This blog post is a short summary of the great work the HH tech team has been working on during the month of May 2019. As ever, any thoughts are very welcome.
Agencies Job Hub
The keen eyed among you may have noticed that we alluded to this in last months’ blog. As a reminder, we are putting together a new job hub for our agencies – a refreshed job description page, the profile of the employer offering the role, and a kanban board for a birds eye view of applicants from application to offer. A quick update on this – we’re into our testing phase and hope to release the feature to users in the coming weeks. Keep your eyes peeled – we’re always looking for feedback!
Engagement Experiment
In our eternal pursuit of delighting our Hiring Hub users, we’re continuously developing our platform and service. This not only benefits new users, but makes our current users so much more productive when using HH.
In order to do this, we asked ourselves what our users thought about us and, at the risk of generating a biased result; we decided we ought to ask our users that question.
Getting a balanced view is always important, so we sought answers to the above question from both our employer users and agency users. We focussed on a small group of users who decided HH was no longer working for them, to see what the most important issues were and how we could resolve them.
Our approach to this experiment is to use the service design double diamond method. We will combine our quantitative data (number crunching) with qualitative data (user interviews) in the form of a wall of post-it notes (see below). From there, we will examine the themes that emerge and consider ‘how might we’ statements for those themes.
At Hiring Hub, we have a poignant wall poster that reads “Nothing at Hiring Hub is someone else’s problem”. This is very much the essence of our approach to experiments, as we present the findings to the whole company and encourage everyone to share their ideas on possible solutions.
As well as keeping everyone informed, it creates a sense of shared responsibility and ownership to solve the issues raised, as opposed to pointing fingers.
We’re currently at the halfway stage of the experiment and we’ve already got some interesting findings. Stay tuned for the full report!
Notifications
This month, the team have been finishing up a piece of work on notifications of application actions (application submissions, interview requests & confirmations, job offers etc.). The purpose of these notifications is to quickly take our users to where they need to be in the app to take action. With this new feature, we aim to see feedback time on CVs and application actions falling, meaning our users can enjoy a faster time-to-hire.
We began creating the notification for new application submissions for our employers. For a singular application, the notification will take the employer to the specific candidate page. To make the notifications easier to read, we grouped them together if there was more than one application to a certain job. In this case, the user will be taken to the kanban board, there they can see the status of all applicants to the role.
Next, we moved onto requesting (employer) and confirming (agency) interviews. Both of these notifications take the user to the candidate page (read more on this topic here). Now that users are being deep linked into the appropriate candidate location within the app, it will be much easier to give feedback and take action on applications.
Finally, we began work on the offers notifications – offer made, offer accepted and offer rejected. For dramatic effect, the two screenshots below show these notifications from an agency and employer perspective, respectively, on a single candidate.
What’s next?
Our next undertaking is overhauling our mobile experience using a progressive web app (PWA). There are a bunch of articles on the internet with differing definitions of was a PWA really is, but to us, it allows us to offer a more native like experience utilising our existing tech stack so we can quickly test and learn what is important for our mobile users.
This project is bigger than the refresh work we’ve been doing as of late, so we’ve been slicing it super thin. At present, we’re at the beginning of the build phase with some quick wins. Keep your eyes peeled for next month’s update, where we’ll have some shiny new changes to tell you about!
