Learning fast through a hackathon on our recruitment process
Written: 13 March 2024 by Katherine Everest, Product Manager
The Digital Team at Royal Borough of Greenwich recently held a weeklong hackathon focused on revamping a section of our recruitment process. Our Rethinking Recruitment team are looking at creating a quicker, easier, and clearer recruitment service for the recruitment team, staff, and for applicants.
This event brought together several communities of practice (Product Designers and Managers; Business Analysts, Service Designers and Delivery Managers) with the aim of enhancing our approach to recruitment.
Hackathons are often used in agile teams, where multiple disciplines come together and intensely work on a specific problem. A typical goal of a hackathon is to create a functioning prototype/solution by the end of the event.
Our focus
Our week focused on one section of our recruitment process: how we kick-start hiring internally. We set the scene with a comprehensive and engaging presentation of all our discovery work and form design learnings.
From this we identified some big questions, problems and hypotheses. Our aims were:
- Enhance the request to recruit form by simplifying the existing form by splitting our guidance sections and the data fields. Split the form into separate sections so different stakeholders know what they need to complete.
- Transform the content on our Intranet to support the recruitment journey. The Intranet should be our central place to house guidance and link out to our processes. Many of our forms have guidance within them, rather than on the Intranet.
- Find opportunities to improve the whole recruitment process. This single form is just one section of our recruitment journey and by looking at this in isolation helps to highlight how we could improve the surrounding process too.
What we achieved in one week
There were four form design iterations throughout the week.
- A new form design and simplified the layout. The guidance was condensed and placed at the start of the form, with any other guidance to live within our Intranet. We also split the form into two separate papers (one for direct recruitment and another for agency) along with clear sections with clear instructions on who would complete each.
- Removed unnecessary sections following a design critique with key stakeholders. We challenged the need for certain elements of the form and focused on the key sections to be completed.
- User research confirmed and highlighted the readability and comprehension of the form. Adjustments were made to improve the usability and completion.
- The final version presented showed the direction we could take the form in. Although not ready for launch, this paved the way for stakeholder support to continue this work beyond the hackathon week.
There was a desire throughout the week to go above and beyond the technological scope of the week. However, we channeled these ideas onto a ‘parking lot’ which would inform our future opportunities and road map for our recruitment process.
The end of the hackathon was marked by a team presentation showcasing the journey of the recruitment form. Stakeholders from different departments celebrated the significant changes created by the hackathon team and supported the road map to launch the new form and roll out this process transformation across other internal transactions within the organisation.
Our learnings
The hackathon is leading us to tangible results, from highlighting everything that needs to be considered when changing a form to involving stakeholder buy-in for effective process and change transformation.
We hosted a retrospective after the hackathon where we shared our learnings and thoughts.
- We can produce a lot with focus
The output of the hackathon has inspired further conversations around how this focused way of working could be used to try and solve other problems and opportunities within the local council, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
“Realised that if we want, we can bring change quicker (but realising at the same time this pace is not something you can keep for months)”
2. Failing fast to learn with pace
Embracing the principle of failing fast encouraged a culture of experimentation, where we rapidly prototyped and tested ideas. The pace at which we confronted and learned from failures helped to accelerate our development process and cultivated creativity and adaptability within the team.
“People want to see change you just have to bring them along on the journey maybe we need to start sharing more regularly and not waiting till it’s perfect.”
3. We always wish for more time
Although we wished we had more time to trial different ideas, the time-bound nature of the hackathon encouraged us to make quick decisions and tackle challenges head-on. It helped us to keep on track, as we could not afford to end up down rabbit holes that could take us off focus, enabling us to produce a targeted solution.
“It inspired deeper change — we got the buy-in.”
If you would like to learn more about how we conducted our hackathon, please email gloria.makinwa@royalgreenwich.gov.uk
