2023

Facilitating equitable hiring practices for talent acquisition

Overview

Acquiring diverse talent is challenging due to unconscious biases and short hiring timelines, leading to homogeneity in the workplace.

Our clients were founders of a new candidate screening platform that sought to promote equitable and inclusive hiring practices. Over a 10-week sprint, we created an AI-driven screening tool that eliminated bias triggers and improved time-to-hire, leveling the playing field for job seekers overlooked the most.


My contributions

Customer Research

Product Design

The team

x2 Customer Researchers

x1 Customer Research Lead

x1 Product Lead

x3 Engineers

x1 Project Lead

Timeframe

June 2023 - Sep 2023

The problem space

Current hiring practices still use traditional methods that lack bias mitigation, relying heavily on resume screening where factors like names, gender, and racial identifiers often exclude nontraditional candidates. We aimed to transform resumes into an unbiased, holistic view of a candidate’s full potential.

TA Managers, HR Leaders, and Job Seekers are crucial for a diversity-focused screening tool. TA Managers would be the primary users, HR Leaders control purchasing decisions, and understanding Job Seekers' needs was crucial to ensure our tool's features effectively supported them.

Correcting early assumptions

Our initial assumptions about our primary stakeholders’ challenges evolved through research. After 80 interviews, we corrected our early hypotheses by validating the real struggles TA Managers, HR Leaders, and Job Seekers face during the hiring process.

Concept testing

The needs we identified guided our ideation of an AI-driven system that could facilitate candidate screening for TA Managers while helping Job Seekers optimally present themselves to potential employers.

I created several different concept cards and storyboards detailing how this system would impact our primary stakeholders, with primary benefits being related to screening efficiency, richer candidate profiles, and bias mitigation.

Tests with 30 Job Seekers and 25 HR Leaders & TA Managers showed strong desirability for our value proposition and allowed us to transition to solution development.

Rapid solution validation

Capitalizing on this momentum, I helped create a prototype that evolved into our initial MVP. It was key for the solution to demonstrate value quickly and be tested with customers immediately, so the design focused on functionality and the ability to be quickly implemented by our engineers.

Key Features

  • Standardizes a talent view for each open job posting

  • Organizes applicant skills & experiences to match job requirements and highlights transferable skills

  • Removes cues for unconscious biases related to previous companies and gender, racial, and heritage identifiers

For MVP testing, we asked TA Managers & HR Leaders to provide a single job description and a handful of resumes to us, returning candidate profiles to them within 24 hours. Our engineers created over 900 unique candidate profiles, allowing our primary stakeholders to experience our value proposition quickly and across varied roles.

Outcome

In retrospect, our ability to atomize our solution to deliver its core benefit in 24 hours was instrumental to the success of our MVP, which secured 6 pilot customers in the final 10 days of our sprint.

The product has since secured several $MM of funding from angel investors and, after being further developed under our client’s leadership, has launched into the market.

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