NAUKRI.COM
RMS
Naukri.com is a branch of Info Edge (I) Ltd. It is one of the top 5 Jobsites in India that offers a wide range of products and services for both job seekers and recruiters. Recruitment Management System (RMS) is a product of Naukri.com for the recruitment domain. It is a cloud-based Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and response management tool. This project is about the complete redesign of RMS.
Role
Solo UX Designer, 2 PMs, and an Engineering Team. My role included:
Web App Design
System Design
Tools
Sketch, Zeplin
Design Research
UX
UI
Timeline
6 months
Context
RMS is a recruitment solution that automates the hiring process right from requisition to offer. It is a cloud-based comprehensive Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and response management tool that enables recruiters to create, post, and manage job requirements, across multiple platforms, from a single space. It has two variants based on the two user segments- Enterprise version for corporate clients and Consultancy version for recruitment consultancies.
RMS is one of the early products of Naukri.com. Over the years, new features just kept piling onto the existing system as per the needs of the individual clients. This ultimately led to a platform that is complex, time-consuming, and complicated to use. There was a need to relook at the job of the platform and weed out the unnecessary features. With the changing market needs and the emerging competition, modifications to the system were needed to keep it useful and usable. The success of other Naukri recruitment products such as the job seeker database (one of the largest job seeker databases in India) also posed an opportunity for its meaningful integration with RMS, to make it a one-stop recruitment solution.
Challenge
Increase acceptance and adoption of RMS.
Explore the existing web application and identify the challenges that corporate and consultancy clients encounter while using this product for their recruitment process.
High-level goals:
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Reimagine the product such that it fits perfectly in the current recruitment context
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Provide seamless integration of distinct task flows into a unified workflow
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Create an intuitive and simple platform that is able to handle large data and complex processes
Kickoff
At the outset, the project scope was broad, lacking well-defined specific goals. I started with research to gather insights about the recruitment domain, the hiring process, and our product. This was a prerequisite to understanding the users' concerns and thus building a meaningful solution.
Getting acquainted
To have meaningful conversations with our clients and understand their requirements, the first and foremost step was to get familiarized with the recruitment process. I conducted basic research, interacted with the hiring managers, in-house recruiters, and teammates who had been part of a hiring loop. This gave me an idea of how complex this space was and motivated me to deep-dive. Following are some bits of the foundational information I gathered.
Recruitment process overview
NEED
CORE ACTIVITY
The above image is just a high-level view of the recruitment activity. The idea was to get acquainted with the recruitment vocabulary, individual roles and responsibilities, timelines, tools used and the challenges faced.
Recruitment trends
I gathered that although recruitment seems like a standard sequential process, it is much more complex and dynamic. Over the years, the process of finding the right fit evolved from newspaper job ads to headhunting a candidate pool to hire via social media. The candidate requirements and interview processes evolved too. To remain contextual to our users for a foreseeable future, it was important that we align our product with the industry trends. Some of the recruitment trends for 2018 were:
Diversity: Companies creating a workforce with varied educational and cultural background to promote productivity and innovation
Remote working option: Recruiters, interviewers, and candidates majorly connecting over the internet
Virtual reality: Virtual office tours and simulated environment for online interviews, especially while hiring offshore
AI and machine learning: Faster, more efficient, and unbiased automated first level candidate screening
Marketing based approach: Employers advertise to their target audience in order to attract future employees
Consultancy and in-house recruitment
Info Edge offers different versions of RMS to recruitment consultancies and enterprises. It was thus important to understand their distinct workflows and requirements to make the most optimal product offerings. We, fortunately, had both a recruitment consultancy (Quadrangle, a division of Info Edge Ltd) and an in-house recruitment department under a single roof (Info Edge is the parent company of Naukri.com for which this project was undertaken). Approaching people within the same organization was easier and thus it helped me gain an initial understanding of how differently these two operate. This further prepared me to meet our clients and understand their specific requirements. The details of the interviews and insights are covered in later sections. The key distinctions identified were:
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Consultancies need to track client invoice and billing
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Consultancies need more elaborate reports for recruiter's performance as incentives are usually tied to performance
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A supervisor is usually the point of contact (communicates with the client company) for consultancies and has administrative rights
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Interview scheduling, feedback, discussions, and candidate onboarding are more deeply associated with the in-house recruiting
Knowing the product
The next pivotal step was to understand our product in detail. Along with the general concepts of an ATS, it was important to understand, RMS offerings and promises, functionality, features, issues, market placement, and the competitor products. Being a first-time user further helped me conduct an unbiased assessment of our product (I validated the findings based on interactions with the actual users).
