Challenge

Jobvite is an industry-leading applicant tracking system used by some of the largest players in the digital space, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Living Social and Square. The platform's publishing tools allow companies to increase employee referral metrics through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Jobvite's User Experience was dated and could not transition well to a mobile, touchscreen future. The User Experience had suffered due to the number of designers who had worked on the platform. This poor experience was reflected in customer survey comments, with over 25% sharing their disatisfaction with the User Experience.

Goals

• Develop a platform would give back an hour a day to recruiters by allowing them to review candidates
• Develop a touch based user interface to allow hiring managers to perform research both at home and at the office. During the research process, we found that over 50 percent of the hiring managers owned a tablet device.

Process

A new user experience team was recruited, including two designers with both social media and agency experience. Both designers also had experience designing for Windows 8 and iOS tablet devices prior to working at Jobvite. A front end engineer was also recruited to help speed up the prototyping and design process.

Research

• Over 100 recruiters, hiring managers and other human resource professionals were interviewed through contextual inquiry. Personas were created to represent the different actors that use Jobvite's applicant tracking software.
• Over 10 customer visits were performed over a six month period to understand the environment and mental model. 
• Over 70 usability tests were performed on the current and new user experiences to understand the pain points.

Design

• The early conception of the design was done using InDesign as a tool for a quicker iterative process. 
• Early usability testing was performed with a small group of respected Jobvite users, gathering their feedback 
• The design process included three months of iteration with the product and engineering teams. Sales and marketing were also involved in the process, which eventually lead to the adoption of the look and feel for all marketing materials.

Solution

In late September 2012 at HR Tech, a conference for human resource executives and professionals, Jobvite released a new Job Board that enabled job seekers to search opportunites advertised by 1,000 Jobvite customers.  Jobvite also announced the upcoming release of a completely redesigned Applicant Tracking and Sourcing application, and a new public facing website that reflected the application's new design.

Forrester and Gartner analysts called the new user interface innovative and forward thinking. One of the most innovative features is a completely redesigned scheduling assistant that will reduce the time to schedule interviews by at least a third over the previous Jobvite application.