My role
I worked with our product lead from discovery to launch, while owning the entire design of this project, from visuals to key flows
Together we ran user interviews and prioritise MVP features to deliver, while also partnering with marketing to establish the visual language for our chrome marketplace collaterals and website before launch.
Opportunity
Our customers rely on third-party tools for scheduling. They were not built for high-volume hiring or integrated with candidate data
The opportunity is to expand our product suite by introducing a scheduling feature that fulfils our high volume customers, one that connects with their ATS, our Sapia.ai assessment and integrates with their candidate assessments.
Research
8 interviews with hiring managers and recruiters revealed a clear pattern: scheduling was painful because systems didn't talk to each other, and processes were manual.
These three core personas informed the foundation of the design.
Schedulers Scanning and scheduling the right candidates to move on to the interview stage.
Pain points:
- Scheduling 80+ candidates a week, generic scheduling tools like Calendly couldn't keep up.
- Tracking individual progress were a mess and no-shows were frequent.
- Some used interview scheduling tools from their ATS which was clunky with bad user experience.
Interviewers Store managers who do interviews
Pain points:
- They don’t use a calendar tool to track interviews.
- Interview data not integrated to their scheduling tools. Some reported using shared spreadsheets to track candidate status and interview time.
Candidates
Pain point: Some tools hiring managers use right now don’t allow rescheduling or cancellation, leading to no shows.
Idea generation
How might we design a scheduling experience built for high-volume recruitment, fitting into existing workflows and works well for schedulers, interviewers, and candidates?
We brought together engineers, customer success, and key stakeholders across the business for a brainstorming session focused on reimagining the scheduling experience for our target archetypes.
It was a fruitful session, generating ideas that pushed toward a more optimised flow.
A chrome extension for scheduling interviews as allows users the flexibility to schedule without leaving their ATS (Applicant Tracking System).
Our key success metrics is to improve the efficiency of the scheduling process. From the brainstorming session, stakeholders have proposed building a Chrome extension instead of a standalone web page, so users are able to schedule efficiently without leaving their ATS.
Challenge
Competing priorities for MVP
Our priority was to quickly onboard users at launch to gather feedback, so we focused the MVP on features based on 2 criterias:
- What made for a great scheduling experience, and
- What our customers needed most. Tradeoffs were made carefully without sacrificing user experience.
Due to time constraints, we made deliberate tradeoffs for MVP. For example, interviewers requested run sheets — an email listing all their scheduled candidates if they have interviews for the day. This would require building an additional email template, so we've backlogged it to post-MVP.
With this kept in mind, I've designed an option for interviewers to add iCal reminders directly from the confirmation email they receive when a candidate books an interview. This gives them interview visibility in their calendar now.
Collaboration and execution
I ensured to bring stakeholders in early in the process
Working on bigger projects like this, handover and feedback can difficult. I have ensured to gather relevant stakeholders early in the process, especially engineers, to inform us of effort, feasibility and dependencies.
After design and development, feedback was sought in phases to ensure all stakeholders are happy, derisking the final product.
Final design
Schedulers can now push candidates directly from their ATS to Live Interview in one click, with candidate data carried over automatically.
First…
Schedulers change candidate’s status to ‘interview’ from their ATS.
Then…
Candidates, with their details are moved to Live Interview where they can be bulk scheduled.
The scheduler experience
Candidates status progress clearly displayed for more efficient tracking.
Spitting into 4 stages with tailored actions mapped to their statuses: Pending, Confirmed, Past and Cancelled
Multistage interviews were a standard practice. In Live Interview, schedulers can book multiple rounds for the same job and track them all from a single view.
The scheduler experience
Building around familiarity
Our scheduling interface uses Natural Language Processing to automatically generate time slots, given many interviewers share their availability with schedulers through emails and texts in plain language.
Parameters around how they are generated were considered as well. For example - how many weeks ahead the system should generate time slots when a user enters “Monday 1–5”?
These decisions were guided by our customers’ scheduling workflows and how far in advance they typically plan interviews.
Interviewer and candidate experience
Automatic interview reminders for interviewers and candidates on the day of interview (After MVP)
Since not all interviewers use calendar tools, we automatically send email run sheets on the day of their interviews with candidate details, and recommended interview questions.
Candidates can reschedule or cancel directly from their email or iCal invite.
Outcome
Successfully reduced time to screen candidates by 10 days (53%) in one of our current customer + 15 mins time saved when getting in touch with candidates to book in an interview.
Learnings and reflection
1. Sometimes the best user feedback only comes after the launch - especially when it comes to building an MVP.
While usability testing is important, some of the most valuable feedback only emerges after launch. For the MVP, we prioritised core features and set aside “nice to haves” due to constraints. Post-launch, we found users didn’t need many of those planned features, reinforcing the importance of shipping early and iterating based on real user needs rather than assumptions.
2. Sacrifice features, but not experiences
In fast-paced product development, there are times when shipping an MVP requires making trade-offs in user experience. However, Instead, we must offer alternative pathways and fallback options—to ensure users can still achieve their jobs to be done efficiently.