REDESIGNING RECRUITMENT

Optimizing the recruitment process between IT Hiring Managers and HR Recruiters

Feb 2022 - 3 Day Virtual Workshop
Size - 3 Team Members, 11 Participants
Role - UX Researcher | Workshop Facilitator

Jump to Section: Background | Solution | Impact | Retrospective | Contact

BACKGROUND

CLIENT

Vizient is a leading healthcare performance improvement company known for its data-driven insights and expertise in supply chain management.

They help healthcare organizations optimize purchasing processes, leveraging data and negotiation power to secure better prices on medical supplies, resulting in cost savings and increased efficiency.

CHALLENGE

In response to a growing demand for technological solutions, spurred in part by the pandemic, Vizient has found themselves requiring a larger workforce within their IT department.

To help with this effort, IT hiring managers and HR recruiters have asked me and my team to help them meet Vizient’s hiring needs as effectively as possible, as they currently have about 400 full-time employees in their IT department and aim to double that number.

GOAL

Review the current state recruitment process to identify and prioritize pain points and ideas for improvement.

SOLUTION

We embrace the principles of the design thinking methodology and first half of the double diamond process model to guide our approach.

By providing activities aimed at facilitating empathy with the various stakeholders in the hiring process, we encourage participants to delve deep into their experiences and gain an intricate understanding of the challenges involved.

As the workshop unfolds, each activity complements the other, allowing the team to progressively visualize the entire situation and, most importantly, to emerge from the workshop with a clear, well-informed direction to address the complexities and intricacies of the hiring process.

Agenda

1) Map Current State

The first step is to map out the recruitment process and interactions between the players involved.

Journey Map
*Please note that all images are intentionally zoomed out and left blurred for PHI and security reasons

Before ideating on a solution it is important to align the team on how things are currently being done.
A Journey Map helps document the interactions between hiring managers, recruiters, and other parties involved.
Using this framework and open dialogue, I was able to help the team break the process into five distinct phases and identify the steps, backstage interactions, pain points, ideas for improvement, and questions within each phase.
The surfaced pain points highlighted issues in the process that need to be addressed. These pains would then be prioritized and serve as a starting point for the idea generation activity.
Backstage Actions:
What actions support the user's journey outside of the users line of sight?
What internal steps, interactions, or processes support the user journey?
Pain Points:
What do you as a user not like about the current state process?
What is causing friction in your recruitment effort?
Ideas for improvement:
What are those “A-ha!” moments, ideas for improving current processes?
How do they mitigate the pain points mentioned in the prior question?
Questions:
Is there anything that is unclear about this step?
What questions do you need answered in order to move forward?

2) Prioritize Pain Points

With the current state mapped and pain points identified, we moved on to prioritization.

Prioritized Pain Points and Pain Point Themes

Before getting into solution building it is important to understand the pains we are trying to solve for.
This activity is designed to help conceptualize the severity of the issues that were documented in the Journey Map.
The activity started with participants placing their ideas from the previous activity on a scale. This scale used three emoji faces (neutral, upset, and angry) to help convey the urgency of the pain as well as a top and bottom section to indicate whether the pain point was personal (individual-specific) or process-related (system bottleneck). These two sections would help participants understand how it relates to the individual.
The placement of each idea was up to the owners’ discretion. Once all sticky notes were placed, I did a readout of each one to review the idea and confirm the placement. This also gave participants the space to hold any needed conversations for particular pain points.
Following the placement of pain points, the leaders sought to delve deeper into the exercise by identifying overarching themes. In real-time, we modified the activity to pinpoint themes and rank them based on the leaders' preferences.

3) Ideas for Improvement

With a clear understanding of where the pains in the process lie, the team was now ready to brainstorm and prioritize potential ideas for improvement.

Ideas for Improvement Based on Top Three Pains and Prioritization Matrix

This process aims to provide an equitable space for all ideas.
Giving all ideas consideration not only improves your likelihood of finding the best solution to the problem, but also strengthens the team dynamic.
To optimize our time, we concentrated our ideation efforts on the top three pain points identified in the previous activity.
After participants recorded their ideas for the top three pain points, everyone was given the opportunity to share with the group.
Guiding Pain Point Questions
1) How might we improve the feedback SLAs across the recruitment process?
2) How might we improve the approval process?
3) How might we prioritize hiring?
To help gauge the potential of each idea we used an Impact Effort Matrix.
To help create a more manageable list, participants were asked to select their top three ideas from each pain point question.
The result was a set of focused and achievable process and technical changes for the team to choose from.
Top Ideas
- Keep process in Workday but with email notifications (Feedback SLAs)
- Better upfront information on budgeted projects so we can better plan for staffing needs in advance (Approval Process)
- Block off times on calendar dedicated to doing interviews (Prioritize Hiring)
- If you have an open req or are on an interview panel, block off time on your calendar weekly (Prioritize Hiring)

IMPACT

Smoother and more transparent recruitment process, resulting in 400+ new hires over the span of two years - effectively doubling the department’s workforce

4.75/5 Stars - Workshop attendees’ average ‘Overall Workshop Experience’ feedback score

Attendee Feedback: “Your team did a good job guiding - the activities and facilitation made space for everyone to share and engage in dialogue.”

RETROSPECTIVE

Our team is committed to refining our practice by soliciting feedback through a voluntary assessment form and conducting an internal postmortem.

The feedback form serves as a swift means to gather insights from participants about their three-day experience while the postmortem is a dedicated hour to review the workshop.

Below are my takeaways from the experience.

Personal Takeaways

Establish firm expectations with new client leads. This will allow them to support their team and the facilitators to the best of their ability throughout the workshop process.

Consider theming ideas during Pain Point activities, particularly with large groups, to help facilitate concise problem definitions
Avoid using descriptive quadrant headers in the Impact Effort Matrix activity when to prevent unintentional bias when prioritizing ideas to allow for more objective evaluation
- Good rule of thumb is to prevent bias whenever possible
Activity simplicity is key: prioritize a board that is easy to manipulate and comprehend over an intricately designed one; excessive designs can hinder adaptability in real time

Note: After a workshop concludes, our role as a design thinking team ends. We assist teams in understanding their challenges and generating solutions, but the responsibility for implementing the proposed solutions lies with the team itself.

Thank you for reading my case study!

Need help designing a User Journey? Let’s connect!

Please feel free to contact me at austinleeburton@gmail.com or fill out the form below!

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