Furthering our with mission with the design process

According to the FBI, as many as 70 million Americans (one in three adults) have a criminal record. That criminal record can follow a person for decades, denying them employment long after they’ve paid their debt to society. As a company aiming to disrupt the background check industry, we deliberately chose to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.

At Checkr, we believe all candidates, regardless of their background, should have a fair chance to work. By “fair chance,” we mean that candidates should have the right to be assessed based on their qualifications in relation to the role. Checkr is devoted to bringing fairness and transparency to the hiring process.

Unlike Checkr’s near-term revenue goals, our mission is not something we will ever check off our list and consider done — it’s our guiding purpose for everything we do.

What Does It Mean to Be a Mission-Driven Company?

Being mission-driven means that the mission is the driving force behind the company’s decisions and direction. The mission and the business opportunity are deeply intertwined; our business is stronger with our mission, and our mission cannot succeed without our business.

Part of the inherent tension in being a mission-driven company is determining how to prioritize the mission among more demanding customer requests and revenue-generating projects. As we entered hyper-growth mode at Checkr, we wanted to ensure our mission was clearly reflected in our product experience as well. To do so, we asked ourselves:

How might we further integrate our mission into the product experience?

Using Mission-Driven Design Sprints to Bridge the Gap

Dedicated design sprints are great for igniting and motivating a team to tackle an overarching goal. For our purpose, we hosted a one-hour, mission-focused brainstorm modeled after GV’s Design Sprint structure, with the goal to generate as many ideas as possible.

We assembled a diverse team of candidate experience representatives, designers, product managers, and engineers in order to voice differing opinions and approach the problem from their unique perspectives.

Our Design Sprint Process

Goal

As the sprint facilitator, I started by setting expectations and defining success. Goal setting is critical to a successful design sprint because it creates parameters that guide the team.

Throwing a team into a brainstorm without proper expectation setting can make teammates feel lost and frazzled. Creating a shared goal helps to make people feel aligned and energized, leading to more targeted solutions.

I gave a brief overview of the process and then discussed our sprint objective to brainstorm as many divergent ideas as possible.

After determining our goal, we worked together to determine our measurement of success. We wanted to have a long list of ideas for securing resources and get a sense of what we should work on first.

We defined success as the selection of the top 3 most impactful ideas to move forward and develop further, and creating a backlog of potential ideas to explore down the line.

Context Setting

We brought in two experts to give the initial context about fair chance product initiatives and recap existing ideas. Our experts shared the following pain points to frame our brainstorming session:

• Candidates are not able to tell their story nor show evidence of rehabilitation
• Candidates are burdened by criminal records that are now eligible for expungement
• Our customers / partners may not be aware of the benefits of fair chance talent

Idea Generation

Considering the constraints, we began brainstorming with the mindset of being open to all ideas. We gave each person a paper folded into eight sections and asked them to come up with eight ideas, one idea per minute. This brainstorm methodology is known in the sprint world as “Crazy 8’s.”

Focus Groups

We then divided into groups and made sure that each team had people from different functions of the company so we could give more holistic feedback. We discussed our ideas in our small groups, where we were able to see common themes and bring together the best of our collective ideas.

Consensus Building

Each group shared their most promising ideas to the full team. While people were sharing, we asked follow-up questions to gain a collective understanding of the problem and proposed solution.

After all the ideas were shared, each person voted on the whiteboard to create a visual heat map of great ideas and build consensus on what we think will be most impactful.

Next Steps

Furthering our mission will always be a work in progress. The beauty of being mission-driven is that the mission helps align us on long-term goals and prioritize near-term ideas.

At the beginning of the sprint, we had a sweeping goal to further integrate our mission into the product. By the end of the sprint, we had twenty three unique ideas for how to infuse more opportunities for fair chance hiring into our products. Through individual voting, we were able to identify the top three ideas we want to address this quarter:

1. Implement a form that allows candidates to share context about their background check results and/or positive information about themselves in a structured format that employers can easily review.
2. Create an automated way to identify candidates eligible for expungement and help expedite the process.
3. Build contextual notifications into the adverse action process that educate adjudicators (the decision-makers) on fair chance information that may be helpful in their review.

With our list of most impactful ideas, we were able to build a tactical roadmap for how to further embed our mission into the product. We decided to “divide and conquer,” with product managers working on the business cases, candidate experience representatives advocating on behalf of our candidates, and designers and engineers working on the concept designs. In this way, we’re leveraging our individual expertise to have the greatest collective impact on operationalizing our mission into the product.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re designing at Checkr, send me a note on LinkedIn or check out our open roles!