The challenge
I was part of a small team looking into how Vacancy Filler as a company could provide recruitment solutions for enterprise-level needs – companies with over 5,000 employees, with a variety of recruitment processes, and higher level of autonomy and independence for hiring managers. This was the future of Vacancy Filler's offering.
The approach
For me, the sources of insight and understanding for these enterprise needs were through...
- Learnings from the requirements of existing Vacancy Filler clients; e.g. Aldi, V&A Museum, Busy Bees, Missguided, Lush, & Barnet Borough Council
- Sales team – working very closely with the sales team in touch with Enterprise HR teams
- Reviewing requirements documented in procurement guidelines for submitting tenders to potential organisations such as Ministry of Health, Pendragon, Moto
- Desk-based research – understanding the trends in usage of mobile at work, organisations mobilising their employees to work on mobile devices, and the trends in the future of HR (e.g. through Human Capital Trends by Deloitte)
After discussing our understanding of user needs with the business development manager, I started putting the document below together to gradually define the scope of the MVP of Vacancy Filler Enterprise. This document would also get continuously reviewed and discussed with technical director, head of engineering, and sales director.
Some of the insights
Some of the most essential parts of an enterprise-level solution for the organisations we interacted with were...
- the ability to provide maximum level of autonomy possible for hiring managers to create and manage their own recruitment campaigns.
- providing granular access rights for different types of users (e.g. HR interns, hiring managers, recruitment officers for a parent brand) to respect confidentiality or to reduce the chance of making mistakes.
- The ability to use templated job advert, templated recruitment processes (workflow engine), and templated communications in order to reduce errors, bring consistency in their approach, processes, and communications.
The output
I made mind maps, flow diagrams, and low-fidelity mock-ups of what the solution could be so that all the internal stakeholders could be on the same page but more importantly to discuss ideas and plan with potential clients, get feedback, and improve our understanding of their needs.
High level requirements
To facilitate this high level requirements in an enterprise B2B solution, there are many large building blocks which could come together to facilitate that process. One of these large building blocks is how an job advert is authorised and created.
This large building block comprises multiple smaller building blocks which are shown in the diagram below.
Creating a job advert
in a multi-tiered enterprise on a mobile device
After multiple rounds of internal iteration, the below prototypes was created to demonstrate how Vacancy Filler Enterprise could enable a hiring manager work together with a recruitment officer / HR admin to draft up and post an advert for a job vacancy. This prototype was shown to the client through the sales person and their feedback was collected. Ideally, I'd have liked be the one interacting with the client and also to do more research to understand usefulness, relevance, and ease-of-use of the prototype. but I wasn't able due to lack of access to the users and tools – low maturity in UX design practice.
The interactive PDF below shows the prototype that was sent to the client.
Prototypes are great at bridging imagination gaps and materialising conceptual thinking cheaply. In this case, the prototype helped the client to better understand their expectations of their own internal processes. The 2nd major iteration based on our deeper understanding and client's feedback is shown below.
Potential UI
This is a sample of how it could look.
Here's another one...
The outcome
The business secured a 5 figure contract with one client. However, the business decided to park Vacancy Filler Enterprise as a stand-alone solution and to not sign the contract with that client. The business pivoted the strategy to transfer the planned capabilities of this solution into the standard Vacancy Filler off-the-shelf solution. The reason was that the company couldn't keep up with managing two pieces of software. The standard Vacancy Filler had started to lose clients.