During my time with Aquent as their Lead Product Designer, I observed a significant gap in understanding job expectations between Aquent agents and company hiring managers. It was costing agents time and money to calibrate what type of talent is needed for what type of role at any given company because certain position titles and responsibility descriptions varied from company to company. The expectation of an application designer at Meta, for example, might not be exactly the same as at Etsy. I created a tool for recruiting agents and hiring managers to better and more quickly align on role expectations upstream in the talent screening process. Some key achievements included introducing design jams to the company at large, leveraging prototypes as evidence for roadmap consideration, and positively impacting business bottom line in a 3 month timeframe.
I sifted through hundreds of job descriptions from companies and agent listings and distilled the most commonly mismatched role titles and descriptions. This allowed me to scope the initial prototypes of the product idea to address the most costly roles talent were being screen for. By costly, I mean, for example, "Design Strategist" strongly differed in description from agent to hiring manager across companies. I also interviewed agents and hiring managers after talent screenings to learn of the most often requested deliverables from each of the determined costly roles. I wondered, how might I bring clarity and alignment to these role descriptions for both agents and hiring managers, so that they can better identify talent to screen?
I charted a graph that mapped skills and deliverables against a common design workflow. When speaking with hiring managers, I had agents note where they heard certain skills and deliverables are most needed, and then plotted those on the graph. This indicated where in the design workflow certain skills and deliverables are most often expected in certain roles talent were being hired for. I then had agents do this exercise with talent they were recruiting. They would ask talent to identify and stack rank their own competencies with a limited currency (in this case, a set number of blocks).
By comparing a talent's graph against a hiring manager's graph, agents were then able to more effectively visualize and articulate whether the talent being screened might confidently match the type of role a company hiring manager is trying to fill.
After getting buy-in on the concept from leadership, I conducted a design sprint with an engineer to deliver a functioning product to equip agents with. After two weeks of use in the field, and positive feedback from agents, Aquent Persona was launched and accessible to not just agents but hiring managers via a URL. This further enabled ingesting company and market perspective on roles and descriptions for us to utilize in the product's backend.
Straddling product ownership and design is always invigorating to me. This particular experience is one of many in my career that reminded me that pursuing ideas I believe in is always worth it, even when it might be uncomfortable. In its early stages, there was one point where we really questioned whether having talent essentially "profile" their competencies was an appropriate exercise. It warranted its own investigation. It turns out, talent are most likely to engage with this type of tool exactly when applying for jobs because their own self reflection and assessment of their own skills is perceived as necessary.
Aquent Persona decreased the time to "first submit" by 12%, increased lead volume by 19% in its first 6 months, and resulted in 62% of leads being successfully filled. The product would evolve to become Aquent's UX Job Builder application, still used today.
More details about this project are available on request.
