CASE STUDY
CareerBuilder Applicant Tracking System
MY ROLE
PLATFORMS
YEAR
PERFORMANCE INCREASE
Lead Designer
Web
2019-2020
N/A - Currently being developed.
Problem
CareerBuilder's Applicant Tracking System (CBAT) was bleeding customers due to a clunky and dated system that had been piecemealed together over the last two decades. Competitors' systems are faster and much more efficient for recruiters to quickly see candidates and take action.
CURRENT APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEM (NOT ALL SCREENS)
Key Drivers
With customers not renewing their contracts leadership decided that it was time to take action and rebuild CBAT from the ground up. UX and UXR would get the opportunity to speak to current customers and understand their pain points and how they would make work better for them in their day-to-day.
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To begin, I worked with our UX Research team to see what users were saying about the existing CBAT. I also met with the product team to better understand the main goals they wanted to achieve with this redesign.
FEEDBACK FROM RECRUITERS
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Dated look and feel to the product
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Product is extremely buggy and often crashes
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Too many icons
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Users get lost trying to complete simple tasks
MAIN GOALS PRODUCT WANTED TO ACHIEVE
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Make the look and feel consistent to rest of CB products
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Customer retention and growth
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Build on a new and faster platform
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Simplify key recruiter tasks
Initial Sketches - Brainstorming
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Based on the conversations UXR and I had with our users and product team, I came up with these initial sketches. You'll notice that these sketches are very different from the existing CBAT. I wanted to call out some of the most important day-to-day tasks and highlight new candidates, new requisition actions, etc. since the last time the user had logged into the system. This sort of acts as a to-do list for the recruiters. They can quickly see that there are 12 new candidates they need to act on for requisitions that they are working to fill.
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Another big shift is that we have two different views for our users. The view on the left is the new simplified view, that consolidates the key information into a card on the left so users can quickly see detailed information on the right. The view on the right, is similar to how CBAT currently exists, more of a table view of information before diving into the detailed information. This is displayed better in the detailed wireframes that were created for User Testing.
ANOTHER IDEA THAT PRODUCT LOVED, BUT USERS DID NOT
We did some initial testing around this concept that the product team loved. However, once we began talking to our users we quickly learned that they were overwhelmed by all of the information on the screen, and did not understand where to begin.
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After getting this same feedback from 7 different customers we realized the better path to move forward with was the more simplified version of the existing CBAT.
High Fidelity Wireframes for UXR
The UXR team and I shared these high fidelity wireframes with current CBAT users to see their response to the reimagination of the product. We had users click around and see if they could see how they would complete some of their day-to-day tasks. Overall users loved this approach, they said that it simplified some of their main tasks and made the product feel more organized as a whole. They loved the widgets at the top that let them know if they had new candidates. Users did mention some of their original concerns from the existing CBAT about bugginess and slow load speed, but overall they were impressed with the new direction of CBAT.
Final Designs
REQUISITIONS WIDGET
When speaking to current CBAT users, many mentioned that the faster they could get to candidates tied to requisitions the better. In the new design, I focused on this by creating cards for requisitions that took up a fourth of the screen. The requisition cards show the most important information that recruiters want to see: Requisition title, location, recruiters, how long it has been open and how many positions have been filled. The other three-fourths of the page is dedicated to candidates tied to the selected requisition card. Candidates are filtered into different workflows that the recruiters create. This allows the recruiters to quickly see how many candidates they have in each part of the workflow and if they need to source more. Recruiters can also see if candidates are tied to other requisitions and what part of the workflow they are in. This was a big hit with our recruiters, they liked that they could see if a candidate is worth their time to pursue based on how far along in other workflows they are.
REQUISITION AND CANDIDATE DETAILS
The detail pages for both Requisitions and Candidates are full of important information for the recruiters. The Requisition details page shows all of the information about that requisition, attachments, history of the requisition, the ability to create screener questions, application forms and more. I wanted to make sure that all of this information was easily available to the recruiters without there being too many actions or content in one view.
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There is a similar view for the candidates. There needed to be the ability to hold a lot of important information for the recruiters about each candidate. The most important information is included in the header: including the name, contact information, which jobs they have applied to, which workflow steps they are in and the ability to move them through the workflow. The resume section has also been highlighted first, this is what the recruiters said they wanted to see before any of the other tabs on the page.
