Image by @diansorayar
Image by @diansorayar
In August 2019, the Traveloka Design Department's Design Leads noticed significant challenges in hiring suitable talents, especially for critical positions. This led to an internal review by the Design Leads and Senior Designers involved in the recruitment process. The challenge of this project was how we could enhance the Design Department's hiring process to recruit talents that best meet our needs effectively.
Traveloka is Southeast Asia’s travel and lifestyle app that provides its customers with access to discover and purchase different types of travel needs. Its product portfolio includes transport booking services such as flight tickets, buses, trains, car rentals, airport transfers, and access to SEA's largest accommodation inventory. By the time I worked on this project Traveloka had about 40 million monthly active users across Southeast Asia.
Designing good products and services often start from having the right people who design the products and services themselves. So, I learn a lot on how important it is to have a good recruitment and hiring process set in an organization.
Service Blueprint Mapping
I started by interviewing key stakeholders in the hiring process, including Recruiters, Design Leads, Senior Designers, and newly hired designers, to understand their experiences and perspectives. This led to creating a service blueprint with the project team to identify areas for improvement. We discovered a lack of standardized candidate assessment guidelines, which was the root cause of the recruitment challenges.
Development of Evaluation Criteria and Assessment Tool
We developed evaluation criteria and an assessment tool by integrating stakeholder insights, adopting best practices from other departments like the Engineering and Data team, and referencing external sources. We tested the draft criteria for readability, validity, and reliability with Senior Designers to ensure it effectively measured candidate competencies.
Improvement of Hiring Flow and Guidelines for Senior Designers
We refined the hiring process and produced a detailed guideline for Senior Designers to ensure consistency and clarity in candidate assessments.
The whole process of mapping the service blueprint has helped us gain better understanding and brought realization to everyone involved in the hiring process the challenges they were facing in every milestone or touchpoint thus helped the project team identified potential areas of interventions, which was around bringing clarity on the criteria to evaluate candidate and clarity on the hiring flow.
The project team mapped out the “Before” and “After (Ideal)” of the Hiring Process as well as what to be put in the guideline for Senior Designers
Evaluation Criteria & Guideline Platform Concept
We thought about how we could make the Evaluation Criteria and Guideline more accessible for the senior designers and design leads who are going to be involved in assessing the candidates.
Initially, we prototyped a Google spreadsheet to host the evaluation criteria and then we tested its functionality through role-playing. However, feedback led us to develop a more user-friendly web-based guideline platform that can be operated through a Content Management System platform (CMS) for easier navigation and content management.
UI Design & Usability Testing
Together with the UI Visual Designer I also enhanced the platform’s design to high fidelity, focusing on the optimal information display. We also conducted usability tests with senior designers and design ops team members to ensure the platform and CMS tool were easy to use and effective.
We also tested out if the evaluation criteria and guideline content were easily understood along with doing the usability testing on the design form of the guideline.
First iteration on form was to build the evaluation criteria and guideline on Google Sheet
We decided to create a web-based guideline platform that can be operated
through a Content Management System platform (CMS) for easier navigation and content management.
Apart from designing how the guideline platform would look like, we also designed the structure of the Content Management System (CMS) tool that we used to operate the guideline. We tried to integrate the platform to hiring platform that the HR team used, but we didn’t manage to do that as it was too complicated technically, but the guideline was proven useful regardless.
After socializing the evaluation criteria and guidelines, we observed significant improvements in our hiring process, reducing the review lead time from 1.5 week to approximately ~1-2 days.
This was my first project where I got to learn more about using a service blueprint to map interactions among all stakeholders in the hiring process. It helped enhance my systems thinking by considering perspectives beyond the candidates and assessors (senior designers and design leads), as it also included the recruitment teams. This experience also encouraged me to use a more participatory approach in designing and incorporating feedback in every project milestone.
Through this project, I also learned to develop solutions beyond technological platforms, such as structuring content and refining the hiring process. Additionally, this project allowed me to blend my domain knowledge and skills in behavioral assessment with solution design to improve the Design department's operations."