An ATS primarily parses resumes and helps in candidate screening based on keywords. These resumes can be a part of a personal or shared database, submitted over email or social media sites. Like other ATS, RMS offers candidate screening. Other than that it provides the following:
Career Site: Mobile-friendly, responsive career site to build an online brand. Post jobs and share them across the web.
Application Tracking: Update candidate status in real-time.
Jobs on the Web: Job sharing across Naukri, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Higher appearance in Google search results and automated social sharing.
Naukri Advantage: Benefits of being completely integrated with Naukri.com such as job posting on Naukri & personal site using a single form, familiarity with the interface.
Private Database: Responses from other job boards; resumes from emails, excel, pdf, doc, outlook, and zip files; all in a single database.
Evaluating the product
It was time to put the system to test and see how it performed. I along with 2 senior UX Designers and a Design Intern conducted a heuristic evaluation of the web application.
Heuristic evaluation findings
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We found the app has a steep learning curve, as the 'recognition rather than recall' principle was majorly challenged. Though this platform is to be used by trained professionals there were unnecessary complexities in some basic features, such as the 'add profiles' and 'search' examples shown in the above images.
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There were numerous consistency-related issues, leading users to assume or memorize information, thus increasing the chances of mistakes and reduced productivity.
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Some features which might have been initially designed for a small data set were not optimized when the database became huge making it further less efficient to use.
We compiled all the issues, segregated those as per the sections in the app, and assigned severity.
Product benchmarking
I worked with the Product Management team to analyze our competitor products. Some offered a free trial version which gave us a chance to explore their features in detail. We studied 10 competitor products Lever, Recruitee, Workable, Hire, Hirecraft, Taleo, TalentNow, Ziprecruiter, Greenhouse, and Bullhorn. We narrowed it down to 6 competitors with certain well-defined features. One such example is Greenhouse. It has a dynamic dashboard, customized as per the user's profile and the day's agenda. It provides visible task flows making it easy to go to the next step or return to the previous one. Following are just a few images from Greenhouse.
Dynamic Dashboard
Easy Approvals
Visible Task Flows
Candidate Feedback/Scorecards
Walking in the users' shoes
The utmost important step of this research was to empathize with the users and get their perspective on our product. To achieve this, I did the following:
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Shadowed one of the in-house recruiters
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Posted an internal job requirement with the help of a recruiter and a hiring manager; managed the initial responses
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Interviewed recruiters and other users of the product at our client companies
User interviews
Selecting the right demographic is a prerequisite to capture wider user perspective in a limited amount of time. I conducted interviews with 22 RMS clients as per the distribution in the chart.
BUSINESS
RMS USAGE
LOCATION
Goal:
Key findings:
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Capturing details of the daily activity of recruiters, Hiring Managers, and TA Heads
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Identifying for which activities they rely on the software and to what extent
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Understanding the pain points and gaps the users encounter while using this software
Interview method:
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Contextual, semi-structured interviews
Participants:
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Mix of consultancy and enterprise clients, further categorized by low, medium and high RMS usage
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Job posting is tedious, an easy way is needed to share the same job across multiple platforms
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The current filters for incoming application are inefficient, users have to spend additional time manually finding the relevant profiles and storing them under separate folders
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The interview management module is confusing and rigid, users need customizable selection process
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Report generation is a lengthy process, auto-generated reports, customized as per user profile are required
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Users maintain personal notes outside the system as the system doesn't provide notifications and there are no standard templates for generic communications
User experience mapping
We created a persona, Sandhya, with a specific user story to detail out user's interaction with the system. We created a map thinking from Sandhya's perspective, at each step, what does she want from RMS, and how RMS responds to the user's need. This helped us further to identify and segregate the areas of improvement in the system.
