lead UX Designer
Bridge Labs’ mission is to connect development teams and hiring managers with top talent from African countries, allowing companies in the United States to take full advantage of this talent pool when looking for affordable developer talent. As the company continues to grow, they sought to build out a process for users to post jobs, conduct interviews, and hire candidates from their platform. This would allow users to complete more of the process independently, resulting in faster conversion times and an experience that could scale with a growth in users and content within the process.
Bridge Labs
The Problem
The initial outlined process for finding and hiring a candidate had too many steps and was confusing.
User Journey
Since the hiring flow would be a net new process, I started with developing a user experience journey map to define the process a user would take to reach conversion (hiring a candidate) and to anticipate any functionalities we would need to integrate into the design. With user research data, I was able to develop a user personas that I could map out on the journey and further ideate what actions a user would be taking during this process. The process entailed, the user creating a job description and scheduling a mandatory consultation call with Bridge Labs. After a shortlist of candidates would be delivered to the user at which point they would be able to schedule interviews. Finally, the user would be able to extend an offer to a candidate from their shortlist.
Mapping out these steps, I identified that the process would need to account for various user needs and friction points. The largest friction point I was able to identify occurred after the job description where the user would need to schedule a consultation for a later date, removing them from the process. Since this delay occurred after the first step of the process, I wanted to improve the user experience by giving the user the ability to schedule the meeting prior to generating a job description. This different path would allow users to complete the job description and consultation on the same call, which would remove the opportunity for user drop off. I was able to determine that the designs would need to account for users hiring multiple candidates for the same and multiple positions within a user’s account. This meant being able to keep the elements organized so that a user could schedule multiple interviews. Keeping this in mind I moved to the wireframe phase thinking of ways to prevent user drop off at this step in the process.
Wireframing
Keeping these concepts in mind we moved onto wireframing the screens, identifying key components and functionalities. We wanted to give the user to the option to schedule their consultation immediately to funnel them through the process with less friction. We accomplished this through including a CTA for users to contact a Bridge Labs specialist for their consultation on the landing page as well as the job description screen. By giving users this option early on in the process, they have the option for a more hands-on assistance in the early stages of the process while avoiding as much of a delay in the event they were to not use this feature. To further convey transparency, we added an additional component on the “waiting for shortlist” screen that outlines the progress to receiving their shortlist.
By using a breadcrumb component, we gave users the ability to easily navigate between the different steps in the process so they would be able to return and edit their job description, while being able to see every step of the process.
Prototyping
With the layout and web elements defined in our wireframes, i collaborated with the lead UI designer (Hermann) to ensure web elements would push the users through the pipeline. We reserved primary CTA colors to be used for interactions that advance them through the funnel, and spent time collaborating on the language used to ensuring clear communication of the functionality behind them.
Results
The prototype for these screens were presented and passed onto the development team, slated for publication during the later portion of 2024. Given the opportunity to continue working on the hiring flow, I would like to conduct qualitative research to gain better insight into user needs and painpoints in the process. I would also like to experiment with different copy used for the CTA’s to see if there is any opportunity to provide more clarity to the users. Since this is a net new user experience for Bridge Labs, I look forward to checking in in the future to better understand user needs and opportunity to improve the usability of the platform.
