Starting a User Research Practice
How to hire an expertise you do not have?
It all began several months ago…
At that time, we were 3 designers in a team of over 60. We all joined Alan with the mission to change people’s relationship to health, starting with health insurance.
Health insurance is tricky. It’s a complex ecosystem with a wide variety of stakeholders, and Alan is constantly making strategic choices on its way to becoming Europe’s number one platform for health.
This is exciting and… quite a challenge!
We believe high quality insights will be key to navigate those choices and reach our goals. There are two identified sources of insights:
- Quantitative to collect and analyse data points (that’s our Data team).
- Qualitative to observe and collect non-numerical insights such as opinions and motivations (conducted by user researchers).
The team already understood the value of talking to users (since launching a whole new health insurance in just 9 months). We had, however, a blurry idea of what User Research was as a practice and thus on how to identify and hire a good researcher.
Here is the (long) path we took down that road!
Define the profile your team needs
Starting with Alan’s company objectives, we built a list of topics we wished we knew more about to inform our product strategy:
- Understand our stakeholders: beneficiaries (individuals, couples and families…), admins from big and small companies (CFO, HR, CEO, accountant…) and health professionals (doctors, pharmacists…)
- Understand people’s relationship to health, their friction points as well as unidentified needs and opportunities
- Learn about new market and new countries (where we’re expanding)
- Evaluate the quality of our products (usability, perceived quality)
This list allowed us to draft a job description and a definition of the profile the team needed today. We also had to take into consideration the environment the user researcher would land into. Being the first with a new expertise in a company comes with its challenges:
- Find and make his place within the organisation
- Help grow understanding of the methods and value of User Research
- Define how the practice would fit with the processes and methods in place
In order to make this recruitment a success on both sides, the team agreed a senior profile would be a better fit. It seemed right to hire senior user researchers first and only later welcome more junior profiles (in an environment where they can grow).
Go out there and meet experts
We now had a fantasy of user researcher in mind. Did it fit with reality? We needed to validate our ideas with actual practitioners and get their help. We made contact with researchers in our networks and expanded the network. Doing so, we learned something important:
If you invite people for a drink and ask them to talk about their role, they are very keen to share. We took the opportunity to be curious and ask as many questions as we could, such as:
- Where does User Research fit today in your organisation?
- What have been your successes and struggles in your current role?
- What are you looking for in a new opportunity?
- What is your team’s recruitment process for a user researcher?
- What are the hard and soft skills you are looking for?
Those discussions allowed us to better understand user researchers and make sure there was alignment with the team’s needs.
It was also an opportunity to get very accurate recommendations of candidates from highly skilled people. This ended up being a good strategy as both user researchers joining the team were referrals.
Build your hiring process
Just as recruiting is a huge investment for a company, so is interviewing a serious investment of time for candidates. At Alan we respect that. Which is why during the hiring process, we make a real effort to be as transparent as possible about our values, culture and the way we work. The goal is to give the most accurate picture of what it would be like for a candidate to be in our team.
Our recruitment process aims at assessing both hard and soft skills as well as cultural fit. It’s a 7-step process, 3 of which are directly assessing the expertise.
We started with defining the skills we wanted to test for:
- Define, plan and perform the interviews, choosing from a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods
- The capacity to analyse and transform complex results in an understandable and actionable framework
- Define and organise how User Research fit within the company’s processes and methods
- Facilitate evidence-based strategy in product decisions
We test for these skills at 3 different steps:
1/ A 45 minutes case study on a past project freely chosen by the candidate, with context, problems and results. In the room: A product manager and a product designer.
2/ A 90 minutes exercise during which the candidate defines and proposes a research plan on a given topic with the help of a data scientist and a product designer.
3/ The final step is a full day with the team in our offices. In that context, the candidate will define and conduct a research project and share insights with the team.
Then, test your process… and iterate
We had a process!
We started looking for people relevant for the role to get in touch with. You do not have a User Research network? Build one!
- Leverage people you know: colleagues, friends who worked with User researchers.
- Nurture referrals: if a great candidate is not interested, not everything is lost as he might know great people too! Just make sure you are building a relationship with them first and not ask point blank.
- Join communities: organisations, slack groups, meetups around User Research are good to find people driven by their field.
- Look at great company’s teams, freelancers or agencies: it might be the right moment for some to start a new adventure.
In order to respect candidates and their time, we shared from the start that we were iterating on the process. Usually people were totally OK with the idea and eager to take part.
At each step of the process with every candidate we asked ourselves if we got the signal we were looking for and asked feedback. It allowed us to fine tune our process and expectations. I cannot thank enough all the people who took the time to share their thoughts and experience. It was of incredible value!
Hiring is just the beginning
I’m proud to say that the team welcomed our first user researcher this December and will be welcoming a second one early next year.
Why two and not just one? Thanks to our process, we had two great complementary profiles willing to join. Alan is the type of company that does not let opportunities to hire good profiles go away. Most of the time we have the flexibility to hire more than anticipated.
Given the many opened research topics, two people won’t be too much!
We have still much to learn together as a team, now in collaboration with user researchers to better answer our users’ needs. I hope this article will help you recruit for expertise you do not have!
