Enabling recruiters and hiring teams to hire better.
Date: March 2021-present
Company: Clovers is a seed-stage B2B recruiting technology created with the idea that we could help every company build more talented and diverse (dream) teams and give every person the hiring experience they deserve.
Role: As a founding member of the executive team at Clovers, my role focuses on designing the product experience and marketing. Read more about my role in my resume.
Project type: UX/UI design, customer research
Created with the idea that we could help every company build more talented and diverse (dream) teams and give every person the hiring experience they deserve.
The brief: In 2020, there was incredible disruption in the world; the global pandemic, the focus on equality and human rights, the great resignation, and the move to remote work.
The solution: Build a hiring software experience that meets the demand of the hybrid and remote working environment today that helps businesses hire quickly, hire the best talent out there, and hire inclusively and equitably.
User insights
Goals:
Interview 10 people to uncover trends to help create realistic representations of our key audience segments
6-12 interviews per persona type
Create 3-5 corporate personas
Interview users and record conversations
Building personas using the outside in approach
Setting up the conversations:
First, I reached out to current users, and then, to get even more feedback, I found more similarly profiled users on UserInterviews.com and set up asynchronous interviews. Here is an example email to the customers requesting participation…
Hi [insert name],
We’re always striving to enhance the overall experience for our customers and to help us do that, we’d love to speak to you, hear your thoughts, and understand your goals, priorities, and pain points.
Please note that this is not a sales call. We’d just like 20 minutes of your time to pick your brains and get to know what’s driving you a bit better.
If you’re in, you can book a time and date that suits you here.
Conducting the interviews:
After the feedback request, I immediately added time to the customer calendar and set notifications 5 minutes out and 30 minutes before the call.
Send a reminder email a day before with a personal touch, including a breakdown of what we are asking in-call).
Record calls so you can be present and attentive. Let them know I may be taking notes.
Make sure all questions are open-ended.
Don’t be afraid to deviate from your question list.
Follow each response up with another ‘Why?’
Don’t ask redundant questions.
Have an open mind and take an agile approach, and you’ll continually refine and improve the process as a whole.
Personal
What is your title and what size/industry do you work in?
Director HR for a 200 person tech company reports to CFO
How much technology do you use in your day-to-day working life?
Premade forms in Lever to steer hiring team and tests for candidates
Like the same hiring team for every req (they don't change them out)
We don’t have a strong process
Personality
How would your colleagues describe you?
Natural leader. Thrive at influencing and persuading
Strong communication skills
Organized and ethical
Organized, communicative, · problem-solver, analytical
How would your colleagues describe you?
HR Leader; very important, unbiased conversations are “gut checked” by recruiters, and there is an unbiased roundtable for the org at large.
HR professionals care about DEIB in hiring. Standardizing approach and interviews on performance and outcomes.
Role
What are your main responsibilities?
HR Manager: benefits, recruiting, onboarding, pay, payroll, DEI
Compensation, employee relations (recruiting is big right now)
Sourcing, recruiting, DEI
Recruiting, retention, operations, hiring, associate relations
What metrics are you measured on?
Turnover mostly. Also, the kind of turnover we have, whether it's front-line employees, therapists, or management.
Cost to hire and how much money I’m compensating people.
Retention
Price - So if it's costing me $5000.00 to hire somebody, and then they quit, that looks bad on me because I spent all that money trying to hire them.
Current state
Tell me how you support the candidate experience?
Timely replies, appropriate messaging at the end, communicating why the role was not a fit, thanking them for their time.
White glove approach through every step, intentional with comms, survey at end that sees where we can adjust our processes.
How do you currently make sure bias is not introduced in the hiring process? Is an unbiased conversation important to your hiring process?
HR Leader; very important, unbiased conversations are “gut checked” by recruiters, and there is an unbiased roundtable for the org at large.
HR professionals care about DEIB in hiring. Standardizing approach and interviews on performance and outcomes.
Pains
What are your top three to five internal barriers?
Getting hiring manager time—they are busy.
Not enough people in my department to source and interview
Hiring team helping to close top candidates. Sometimes they are not prepared and organized.
Candidates market; by the time someone is in the door, they already have offers.
What are your top three to five external barriers?
Find people who have not just the knowledge and skills we need, but people who fit into our culture.
The talent pool is not big enough for some of the areas I want to hire.
Figuring out the best candidate can be very hard because you only have the interview and the resume before you hire them. Bad hires happen.
We just can’t find enough diverse candidates overall.
Preferences
Do you have a preference over articles, webinars, videos, podcasts, etc?
Deep understanding from seminars
Podcasts or articles (I usually multitask and can’t watch videos)
Articles (No webinars, videos, podcasts), You can copy and paste snippets of articles to send to people
Short bite-sized information. Short videos, podcasts. No articles as I multitask.
What are your go-to resources for staying up-to-date with the industry?
HR Executive magazine
I also just google exposure stuff every once in a while, like on Google h.r. trends and retention.
Talk to friends, newsletters
Follow SHRM and email newsletters
Email newsletters; HR Guru, ComplianceHR
HR Professionals on LinkedIn
Fast Company, HBR
SHRM, newsletters; HR morning, WorldatWork
Competitive analysis
We took time to understand the landscape of solutions existing before we put pen to paper. We conducted competitive analysis that provided insights into the features, functions, flows, and feelings evoked by the design solutions of our direct and adjacent competitors.
Established design philosophy and standards
Wireframes
Final designs
Created the voice of customer program to keep a pulse of the business.
I collect, aggregate, and communicate to the business customer feedback across channels, such as surveys, interviews, online reviews, support tickets, and sales calls.
A small team analyzes the feedback to identify top strengths and weaknesses impacting retention and new sales.
I set up action plans with peers based on feedback to drive product and go-to-market improvements.
Customer research program
