Aquent User Experience Overhaul

Aquent is evolving its business model from traditional recruiting to an employment solution service provider. Its product ecosystem needs to reflect the new business model with improved user experience and optimized business performance for Aquent’s B2C, B2B, and enterprise products.

Customer-facing (talents) recommendations

1. Streamline talent application experience
2. Optional equal employment opportunity (EEO) and voluntary self-identification questionnaire
3. Inclusive messaging to let talents know why we collect their personal data
4. Messaging to explain how we safeguarding their data

Findings

• analytics show talents often abandon application mid-flow
• 56% of talents find application process lengthy and repetitive
• > 75% of talents think EEO and voluntary self-identification questionnaire unnecessary

Methodologies

• we studied talents usage analytics to understand where talents abandon the application flow
• we crafted and sent out online survey to talents to understand their thoughts on the recruitment process
• we conducted interview with 8 volunteered talents to understand their pain points
• we shared analytics, survey, and interview findings with recruiting teams to map out and confirm pain points

Enterprise recommendations

1. Consolidate and standardize recruiting workflow
2. Leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks
3. Modular and scalable workflow
4. Recruiting agents should focus on high-value tasks
5. Merge overlapped or redundant vendor services

Findings

• > 90% agents use their own ad-hoc workflow outside of the web application because they find it glitchy, unreliable, and hard to use
• 72% agents feel burdened by time-consuming repetitive tasks
• 46% agents found it challenging to accomplish all required tasks without rushing or overworking
• >20% of analytical data aren’t always captured because it relies on manual entry
• all recruiting managers agree they have different and sometimes priorities, and the workflow needs to be customizable
• 3+ teams are using different vendors offering identical or similar services

Methodologies

• we crafted and sent out online survey to all members of the recruiting teams to understand how they utilize the enterprise web app day-to-day
• we interviewed voluntary recruiting agents (3-5 from each team) to understand their pain points and pleasure points
• problem framing workshops with managers to understand challenges of their teams
• hypothesize potential design solutions based on survey, interviews, and workshop findings
• prioritize recommended design solutions based on value/effect analysis and existing constraints
• beta workflow to test out hypotheses
• interview various engineering teams to identify overlapping or redundant services
• reviewed expiring contracts to identify opportunity to eliminate redundant services

Role

• Product Design Lead

Key responsibilities:

• crafted and presented vision and narrative of customer experience and product ecosystem for leadership buy-in
• formulated strategies for research, user surveys/interviews, competitive analysis, and user testings
• created product design timeline and delegated tasks to product pods
• recommended design solutions and technology vendor based on research and discovery findings
• led, coached, and mentored product designers