Messages
Project: Messages encompasses a few types of communications available to recruiters and hiring managers. Emails, text messages, and LinkedIn InMail.
My Role: User Experience and Design.
Problem
We needed a place where a recruiter could easily check multiple communication streams without having to leave the platform, or bounce around between tabs/sections.
User Experience Goals
Ability to prioritize
Technical Requirements
TK
Evaluation of the Existing Feature
The existing Notes feature inside a candidate’s profile was hidden inside a collapsed accordion that required a minimum of three clicks to access which made it difficult to quickly scan feedback. Typically, I don’t broadly endorse “counting clicks” as I don’t believe it’s a good metric for measuring experience, however in this case the additional clicks were standing directly in the way of the usability of the feature. Notes were also truncated so that a user would need to click into them to see the full note.
The existing Notes feature in action.
Technical Research
I asked my Product Manager to query a couple of pieces of data across all the notes created by our users:
The median length of a note in characters
The median number of notes left per candidate
I wanted the median to help weed out the few users who may have been using the feature for something other than leaving notes (such as pasting in conversation threads or entire emails). We had a single case of over 70k notes left on a candidate profile, which was definitely an outlier. The query came back that notes were around 389 characters, and each candidate had 2.01 notes left on their profile.
With this information, it seemed reasonable to keep all notes exposed in their entirety on the candidates’ notes tab, so a recruiter could easily scan and read them without having to leave the page or expand individual notes. We do expect that the increased functionality of the feature will encourage higher usage, and we may need to revisit exposing all notes if the feature begins to be more heavily used.
GIF of the updated feature in production
Improvements
The feature was improved in a few key areas:
All notes were now able to be added and edited in-line, eliminating the pop-up window.
Subject lines were auto-generated with the name of the logged-in user and a timestamp to reduce notes with blank subjects (auto-generated subject lines are also editable upon creation).
A filter was added to show notes that were system-generated, or left on other jobs, related to the same candidate
What worked
Overall the reception of the Notes feature was received as an overall improvement from the existing feature. Recruiters and Hiring Managers commented that they were happy to be able to see the all notes on a candidate’s profile at a glance and adding new notes was simple and intuitive.
What didn’t work
The main complaint that came up during usability testing was the fact that Notes was still relegated to its own tab, where recruiters would like the ability to see them alongside other information (such as taking notes while reviewing a resume).
What’s next
In doing research on the IA of candidate profiles, one of the areas the came up multiple times was the desire to be able to leave a note from anywhere. Another suggestion that came up was the ability to add tags to notes to help sort/organize. These suggestions were brought to Product’s attention and planned for a future enhancement.
Results
“New iCIMS” is effectively in a beta state (not having full feature-parity with the current platform). Since it isn’t currently possible for users to use the product end-to-end it’s not possible to give a clear measurement of adoption. However, outside user feedback we do have some stats on increasing usage over time: