How recruiters can benefit from Design Thinking

Photo credit: Finan Akbar

Like many, I’ve received my share of Linkedin messages asking if I would be interested in a new role with a certain company. Most of them go something like these (contents lightly edited to protect the innocents).

Exhibit A

I just wanted to reach out and tell you about our Lead Product Designer Position at ACME Corp. We are looking for a Lead Product Designer who wants to lead a growing design team and work alongside product-minded engineers to deliver amazing technology and experiences to our customers. In addition, you will:

- Lead the product design function at ACME corp. and manage other designers.

- Establish and implement style guides for our product and brand.

- Create remarkable experiences for software engineers, turning product complexities into elegant UI/UX solutions.

Please let me know if you are interested in hearing more about the role. I would love to schedule a quick call to give you all the details.

Exhibit B

I came across your profile and felt you would be a great match for a career prospect for a Exciting Senior Product (UX) Designer opportunity with one of our clients on Mars. It’s a private company that offers an e-mail marketing and sales platform for small businesses, including products to manage and optimize the customer lifecycle, customer relationship management, marketing automation, lead capture, and e-commerce. In total, the company has generated over $x million in funding and $x million in revenue in 2017.

If you are interested please send me a copy of your chronological resume and your availability for quick phone chat today or Wednesday by going to <this link>.

Exhibit C

I had gone through your profile and I feel you to be suitable for one of an internal position with us in ACME Corp. on Mars. Would you mind discussing about the position over a phone?

Exhibit D

I came across your profile and I would love to learn more about your experience. ACME Corp. has an opening for a UI Product Designer & a UX Strategist.

ACME is interested in hiring people who have experience and a passion for user interface, user experience, innovation and design. I would love to speak with you and see if the positions would meet your career goals.

Let’s chat when your free.

What do these messages have in common? There are quite a few but at its core, they all lack an understanding of their target audience and what would trigger them to respond. Ultimately, I suspect none of these messages help the recruiters connect with great talents.

Applying Design Thinking in Recruiting

These recruiters could dramatically improve their conversion if they take a design thinking approach to recruiting:

1. Empathize with the audience. Understand what great talents really want instead of having a cookie cutter message that’s centered around what the hiring company needs. Stop thinking about “me” and think more about “them”. If you don’t know your audience, research and learn. Create a persona for whom you’re after, and actively design an approach that maximizes your own personal success.
2. Define the problem — Identify your top obstacles and prioritize the problems to fix. You can’t really solve your problems until you have a deep understanding what they are. Are designers not responding to your messages at all? Are they responding but not being very enthusiastic? Or maybe you are losing them on the phone screen because you can’t demonstrate the value of the hiring company?
3. Ideate | Prototype — Strategize the different ways to solving your problems. “Prototype” your messaging and test them out. Try them out with friends, colleagues, and get feedback. Iterate on your approach and relentlessly refine them over time.
4. Test — Put your approach to test, try them on your next recruiting attempt. Measure your conversion rate with each of the approaches, so that you have benchmarks to see if changes you made has brought improvement to your conversion. Heck, you can even A/B test your design by varying your subject line, keywords, message length, tone, etc, etc, etc

Jared Spool had written an excellent article on the UX of job ads — one of the key touch points in the recruiting process. Many in the recruiting business would really benefit from reading it to learn what really excite good candidates. From there on, start applying design thinking to curate a recruiting experience that wows and wins candidates over.

Hiring is very competitive and finding great design talents is not easy. Design thinking will give you an edge over your competitions.