Boon
Building referrals, from the inside.
BOON, A CLIENT PROJECT FOR A STARTUP IN THE ONLINE RECRUITING SPACE.
GENERAL ASSEMBLY, PROJECT #4 of 4.
Case Study
Project Summary
This project had me designing for the founders of a San Francisco-based startup called Boon. The Boon team, who have no designers of their own, are trying to create a platform through which recruiters at large companies can maintain and manage their candidate tracking. Boon would become a place to make an internal recruiter's job easier, tapping into the extended network of employees, and employees' professional contacts.
Boon had an out-of-the-box demo online, but no fully-working designed solution. Along with two other students at GA, I was asked to make some or all of the solution for the CEO and his head of sales.
Pictured from left to right: my design pals Eric and Bert; Bill, the CEO/Co-Founder of Boon; and me.
Business Needs
After a kickoff meeting with the client, I articulated the business needs as follows:
Create a world-class referral builder for large companies.
Allow the company's recruiters to tap into a robust internal network.
Following the first couple meetings, I got a sense of their future customers - the people who would be regularly using Boon. Currently their only users were job seekers, using Boon essentially as a job board like Monster or Craigslist. But the Boon CEO wanted to attract companies and recruiters to the platform.
My team created three main personas:
PERSONA #1: THE RECRUITER. A quote from one of the recruiters I interviewed captured the essence of this persona's motivation:
"I want to know the human behind the candidate. Show me great candidates and tell me about them as people, not just them as resumes."
PERSONA #2: THE EMPLOYEE. We polled several of our friends and their friends. We asked them, if you were hired at a company, and your HR manager asked you to sign up for Boon and make referrals, what would incentivize you to actually do it?
"Make it easy and painless for me - to sign up, AND to make referrals. Don't make me work - I'm busy."
PERSONA #3: THE JOB SEEKER. We asked peers and recruiters alike, what motivates you to sign up for a new job site on the market?
"Match me intelligently with jobs I actually want. Don't give me another laundry list of job postings. Get to know me, and help me find the jobs that fit."
The Problem
By talking to present-day customers of Boon and playing around on the site, I discovered Boon had a fully functional job board and even the birth of a referral / bounty system. But onboarding didn't ask job seekers for all the information that mattered to recruiters - it asked for a resume and work history, but skipped over key questions about their work/life balance, preferred company culture, and the path that led them through their career.
I surveyed people who had signed up for Boon and agreed to share their contact details with the company. We focused on trying to uncover potential pain points around onboarding, the referrals process, and the UI in general.
The referrals aspect was also underrepresented and deemphasized, and the UI in general was not engaging. The Boon team verified that what they had wasn't retaining users.
[Click image to enlarge] The old Boon homepage had that slick future-y feel that played to their audience (mostly Bay Area tech companies and recruiters). But the content didn't differentiate between different user types (one demo, no matter if you were a business owner, a recruiter or just someone looking for work).
Old Boon also disguised the functionality of referring jobs to quality candidates, even though referrals were kind of the point of the whole platform. Looking at the job above, how would you refer it to a friend? You wouldn't know at first glance, but "Send Boon" is the only way.
Scope
Armed with an understanding of the different customer types, an analysis of the current site, and pages of notes from interviews with the Boon team and their users, I finalized a solution statement that worked for the group.
1. Enhance and simplify Boon onboarding;
2. Get Boon working harder for recruiters;
3. Give people incentive to make referrals.
The Design Group
As a cohort of three designers, we discussed how to divide up our three-part solution. We would all share a common style guide and collaborate daily, showing each other's designs and gathering feedback as we iterated over a 2-week period. But with so little time to build a complex multi-headed product, it was important to us to give everyone a specific piece of the puzzle.
Eric: advocate for recruiters
Eric focused on a clean, useful dashboard for recruiters, HR managers and anyone else who would act as an 'admin' on the site. He also revamped the flows for posting jobs and running filtered candidate searches.
As the former manager of a brewery and someone who understood the hiring process, Eric was passionate about solving this use case.
On day one, the Boon CEO told us that surprisingly few people bothered with referrals even when there was bounty (money) to be made from them; Bert's face lit up with ideas.
Bert: advocate for employees
Bert, my other design partner, loved the idea of trying to "gamify" the referrals process. He wanted to prove that there were new ways to motivate people who already had jobs to refer their friends for open positions.
...and me: advocating for job seekers
As a Content Strategist, I knew I could build a better onboarding flow. The platform needed to ask candidates smart questions that recruiters could use to place the candidate in the right position. Boon would then populate job seeker profiles with not just their work histories, but also their motivations, passions, the 'human' stuff.
You may have noticed by now that we used our own photos in the user personas (pictured earlier in this case study). We're not vain, we just enjoyed a little humor and roleplaying...
Eric works out a draft of a user flow for a company admin adding their recruiting team to Boon.
Bert works with stickies to sort out key features of the employee dashboard.
Whiteboarding the flow of usage from admin, to recruiter, to employee, and on through the extended network.
User Interviews
We poured through our notes from over 20 interviews with different recruiters we'd met along the design trail, job seekers from our class and our friend networks, and the current body of Boon users.
Specifically, we looked through the quotes we had written down from these various people. We wrote down the quotes that captured the essence of the solution we wanted to make, and used those quotes to make sure we never lost sight of our customer.
The Boon project "quote board" we created. It watched over us as we designed.
Highlights:
“I see another job board it’s like, oh, ok, here we go again. They’re all the same.”
-Leo (job seeker)
How this informed our design: I eventually created 'pitch pages' off the homepage to immediately distinguish Boon from other job boards for candidates (using clever introductory content and sample screenshots of the logged-in experience).
“If I see jobs upfront and I know the site's legit, I’m willing to take time & sign up properly.”
-Sarah (job seeker)
Key takeaway: our onboarding didn't have to be a one-screen deal - we could indulge a new user's patience - but we needed to be able to demonstrate via 'teaser' screens that Boon did, in fact, have job listings you couldn't find anywhere else.
“Most of the process is manual. The best results are from sitting down with my employees and asking them about their connections.”
-Ashley (recruiter)
From an internal recruiter at Climate Corporation. We heard a lot of recruiters refer to the pain point of recruiting being too "manual" of a job. This eventually led to a system of automating the candidate hunt via a built-in "Boon Bot."
“When I send a job to a candidate, there’s a moment of uncertainty. I THINK this is a good job for them, but without knowing them better, I can never say for sure.”
-Jeannie (recruiter)
Fears like these from recruiters reaffirmed the vital need to survey job seekers and get them to do more than just upload a resume.
Competitive Analysis
(click any image to enlarge)
If there was one key takeaway from competitive analysis, it was that no site seemed to be doing the job of catering equally to all three of our user types: the candidate, the recruiter, and the employee. There was a big opportunity to build the first 'complete' site that worked for each.
User Flows
We signed up for dummy Boon accounts on the existing site, and noted the pain points that came up during regular use. We particularly noted the pain points that paralleled complaints we'd heard from existing Boon users.
inability to apply for jobs as a job seeker even after completing the onboarding process (the system pestered the job seeker for further information repeatedly even after signup was finished).
unexpected error messaging during job searches and application.
(click image to enlarge)
no way to hold separate accounts as a recruiter and as a business.
no distinction between dashboards for recruiters and job seekers, making it difficult to find basic functionality (like posting a new job opportunity).
Site Map
I developed a site architecture to show the business how we could remove some of the circular logic within the current page structure, and simplify the overall hierarchy.
During site mapping, I realized how important it would be to show the messaging behind the site, such as email invites to employees and fellow recruiters from the admin, which became part of the final prototype.
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