Candidate Management System
For this project, our aim was to create a tracking system that enables employers to track and monitor candidates' applications and progress. The primary goal was to make it as user-friendly as possible while providing all the functions that are expected to be present in an ATS.
Market Research
We started the project with market research to understand the potential mental models that employers might have. This gave us ideas about what we could do and what we should have for this candidate management system.
Whiteboarding
Next, we went on to do some whiteboarding to explore what the design could be. This exercise also led us to a common ground where we all knew what we wanted to build and the main structure of the design.
User Research
After whiteboarding, we felt like we had some ideas about where we wanted to go, but we still had some unanswered questions. For example:
How many stages of progress do we actually need?
Do we need a rejected pile?
What is the most important information to see at a glance?
Therefore, we decided to send emails to the employers we were already working with and ask if they had 20 minutes of spare time to talk about the product we were building for them.
We spoke with three companies and gathered valuable insights about candidate management.
Design
For the triaging part, we structured the page with different stages of candidate progression.
Regarding the candidate information part, the main challenge was organising all of the information in a small screen while also providing clear calls-to-action for employers to sort candidates in the same space.
For design, we separated it into two parts. The first part is the candidate sorting and stage management, while the second part is displaying candidates' information. This allowed us to focus on one thing at a time.
Final Design
The final design aims to enable employers to triage and sort candidates, as well as review their personal information. There were also concerns about whether employers would know if the candidates they were seeing had already been filtered previously. Hence, we added a line informing them about it.
Aligning the design with the design system was another challenge. Since we had never built something as comprehensive as this system before, we felt that the design system wasn't enough to support this work.
Scoped-out tasks
The final version aimed to create just the MVP of the design. We scoped out some of the functions and questions from this design and made them into separate design tasks so that we could tackle different things at different times.