Having the right tools to support the recruitment process is a critical success factor for Randstad, the world's largest employment agency, with over 2.5 million candidates placed each year. I helped them by leading a team of designers from Essense on a multi-million-dollar project developing an internal platform that better supports their consultants in finding the best candidates for each job.
We worked together as a multidisciplinary team in Europe and the USA, developing a brand new platform from the ground up, in a high-paced process that involved research, service design, user experience, and visual design. This thorough approach resulted in a cohesive product that strongly supports the observed behaviors and actual needs of recruitment consultants, making them perform more efficiently and reach their goals more effectively.
My responsibilities included defining the overall user experience vision of the platform, the workflow of the team, direct communication with business leadership and tech stakeholders, and leading the design team (service design, UX and visual design) to ensure the quality of solutions and deliverables.
The end-to-end process that I helped put in place involved a tightly knitted set of sprints performed by a multidisciplinary team which included research, analysis, conceptualization, validations, high-fidelity design specifications and development, ensuring that every initiative that was brought forward would undergo a thorough, yet highly efficient, user-centred design process.
We encouraged members of the business and tech team to join the online validation tests of our prototypes, so that they could get first-hand insights on how the solutions were perceived by future real-life users. They could discretely listen in on the interviews and add their own notes in real-time, so having them participate meant that we could effectively collect insights from the different points of view of each expert involved.
The platform was rolled out and got great reviews from recruitment consultants who said it improved their performance and allowed them to do their job better, faster and with less friction. As an example of the business impact, the revenue for the business unit dealing with blue collar jobs went up by $100 million (an increase of 11%) due to the implementation of the platform.