CharacterID
Character assessment for job candidates.
Opportunity & Challenge
Our client came to Launch Deck with the vision to change hiring for the better through technology.
Studies suggest up to 80% of Americans feel they are unhappy and cannot change careers.
The Reason: Employers explicitly look for certainty in candidates. As a result, candidates without specific industry experience are considered the greatest risk, leaving talented individuals to remain in industries and positions they dislike for undisclosed periods of time.
Character has a greater impact on company culture and organizational integrity than industry expertise. Current job sites and recruiting services have high costs for access to a two-dimensional pool of candidates because they fail to address or acknowledge the impact character has on a company’s success.
Role & Skills
I led product management, experience design, and user research for CharacterID after a handoff from initial rounds of design. I led our team and client calls for collaborative sessions and product demos. With the client, I helped define product strategy, write user stories, and prioritize roadmap based on user need, business impact, and technical cost. I communicated requirements with our designer and developers. I outlined the user’s journey through flow charts, mocking up wireframes, and communicating with our brand/UI designer for final designs. I also led research sessions with 3 participants for design feedback.
Product Management / UX Design / User Research / Information Architecture / Brand Design
User Personas
Hiring Manager who is hiring for new roles. (Buyer)
Job Seeker who is actively searching for a new role. (End User)
Focus profession: Sales
Approach
User Research
I created survey questions that would help tailor who we were talking to – either a Hiring Manager or a Job Seeker. We needed to focus on individuals who were Active looking for a new job or those who had just successfully found a new position. We also wanted to better understand what Hiring Managers perspective on the platform.
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Remote/Zoom
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Conversational (Problem-oriented)
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Prototype & Usability
Outcomes (User Feedback)
I selected 4 participants – 2 job seekers and 2 hiring managers based on the interview responses. For the first part of the interview, I directed questions on their current hiring or job seeking journey and pains/challenges. For the second part of the interview, I had individuals walkthrough a design prototype for the job seeker view.
Hiring Manager, Erik (Sales)
“I would want to see the job candidate’s top 3 and bottom 3 attributes.” We initially developed the app only showing the candidate’s 6 top character attributes and this contributed to ideation around other ways to show this info.
“The interview gold is far more important than a score.” We discovered that Erik really wanted to use the assessment for creating questions in follow-up interviews more than having a total character score to base a candidate on.
“Promotion decisions are far more important than hiring decisions. Currently, our team uses a 4 quadrant screening for personality and a psychologist reviews before promoting them.” This opened up a future use case for internal hiring and promotion.
Hiring Manager, (Technical Recruiter)
“There’s too long of an intro before getting into the assessment.” This generated ideas for a 15-20 second short video to highlight the goal of the assessment and the steps they need to complete.
“This would really resonant to a hiring manager if the company sees their core values in the person’s strengths.” This generated ideas for hiring managers to prioritize character values they deem as most important in their company to filter and assess candidates.
“Brand awareness will be the biggest challenge.” This highlighted the need to create trust with users on the character verification process, as well as getting other trusted brands to partner with.
UX & Wireframes
Invite Feature
It requires trust and clarity for a user to send an invite for a peer to assess their character. To reduce anxiety, I focused on simplicity in communication to build confidence in sending the invite.
Prior to this step, we introduced taking a Self-Assessment so the person feels familiar with the questions that their colleagues will be asked.
We offered options to send the assessment via text or email to complete on their web or mobile device.
We also wanted to remind users that 10 assessments are required to unlock their CharacterID.
Invites Sent
To encourage users to get assessments completed by colleagues, we recommended that they send a personalized follow up after the CharacterID system sends a text or email to the listed people.
We also wanted to share another reminder that they had sent 4 invites and that the CharacterID score will only be unlocked after 10 assessments are submitted.
