It’s time for CV to get smart
“Traditional word document is an old school way to apply for new aged companies”, my fiance pointed out clearly. As he is with no creative background what so ever, he was finding it difficult to design his resume. Every job is different. Customizing resume every time is painstaking. Also, unlike design other fields are more verbo which makes recruiters job boring to find out right candidate.
Meet the team
I happened to meet Prachi & Kishor over a pined of beer. We started our discussion from “age of recruitment data”. From Linkedin to Babajobs there are pool of recruitment data. Its still the early stage for structured recruitment data. Luckily, for smart talent solution data is already available.
The idea
The spread of social networking made the concept of sharing our personal and professional data frictionless. But we need intelligent system to capture right information in concise format.
Not long after I on boarded , I learned that Prachi, our CEO, had written a proposal for something called iCV, where people could create CV with an intelligent way. It sounded really exciting, and I had a good deal of experience building infographics, so it was a great fit for my skills and interests. I thought there was a lot of opportunity to take the project in many different directions.
I worked on the original iCV project,which is where we show extra details on the candidate’s professional attributes which make them more useful — like responsibilities, impact or awards, depending on what kind of candidate they are. I thought showcasing professional footprint was really interesting, and I was pushing the team to achieve it.
We wanted to create a tool that would let people design resume, create glance view and map each of their impact, whether that’s individual or as a team.
Yeah, we wanted to help recruiters to identify right talent with increased efficiency. I think to create a strong impact with experience & achievement and highlight them visually is the smart way. I started thinking about what features would be really helpful for planning a personal, behavioral and impactful data, as well as what elements would be useful showcase them.
Designing the journey
iCV was unique in that I had the freedom to make something completely new. I needed an understanding of existing recruitment industry to form an opinion on how to make something more fun and engaging for Resume. I used some design exercises like Card sort and did some rudimentary research on how people think about resume.
After that, I started sketching. I made a point to sketch for a lot longer this time around, so I was off of Photoshop for at least two weeks. Sketching is a great way to quickly generate a lot of ideas at a decent fidelity without much overhead, and I use it as a tool for making lots of different directions really quickly.
Building a combined info-graphical and text resume view presented a few challenges. Our default layout is based on limited letterhead page size, and the candidate is only looking at a small slice of that page with form.
I designed many ways of combining information and visuals. Two versions trumped all: vertical timeline and combination of info-graphic. It’s interesting because this was the first crossroads in the product that had technical implications as well: is the timeline be vertical with long scroll or a concise horizontal design?
Adding the map introduced a new spatial organization. Professional footprint in context of world gave the larger vision. Keeping the map interactive was actually being very thoughtful about how we designed and implemented scrolling, panning, and zooming. It was important that we also showed the relationship between employer and their locations on the map in context.
Here, I believe getting feedback early and often leads to better products. Even before sketching, I’d make decks to present my ideas to the rest of the Product Design team to critique. I believe that there’s a balance between feedback given and feedback implemented. Oftentimes people really want a certain feature or a certain behavior simply because the sky is so blue, but you can’t do everything at once. As a designer, you just have to try your hardest to find a compromise that works.
At one point, I realized I didn’t know what I was talking about; I’m not a recruiter and never took a hiring decision. So, I wrote a job description for junior designer to help me with graphics design. It was a genuine desire of mine to hire, and a good way to research the collaborative recruiting process. I got many design resumes with a completely new view of what I should be doing and a renewed vigor to make a really amazing product.
Bridging the dots
These kinds of niche projects generally start with a requirement-gathering process. Once I have a good idea of what the feature needs to do, I discuss with tech team and start making decisions about technology. I study the right software and think about how it would need to change to support the new feature. This is also the time when I start thinking about building new systems and incorporating external products and services.
Working with developer is always really fun because you get to know new technology. I think it’s great to have everyone involved from the very beginning, and this project was no exception. Kishor has a really great product sense, so we often went back and forth talking about features that could be cool or useful.
The hardest part was focusing the core feature. We had a broad, long-term vision for where we wanted to take the iCV, and it was challenging to narrow down the shipping feature set for our first version
At this point, I had a good sense of how the iCV form and design would work, but we were still designing the way attributes would be added to the form. We knew that flow was going to be critically important to the success of the product, but until those details were locked down, we weren’t able to much make progress on the technical implementation. That was my biggest concern.
We started with our inline form system, giving candidate a way to add detail information to their iCV. That’s great for candidates because they can fill up details and see how would it reflect on iCV.
But we also wanted to let candidates add any of their other information to iCV, too, so we needed to integrate with a social database of all over the Internet. It’s challenging to anticipate exactly how a new feature is going to be used, and that’s made even more difficult when you consider the incredible scale at which people interact with CVs. It’s important to make engineering decisions that are flexible enough to adapt to a changing design while also being solid enough to provide candidates with a great experience.
Making it smart
While the product was getting polished, I worked on the brand with PR and marketing around how to launch iCV. This was a quick brainstorm with some traditional ideas to the unconventional.
We started with messaging. After some back and forth we decided to go with aspirational messages and not just focus on CV as a communication. Recruitment is obviously a huge part of it, but we wanted to help people realize they could use this new functionality to do more than just articulating their professional experience — you could map out the high impact performance in your CV, create a timeline, or whatever your interests are. We didn’t want to get too prescriptive about how to use the product right out of the gate.
I worked on a set of design principles and assets that helped me iterate quickly on the user education. These assets make up our standard set of components, type styles, buttons and rules for in-product education. Because many of these rules have already been established, my work really centered on the strategy around when to show education icon, a location pin, an award or any combination of these. In a way, it was kind of a stress test of this new system.
The biggest challenge was the timeframe — we had three weeks to build iCV that we’d normally need at least a month or so to build. There was also a design challenge in striking a balance between making iCV that is both attractive and also demure enough to work as a backdrop for the most important content: Talent Acquisition. The use of graphics and a handcrafted look and feel ultimately helped us to meet that challenge.
Preparing for launch
We knew everything had to be ready by the launch event, and we were all just committed to making that happen without sacrificing any part of the product.
It was crunch time, and I was getting pretty excited! At this point, we had all of the pieces in place, and people in friend circle had already started building some amazing CVs. We were focusing on bug fixes and polish tasks, and it was rewarding to see how even those small changes were making the product better every day.
Looking forward
Since our launch, Candidates have added CVs from various backgrounds. We’ve still got lots more to do to make recruitment more awesome and useful, and I couldn’t be more excited to keep working on it in 2016. Interested tryout? Create your own iCV!
