Christopher Norton

Aquent

Employee Recruiting Portal

Impact

Enabled the business to hire new talent faster and to better communicate their key value proposition both externally and internally. The updated website was maintained for over five years.

Improvements

• Clear navigation to objects/nouns, making areas feel more tangible and intuitive
• Calls to action and buttons were placed in the navigation and throughout for quick access
• Defined content strategy and aligned to values
• Clear visual weight between sections with on-brand typography and colors

Who, Where, When

Knowing that our primary users were candidates applying to the staffing agency was helpful. Here’s how I went about generating starter data from almost nothing. Each artifact or step moved us toward better understanding and actual product.

Personas

With no existing personas I needed to do some generative research on candidates mainly front-end and back-end developers. I created surveys for existing employees to find out a little more about why they chose Aquent and using the surveys I built an overview of common facts, problems, behaviors, and goals. This would give context to friction points in the journey.

What was learned

A website can fix a lot of things, but it is not going to prevent culture problems like burnout and mixed messaging between values, working environment, and daily activities. I cannot change the actual building or run in-person events from just a website refresh. Those items were prioritized and offloaded from the scope of the website but I knew I needed to learn more about the overall journey if this was going to be successful.

Journey and Business Ecosystem Mapping

I connected with a VP familiar with the ecosystem and candidate journey and we mapped out how the business generates revenue through recruiting and the candidate lifecycle. I then divided up the journey and grouped it into a loose AIDA model (Awareness -> Interest -> Desire -> Action) so we could visualize and empathize with the user's state of mind at each stage. Were the users just casually browsing or were they deeply engaged? Were they even seeing us? Were the common problems and goals listed in the persona research being answered to the point of having enough desire to take action?

What

Solution 1 – Recruiting process

With HR I helped build a plan for improving the recruiting process and team culture including:

• Reducing the number of interview and vetting stages from 7 to 4.
• Community outreach to connect mentors with aspiring developers
• Planned more events like Hackathons
• Updated printed materials and swag

Solution 2 – Website solutions

We launched a few digital products including a new online video training portal and a recruiting site as part of a plan to better align the team environment and activities with the core business values. Individual landing pages allowed us better tracking for networking at events like job fairs and school visits.

I built the production site from zero including the copywriting, art direction, graphic design, imagery, motion graphics and the HTML/CSS/JS as well.

Technology section

Copywriting

It was helpful to map out content and information architecture before building the visuals. I found the book "Letting Go of the Words" particularly helpful in rewriting all the copy for the website to address the problems and goals I found earlier in the persona discovery process like employee surveys. It was easier to gain buy-in when the conversation shifted from 'Do you like this page?' to 'Does this section make it easier to understand what we do?'

Visual design

I used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch to create graphics and page layouts. Colors, fonts and grid system were matched against the parent company website.

Imagery

I defined the imagery style to be used in the marketing materials, selecting overhead drone photos to create the feeling of seeing the big picture through future tech which is exactly what we provide in our solutions to clients: technology-based solutions that work with large amounts of data at a digestible scale.

Motion Graphics

I created storyboards, animated motion graphics, and handled sound design for an internal video training library. The primary focus of this team is web development so a gear was used a gear icon was used to symbolize 'working' processes. Having the logo typed out creates familiarity with job tasks, including typing out and organizing code.

Development

I used HTML5/CSS3 and JavaScript to build out the designs and engineered a few Node.js task runners to automatically generate compressed HTML/CSS from Sass and pug sources files. It also ran CSSlint and ESLint before pushing to git version control.

How

There are lots of ways to measure success. I established feedback loops and wrote short surveys given to candidates during on-boarding to give us some updated data on what was or wasn't attracting talent. Landing pages for job fairs and other events with CTAs for sending in resumes would also allow us to gauge interest from particular events over time. Overall recruiters could monitor if how many times they had to reach out to clients or how many candidates they were able to fill.

Internal review and user surveys from the new feedback loop were very positive. I moved on to other projects, but metrics control was handed over to recruiters and the marketing team. The updated design was maintained for over five years.