How We’re Driving Change by Redesigning Hiring: Meet the SmartRecruiters Design Team
Everyone knows what it’s like to be in a typical job hunt.
In many cases you’re asked to fill out a long, complex online application. You spend time, energy, anticipation optimizing for any sort of response — anything! But then, you hear nothing, and the cycle repeats.
On the other side of that cycle are overwhelmed hiring teams, who want to give proper attention to their candidates, but often struggle to do that with the resources available.
As the future of jobs unfolds, the SmartRecruiters’ team of three full-stack product designers — alongside our world-class product team collaborators —work together every day to help change this cycle for the better.
Each designer is assigned to work on SmartRecruiters products and features from research to prototype. What drives us is what drives all our colleagues who hail from across the world to join the Smartian movement: we’re all working to reinvent recruiting and make hiring easy, fair and help recruiters find the time to be human with their candidates. We also genuinely want to help people from all walks of life to find jobs they love.
Nurturing local and international perspectives
Although much of the design and product team is based in San Francisco (all three of us designers are actually from the Bay Area), we work with a close-knit product team based around the world. Getting face time with teammates in other countries is often part of the designer’s job, and it also gives us the chance to forge a wider scope of empathy for job seekers and hiring teams who think differently than we tend to do in the infamous Bay Area bubble.
Case in point: I’m writing this from our UK office, just a stone’s throw away from many of our EMEA customers, and one of the centers for the worldwide conversation about unemployment and job creation.
Keeping a broad perspective through traveling is also important for keeping our values in check. We’ve just booked tickets to attend the Design Matters 18 conference in Copenhagen this Fall. We chose this particular event for our design team offsite because of the theme, Designing for Change:
“How we as designers can create design that makes an impact on technology and society — for a better humanity and a better self. How do we as designers support the trustworthiness of news, enforce democracy, equality, sustainability, and how do we help users create a balance in their own life?”
We will hear from speakers like Masuma Henry from Amazon, who asks the question: How do we serve the underserved while serving our businesses?
We’re hoping to engage in many eye-opening conversations about what “designing for change” means internationally. Perhaps we will see some of you there.
Why write, why now?
Although service and global change motivates the core of our work, the reality is that most days we’re still just building software. We’ve historically been a team more focused on Sketch, design systems and whiteboards than putting words together for the internet, but all of us have moments where we seek resources from similar companies who have tackled problems that we’re facing, and have come up dry.
This blog is just one way for us to start the honest design conversations that we are looking for. SmartRecruiters is at a crucial point in our growth as a company, and we’re excited to share our learnings about what it means to design for Enterprise SaaS.
We hope to dive into insights from our journey as a design team:
- How we’ve iterated on a Design Lab to engage customers in enterprise user testing (a.k.a. when guerrilla testing is not an option)
- How do we maintain empathy for job seekers while designing for recruiters? And vice versa.
- What do we learn from having the opportunity to build strong relationships with both our users and internal teams across the world?
- We’ll also cover our upcoming redesign: how does it work to redesign a whole platform?
- And thinking back to that mission of achieving global change: we all want to design meaningful experiences with our products, and strive to take a stance in a world that seems increasingly less focused on humans.
This is where you come in. The design community is already writing from a diverse mix of perspectives. We’re looking forward to adding our voices and showing you how our team approaches impactful initiatives that affect millions of job seekers.
But there’s always more to learn, and we hope to hear stories and questions from readers to shine light on other points of view, topics that we should be thinking more about, and other questions that come up.
Until then, cheers! Here’s to redesigning hiring.
Send us a note about designing for change, and especially about changing the job search. We’re also hiring! Reach out to us at design@smartrecruiters.com.
Other places you can find us are on Twitter @SmartRecruiters, @ShefaliNetke @triciflores @chanishere149. And be sure to catch us at the Design Matters 2018 conference from September 26–27 in Copenhagen where we’ll be brainstorming the idea of “Design for Change” with talented peers 🙂
