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Overview

I worked as a part of a team at Bayard Advertising to help solve the common pain points found in large-scale interview processes at companies that hire and onboard thousands of new employees every day. I helped tackle this problem holistically and was directly involved in three distinct projects that each touched a different user type in the process including applicants, hiring managers, recruiters, and finance departments monitoring hiring budgets. You can read more about the budget wizard here, and the candidate experience here.

This particular piece of the puzzle, the questionnaire builder, allows hiring managers and recruiters to build a custom questionnaire that precedes the official application, and routes candidates towards the best possible role based on their answers.

Problem statement

While interviews are a great way to evaluate potential new employees, the volume of candidates that larger companies need to process can be a time-consuming and daunting task. As an advertising partner, Bayard would often provide pre-built tools to help manage job postings and candidate applications in connection with their outreach efforts to streamline the process for their corporate clients.

Obviously, reducing process time at this volume can lead to massive cost-savings for every party involved. Our goal was to allow hiring mangers to easily create and maintain complex questionnaires and to offload as much of the boilerplate questions as possible before the interview process would start. We also set out to eliminate the often hated "upload your resume, now enter all of the same information in again..." scenarios that online job applicants so often run into during their job search.

Process

Through collaborative and rapid brainstorming sessions, we landed fairly quickly on an open canvas-style structure with the ability to drag, drop, and connect “nodes” together to control the logic of the questionnaire. The ability to easily see the connective paths in a questionnaire was a common problem with existing tools, and it was all too easy for even simple surveys to get out of hand quickly. We also knew that we needed to include the ability to add tagging and data capture all while maintaining a feeling of simplicity and flexibility.

We iterated through multiple aesthetic choices, layouts, and entry methods looking for the most intuitive and pleasant experience that could retain its power-user functionality. One of the interesting challenges I found in this process was designing for the varying levels of detail in zooming in and out that surfaced in some of the larger questionnaires. By providing designs for each node type at 3 different zoom levels, users gained the ability to easily process the display of data at the level they wanted to view it from, and on the screen size they preferred to use.

Results

This reinvention of the questionnaire creation process unlocked a new wave of available data and analysis for hiring managers, and democratized the creation of questionnaires for location-level managers by making the tool more accessible on different device sizes and more approachable for first-time users.