Click on the image to see the complete user journey
Project scoping
Research gave us enough data points to understand what's working well and what needs to be improved in the existing system. To begin with, we limited the scope of the new designs to MVP for the enterprise version. This was decided as the enterprise version is a subset of the consultancy version (except for some minor tweaks). The idea was to first design the MVP for primary tasks before moving onto the ancillaries.
Opportunity mapping
Based on the insights gathered, summing up the opportunity areas identified for primary tasks.
01
JOB CREATION & POSTING
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A connection between hiring mandate and job posting form
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A connection between hiring mandate and job posting form
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Smart and short job posting form
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Job Description auto-fill options
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Ease of sharing jobs on multiple platforms
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Auto candidate search based on posting
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Single global search
02
CANDIDATE SOURCING AND PIPELINE
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Easy candidate sourcing from multiple platforms
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Flexibility in maintaining a personal database
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Candidate details highlighted in relation to the search terms
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Relevant search results and filters
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Auto-response to candidates (as required)
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Handling duplicate candidate profiles
03
SELECTION PROCESS & INTERVIEWS
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Customizable selection process
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Collaboration between Interviewees and hiring team members
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Feedback management
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Calendar blocking
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Offer management
04
COMMUNICATION
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Two-way email integration
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Communication threads
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A quick way to connect to the hiring team
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Searchable comments
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Reminders and Notifications
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Auto forward mails
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Better mail templates, better content, and formatting
Besides these there are a few other optimizations required in the system for:
REPORTS
Contextual graphical reports that are easy to interpret, with customization and forwarding options.
DASHBOARD
A personalized dashboard with user-based widgets and customization options. It should provide a summary of overall system activity, updates, and alerts.
System flow and information architecture
I started with a high-level map, just listing out the core modules and the primary flow. Iterated by adding the submodules and high-level information under those. Each element (jobs, candidates, reports, etc.) of the system was then put on a sticky note. Participants (in-house recruiters) were asked to arrange the sticky notes to form groups. They were then asked to put those groups in a hierarchy. This was used to build the web application’s Information Architecture (IA). It further helped me to define the sitemap and navigation.
Information architecture
After defining a system-level structure, it was time to define the IA for individual sections. Similar to building IA for the system, IA for each section was built using a card sorting exercise with the recruiters.
Paper prototypes & wireframing
Paper prototypes worked as a great tool to visualize and quickly iterate the concepts. It helped in discussions and brainstorming sessions with the team. The next step was to convert the selected prototypes into digital wireframes. It was easier to take feedback from the recruiters and the higher management using the wireframes.
Designs proposed
Dashboard
Key modifications required:
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Show overall system activity and actionable
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Provide activity updates and alerts
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User-based widgets and customization options
Existing
PROPOSED
Ability to quickly add and manage activities to be done. A simple daily checklist.
Activity updates on jobs, a recruiter is working on, with the ability to filter these updates.
Easy to access the calendar view of upcoming interviews and joinings.
A personalized and dynamic welcome bar that gets updated according to the upcoming event.
Job Creation & Posting
Key modifications required:
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Less effort in filling the form
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The form should have smart elements to assist the user
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Form prefill using Mandate and previous similar job posts
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Easy job sharing across multiple platforms
Existing
PROPOSED JOB CREATION
Ability to quickly add hiring team members and manage access rights, particular to this requirement.
Enter job details or save a draft for later.
Requisition ID helps quickly link a job with its parent requisition and fetch details such as Job Description (JD) which were entered in the JD.
PROPOSED JOB POSTING FORM
Step indicator for better visibility of current position in the process.
Quick form filling based on system suggested similar jobs posted in past.
Success toast.
Short perceived length.
