One Last JazzHR Post
January 2021… belated
As I mentioned in my last update, we had some big stuff in the works in the last half of 2020. I’ve since moved on from JazzHR, but these projects all launched successfully and I figured I should throw em online.
Custom Reporting
This was a big one! Our old custom reporting system was… busted. It let you build queries that didn’t actually run, and I still lie awake at night, trying to figure out the confusing UI.
After some internal discovery, support and usage data analysis, and a review of my past reporting-related research, the solution was clear: nuke Custom Reporting and start over. So that’s what we did.
We were able to borrow some UX patterns from my past work on the Candidate List and extend them to include capabilities like report sharing and improved filtering. We ran a beta and spent some time with those users, which uncovered another reporting use case that we were able to accommodate in our Workflow Reporting system.
Now, JazzHR users can get all of their candidate and job data out of JazzHR with ease — no more workarounds. A couple months after release, the project had exceeded our projected business case and reduced reporting-related cancellations to zero. Yay!
You can see how it works in the JazzHR Knowledge Base.
eSignatures and Offers
JazzHR allows users to upload a document (or generate an offer letter), then send it to a candidate for signature via HelloSign. This sounds simple, but over time, this functionality was moved around in the app and sort of duplicated. There were too many ways to get into an eSign flow, the terminology was confusing, and the legacy Offer Letter feature was particularly hard to understand. As you can imagine, our Success and Support teams spent wayyy too much time teaching folks how to use this system.
Long story short, we simplified the “documents” UI on each candidate’s profile and took out a some extraneous document-sending loops. It worked!
You can see a bit more on the JazzHR blog.
In-App Notifications Framework
This was a cool project, and I wish I had some more artifacts to show for it. Before this initiative, JazzHR relied almost exclusively on email notifications to tell users about events in the system. If a hiring manager replied to your comment about a candidate, chances are you wouldn’t notice until you saw the email. The existing main dashboard had a couple activity feeds, etc, but when users logged in for the day, it wasn’t clear what work they needed to do.
In addition, most existing notifications couldn’t be configured, and those that could were generally at the account level — users basically couldn’t control what emails they got. In 2020! Yikes.
I don’t remember all of the product-definition back and forth on this one, but eventually we set about to design and build a unified framework for delivering notifications. We picked five key notification types to move into the new framework so that users could see value right away. The new system pulls all notification-related settings into one place, and every type of notif can be turned on/off for email and the in-app UI.
More info in JazzHR’s Knowledge Base. Looks like the team has added a couple notification types since I left… all according to plan!
