I spent years learning the HR industry and listening to Hireology's customers. Throughout research and feedback from individual initiatives across the entire product, I started to see common themes and patterns emerge. I began to explore these insights and identify opportunities to help lead the product in a direction that would drive value and innovation.

Leveraing the deep knowledge of our internal teams as well as previous research efforts, I sought to unearth our customers' mental model across the hiring journey, agnostic of any tool or software. Through the use of affinity mapping techniques I was able to identify patterns across customer challenges and expectations and map those to their hiring journey. This helped us to better understand the different types of hiring processes customers use dependent on their business structure, and what this means for the different people involved in those processes.

Once I had a holistic view of the hiring journey, I then mapped out the Hireology experience, including features, work-arounds, and any known feedback about our specific offerings and flows. Lining up the two, I then was able to pinpoint our gaps and opportunities as well as areas for improvement and where we are misaligned in meeting expectations.

The hiring journey mapping initiative clearly showed where there was opportunity to provide a better experience for our customers that more closely aligns with their needs. Along with insights about foundational changes to how we set up accounts, companies, and users and permissions, we also learned that our different user types are expecting a hiring tool to provide a level of accountability, visibility, and guidance at varying levels throughout the hiring process.

With a clear picture of how we can better solve our customer needs through a user experience that more acurately represents their hiring journey, I took on a new initiative to define our UX vision. Through collaborative efforts with the UX team, I led several rounds of whiteboarding sessions to define key user stories, flows, and eventually wireframes. I ran a round of user testing on our wireframes to further validate our direction and influence initial mockups. Having a research-backed, validated UX vision has led to buy-in across stakeholders to invest in major UX changes.

Hireology decided to spin up a team to test the efficiency and effectiveness of a new technical strategy and provide customers with an experience that better matches their needs, a la the UX vision. Over the past 6 months, I have led the design process and conducted targeted research efforts to validate our assumptions and drive our solutions, all while keeping an MVP mindset. We are rounding out 3 milestons that include accounts, users and permissions, and the setup and posting of a job. I am currently usability testing the user experience and specific UI interactions. In addition, we are building out our component library collaborating closely with our frontend engineers. Working free of technical constraints with our full-stack agile development team, we are able to learn and iterate quickly. So far, we have received very positive feedback and have completed a round of testing validating that our implementation of accounts meet customer needs.