Create An Intuitive Dashboard To Increase Engagement For New/Old Users
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. The current hiring experiences at Microsoft is a great opportunity for product designers to rise - the fragmentation of tools and information, along with a lack of system visibility. Headtrax, iCIMS, Dynamics, and Excel... those are just some of the key apps Microsoft hiring are relying on. There are even more...
Designers play influence on the product strategy by balancing the need of urging business solution and the best user experience. We understand the business and technology constraints and how that impacts design. More importantly, we need a holistic and systematic view on the work flow for big corps like Microsoft.
Working closely with the design lead of CSEO studio, I was the primary driver of hiring experiences in Microsoft Manager Hub from August 2019 to Jan 2020. I partnered with one project manager to translate concepts into features that addressed hiring pain points, and one UX researcher to incorporate user feedbacks into iterative designs.
From crafting user journey maps, to creating wireframes and prototypes, I shared my content strategy to the leadership team for an inclusive hiring at Microsoft, towards not only quick win strategies but also the long term vision.
With the pre-existing insights from client's research and deeper understandings through our drayage studies and client meetings, we breakdown the high-level goal to more actionable challenges:
Create An Intuitive Dashboard To Increase Engagement For New/Old Users
Automate And Digitize The Manual Coordination
Prioritize Daily Actionable Items On The Dashboard
Optimize And Simplify The Visual
Hiring is never easy. The biggest hiring challenge for Microsoft is the fragmentation across disparate, unintuitive tools; navigating the process using these tools hurts the candidate experience, making it harder to hire great people. It was built with the intention of making hiring managers more accountable and trying to put everything in the same place. However, the actuality of it is that the tools are extremely cumbersome and drive a worse candidate experience because of all the nuances between the various tools.
Import Coordinator
Jenny's
Pain Points
• Manually tracking containers
• Manually releasing holds/fees
Trucking Coordinator
Maritza's
Pain Points
• Scheduling appointments via calls
• Manually invoicing customers
Those insights are gained from the CSEO initial research. The scope is big and influential. It is reimagining hiring experience at Microsoft and involves different stakeholders and intricate work flows. I kicked off by studying the relationship between the hiring partners, which later serves as the foundation for an inclusive and visionary journey map.
Hiring becomes easier when your stakeholders are cooperative, able to quickly see the status of jobs and complete required tasks with ease. A more effective relationship between different hiring partners will provide hiring visibility and drastically reducing the time to fill vacancies. With the insights gained from initial research, I studied the responsibilities and priorities of different hiring personas involved in this journey.
Hiring Managers (HM)
Screening candidates filtered by recruiters and admins.
Requesting interviews for advanced candidates.
Facilitating offer negotiation process with management team and post-offer activities with candidates.
Empowering recruiters and admins with ease to hire.
Ensuring hiring process is compliant.
Recruiters
Filtering and screening candidates for hiring managers.
Facilitating hiring process with HMs, admins, and candidates to reduce their time to hire.
Ensuring effective communication between the candidates and HMs.
Admins
Helping HMs with drafting and posting job descriptions
Creating Headtrax accounts for positions to make sure the finance department aligned.
Facilitating resume reviews with HMs and recruiters.
Ensuring staying within budget.
Interview Schedulers
Setting up interview appointments
Adjust interview details if needed to facilitate various situations of interviewers and candidates.
Ensuring the interview process is compliant
An important game player - the candidate - is not included in the persona study, although the actions made by candidates are connecting the dots of the hiring journey and are carefully considered in our hiring journey map.
Under this broad visionary scope, two parallel strategies are planned to accommodate business needs and user experience needs. In other words it is short term versus long term. Quick win versus vision. Pain relieving patches versus overhaul. The more pressing need appears on the quick win side - the team is preparing a Manager Hub V2 launch. With that being said, the friction of hiring manager tasks needs to be allievated.
Several rounds of white-boarding and meeting with researchers and project managers, I outlined the major road blockers for the next product launch regarding the hiring manager flow.
The existing Manager Hub provides an entry card to present hiring managers the most recent active positions in their hands. But given the definition of Microsoft Manager Hub, recruiters, admins, and schedulers are excluded out of the authority of Manager Hub. The pressing product launch related to hiring is only about hiring managers. Breaking down hiring managers challenges:
• Promote actionable items to hiring managers on Manager Hub dashboard
• Ease the process for hiring managers to find the status of positions
• Provide hiring manager the capability to look up candidates
• With an understanding of the dependence on external tools for this launch
Given the limitations of Manager Hub, what we can help hiring managers with were basically wrappers of 3rd party tools. Hiring pipelines could be presented on Manager Hub with actions surfaced - beyond that we still need to jump out to complete the tasks.
Hiring Manager V2 on Manager Hub
Dashboard
Side Navigation
Delivery Order List
Container List
After the new design was delivered, I participated six user testing sessions to discover whether the hiring manager experience in Manager Hub can unlock value outlined in the UX goals for the product - allow managers to quickly discover their hiring info, and take action on it. We tested several task flows to ensure the new design met the UX goals for streamlining and refining the process.
Key findings of 6 user testings:
• Hiring manager participants were excited by and supportive of the Hiring Manager designs – they were specifically excited to see details of their open reqs that spanned the full, end-to-end hiring process with a look & feel that was clean and easy to understand.
• However, participants didn’t feel like the current designs allowed them to quickly take action on their hiring tasks – hindering their ability to take action was having to complete certain steps in the 3rd party iCIMS tool as well as the lack of Manager Hub support for allowing tasks to be completed by those working on behalf (WOB) of the hiring manager.
• Specifically, hiring manager participants wanted to see more details on the candidates and the interviews that had been scheduled – having these details in the Hiring Manager portal of Manager Hub would effectively alleviate a pain point with the current system by getting those details out of email and into a place where they could be more easily accessed and used.
Endorsed by the user testing findings, I continued the hiring journey mapping with the pre-established hiring personas. The vision exploration was greatly supported by the leadership team (Jie Dong, Bing Zhu, and Maria Cameron etc) - kudos to the insights they provided from their hiring experiences! Pulling together all the feedback inspired me of reimagining the hiring experience not only for the hiring managers but for all the team players. The hiring journey map below presents a holistic view of the hiring flow, collaborators, product touch points, and how Microsoft employees felt about the existing experiences.
The vision gets clear - an Inclusive, Intelligent, Relevant, and Reliable hiring platform at Microsoft. Different personas will own different dashboard cards to facilitate their priorities and tasks, but with an unified framework to support the ecosystem. I trekked through sketches, white-boarding and wireframes and created the following prototype, as a starting point to increase recruitment efficiencies for quality hire at Microsoft.
In January 2020, I presented the hiring vision to the leadership team and received applause regarding the framework and the approach. Positive comments are also received regarding the design directions towards different hiring personas. The hiring vision is aligned with CSEO studio, HR Web, and the overall employee experience we were trying to build at Microsoft. Although it's sad to leave half-way of the vision, I am glad to receive some farewell messages like below –
"I was very impressed with your quick response, awesome collaboration, and high-quality design work. Sad to see you leave but I have very much enjoyed working with you and getting to know you!"
Jie Dong (Design Lead)
"Tingran, you rocked the hiring experience design and business partners really loved the progress we made in the design space!"
Tharanian Mahendran (Product Manager)
"Tingran had tremendous impact in the hiring manager space, and I’m so grateful for her collaboration and excellent design work."
Lyndee Kemp (UX Researcher)
To comply with the non-disclosure agreement, in this case study I have omitted the dashboard page for persona Maritza, the expanded view of containers, and pages with confidential information.
© 2021 TINGRAN LIU