Help for writing a JD, based on selection. Suggested points under each category are based on the role entered.
Easy way to create, customize and save questionnaires.
Ability to post on multiple job boards and social media networks simultaneously.
Illustrations and graphics to enhance visual appeal of the product, particularly highlighting milestones such as task completions.
Job Listing
Key modifications required:
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Better scanability and filters
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Quick actions on jobs
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Better system visibility (candidates in the pipeline)
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Updates and alerts on current jobs
Existing
PROPOSED
Contextual filters upfront.
Hiring Team with each job for easy identification.
Activity updates and quick access to notes on every job.
Job status.
Job Details
Key modifications required:
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Based on job details system should suggest actions to make quick hiring
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It should show the activity timeline of the job along with an overview
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It should show the candidate pipeline and provide its easy management
Existing
PROPOSED
Quick actions on the job
Candidate pipeline
Filters contextual to the selected pipeline stage and view switcher
Quick actions on candidates profiles
Candidate list view for quick scanning and adjacent detailed view for quick actions
Excel view for an audience more comfortable in using excel sheets
Side Drawer for job details, notes, activity timeline, and reports particular to the job
Predictive reports based on the past activity
Candidate Sourcing
Key requirements:
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Integration of candidate databases for a unified search
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Ability to source from multiple channels
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Keyword search and better scanning
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Ease of adding candidates to pipeline/personal database
Candidate sourcing not integrated with the current system
PROPOSED
Personal or Naukri’s database search based on keyword, job title, skills...
Frequently used filters upfront
Highlighted matching keywords for quick scanning
Chat option
Chrome extension that parses and adds the candidate details and also allows manual
adding of candidate details to help move a candidate into a personal database
Quick action on an added candidate or ability to view the same candidate in the
system
Candidate Database
Key modifications required:
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Better filters
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Updates and notifications on the candidate profile
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Ease of collaboration between hiring team members
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Easy movement of candidate in the pipeline
Existing
PROPOSED
Option to choose between all candidates and candidates you sourced
Quickly move a candidate in the pipeline
Different view options (Excel, expanded or collapsed card)
Chat option
Expanded card view
Collapsed card view
Candidate Details
Key modifications required:
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Candidate history and timeline management
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Show current status, feedbacks, and actions taken on a candidate profile
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Quick actions on a profile
Existing
PROPOSED
Quick actions
Candidate details and history
in the system
Candidate timeline, comments, feedback, and documents repository
Ability to quickly move a candidate in the pipeline or mark as not suitable.
Interviews & Hiring
Key modifications required:
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Option to customize the selection process
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Collaboration between Interviewers and the other hiring team members
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Calendar blocking and feedback management
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Offer management and candidate onboarding
Existing
PROPOSED INTERVIEW SCHEDULING
Calendar sync., ability to view the calendar of the interviewer and schedule accordingly to avoid conflicts
Easy addition of the interviewer, interview type, time and location
Notification to the interviewers and reminder
Message to the candidate with auto attached interview details
PROPOSED FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT
The hiring manager can quickly select a response on mail to get auto-redirected to the system for detailed candidate feedback
Auto-attached candidate resume and Job Description for reference
PROPOSED CANDIDATE ONBOARDING
Mark Joining date and onboarding team to quickly transfer all details to candidate to the onboarding team
Reports
Key modifications required:
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Contextual graphical reports
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Easy scheduling and forwarding
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System overview and activity monitoring at a glance
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Easy to interpret
Existing
PROPOSED
Graphical interactive reports with the ability to switch between graphical and tabular view
Actions on a report such as scheduling a report, download, and customize
Reports categorization
Implementing and measuring the results
During my stint at Info Edge, we were able to develop only the job posting form. We worked with the product management team to launch the changes in phases, starting with job creation and posting. As we worked on developing the modules with the tech team, there were some changes to the designs shared above. Development was to be followed by launching and analyzing user acceptance. This phase was taken up by another designer in the team.
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I'd love to hear from you
Email me at tanyaswami1@gmail.com • Connect on LinkedIn