The recruiting team at Facebook sets aggressive hiring goals that require the support of enterprise products to help boost their recruiters’ productivity and efficiency.  I was part of a fast-growing recruiting products team whose objective was to deliver the newest and most advanced customized tools to recruiting teams tasked with seeking out the world’s best talent.

Projects

I conducted ~20 research projects over the course of 24 months that covered various stages of the hiring process: employee referrals, searching for new candidates, tracking and measuring progress of recruiting, etc.  I worked concurrently with multiple teams on demanding project timelines, running anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 months in duration.

My Role

User Researcher

Processes

Every project started with a consultation with product team leaders to identify a study objective, methodology, and participant profile.  At that time, I also garnered commitment from the team (engineers, designers, content strategy, product management) to attend research sessions and confirmed alignment of the research goals with individual team business goals as well as longer term organizational goals.

Most of the studies I conducted were qualitative contextual inquiries or usability tests, with some workflow process mapping, user journey mapping, time studies, and quantitative surveys as needed.

Throughout the research process, I coordinated with recruiting business partners (the end users of the product designs) to ensure the tools were truly meeting their needs.  I also served as the human user advocate in the planning and integration of machine learning models into products and long term strategy.

Outcome

Research findings were delivered mostly in the form of an oral and visual presentation. Depending on the nature and urgency of the project, I also organized interactive poster shareouts, created process map visuals for the team to reference, participated in design sprints, or scheduled daily user insight debriefs to get teams the critical information and user perspective they needed to make high priority product and engineering decisions.

I provided product and process recommendations that influenced product strategy, informed the creation of new employee programs, and enabled recruiting teams to increase efficiency of their business processes. Overall, our product team’s efforts helped the recruiting teams nearly double their hiring goals.