Currently, CX team recommends candidates through a spreadsheet. There were no standard or measurable process in place on recommending mentors for companies to speak to. This would include all the actions from creating a list of companies that need mentors, to verifying they’re the right fit, to displaying the recommendations to the companies.
Goal
Emissary wants to help connect mentors with companies for insightful opportunities. Whether a company’s sales representative needs advice on who the right person to contact to reviewing marketing materials and presentation, Emissary needed to make it easier for companies to review candidates that can best help them and for our internal team to deliver it. Candidate Recommendation System is a feature we built to deliver recommendations (candidate Emissaries) to customers on a regular basis.
My Role
I led the user research and design of the candidate’s experience. I partnered with a product manager, VP of Product, and 2 engineers to inform the process.
Success Metrics
Before beginning a design, I always look to understanding what metrics we want to measure:
- A 95% increase in sending candidates via product
- A decrease in internal team members’ time spent creating GSheets and narrowing list of accounts (at this time it took 1 week to narrow down the list of accounts and put together a list of candidates for all accounts)
Discovery
After researching and discussing the challenge across teams in the company, I created a flow to clarify communicate how we can better recommend Emissaries to our customers. I workshopped with 2 Product Managers to understand, “Where or when does the process start? Where or when does it end?” Then, we discussed and decided on the level of detail to be included in the diagram. Finally, we included list of the activities that took place in the process.
Job Stories
Before diving into the design, let’s understand the customers and the information they might be looking for which was then ranked by priority.
Wireframes to Prototype
After a series of whiteboarding sessions and sketches to understand how the process worked across teams, I landed on a design that was prototyped in InVision.
Feedback
“Before recommendations were sporadic and I’ve consistently have seen more and can make well-informed decisions with my team on who we want to work with as a mentor. During my interaction, [the advisors] gave me ideas and guidance to achieve my goals by exploring new domains in the industry. One of my matches even introduced me to his LinkedIn connections which helped me get a meeting from an executive and closed a deal.”
“I owe a lot of my own success to mentors I’ve had at the company. I’ve already had fruitful conversations with folks early in their sales cycle looking for specific insights.”