Workable Referrals

Project name: Workable Referrals (https://www.workable.com/features/employee-referral) 

Responsibilities: Product design, UX research, UI & Interaction design, Strategy

Platform: Responsive web

Duration: January 2018 – September 2018

Launched: September 2018

Overview

Workable is the world’s leading hiring platform. It provides in-house recruiters and hiring teams with ways to find more qualified candidates and help them work together to identify and hire the best.

The Workable Referrals project dealt with building a platform for company employees, where they can view all the jobs their company is hiring for, share these jobs with their network, refer their connections and apply for jobs that are hiring internally. This platform offers Workable customers a tool to invite their employees in sourcing high quality candidates in an engaging way.

My role in this project as a Senior Product Designer was to lead the product design of the Referrals platform and build the product strategy. I worked together with two Product Managers and a team of 4 frontend and backend engineers. During the course of the project, I delivered user flows, low and high fidelity designs for responsive web, interactive prototypes as well as usability testing reports.

Some context

Workable’s core product consists of multiple tools and flows where recruiters and hiring managers can create jobs and advertise them through job boards, careers pages and other channels, source candidates, track and evaluate applications and collaborate with each other among other things.

For recruiters one of the best candidate sources are referrals through their network. Workable up until 2018 offered a basic solution for referrals, where the recruiter could send an email to a person asking if they know someone they’d like to refer for an open position. If the person knew a good candidate, they could upload the candidate’s information via a link and leave a comment.

Workable’s goal was to upgrade this experience and offer their customers an easier and better way to interact with their employees when it comes to referrals.

Challenges and Goals

Our goal with this project was to give Workable customers the option to create an employee portal, next to Workable’s core product. There, company employees could view open jobs, share them with their network, refer people they know and also get the ability to apply for internal job openings themselves. The sourcing technologies that Workable had already developed for recruiters in the core product, could be reused to help employees in their referral process.

The biggest challenge in this project was that, although I already had a lot of experience in designing candidate sourcing products for recruiters, this time I had to design for a new user type, the employee of a company. This meant introducing a new design language, where information is presented in a simpler way, without the recruiter jargon. This wasn’t just about a new tone of voice, but also about finding ways to reuse Workable’s tools for creating candidate profiles in a less complex way, that is more suitable to someone’s who’s not a recruiter. The even bigger challenge was to get all the stakeholders onboard this shift in design and get everyone adapted to the fact that we’re no longer addressing a recruiter or a hiring manager.

The user

  • The employee of a company. Workable Referrals would be targeted to accounts that were medium to enterprise sized businesses within a wide range, from retail to software companies. That roughly means our users are mostly white-collar employees.
  • The recruiter or HR employee of a company, in the admin part of Workable Referrals

Design approach in a nutshell

As the lead product designer of Workable Referrals, I drove the product design and strategy from conceptualisation to launch. This product would be used by a user who was new for Workable at the time, the employee of a company. To get to know this type of user, I started this project by conducting interviews with employees in a variety of sectors (software, accounting, banking, retail, hospitality) to find out how they would refer a contact and what’s important for them in that process. In parallel, I worked on defining our user flows. This was a lengthy process, since this product was completely new and I had to take strategic decisions for different aspects of the product, like will Referrals have the same branding as the core product, where will this platform live, how will this new employee user sign up/sign in the platform, where will the administrative tasks take place. During this phase, I collaborated closely with the product manager and the lead engineer as well as Workable’s Marketing team.

With multiple design iterations and internal user testing I delivered a final design to be developed for an Alpha release within Workable. Workable’s employees were the first big user group that tested the product. This period acted as a big usability test where I observed user problems and collected feedback, which we later prioritised with the rest of the team. This led to another design iteration that brought us to the Beta release. After the Beta and GA release, I followed the product by observing user sessions in Hotjar and identifying user problems as well as tracked feedback coming from customer support and sales.

Solutions

Quick & easy

Referring someone is as easy as it gets for employees; they can upload a resume, provide a name or submit a link to an online profile and have a candidate profile created instantly. Sharing open jobs, with an individual or an entire social media network, is just as simple. Applying for jobs that are open only for internal hiring is also an option for employees.

An employee can view all open jobs, share them with their network, refer someone they know or even apply themselves
Employees can refer candidates easily even if they don’t have their resume at hand
Uploading a candidate’s resume and leaving feedback about them
Employees can refer candidates even when they have just their email address or social media – Workable creates a candidate profile automatically behind the scenes.
Employees can track their referrals progress and their rewards

Rewarding & engaging

I aimed at boosting employee participation by making referrals feel less like work and more like fun. With referral tracking, social sharing and performance rewards included, Workable referrals gamifies the referral experience to make sure they’re always fun — and always top of mind.

Employees can track candidates who applied via their social sharing links and refer them in retrospect if they want

Accessible & transparent

Employees are kept up-to-speed on open jobs and referral progress, automatically. Workable Referrals emails employees as soon as a new job is posted and empowers them to track the progress of their own referrals and rewards right in the portal.