Project Overview:
In late 2019, I was brought on to help design and iterate an e-commerce marketplace for iCIMS, something the company had been thinking about for a long time but never taken any formal steps toward building.
The Recruitment Marketplace was imagined as an “app store” for finding and integrating outside assistance — think headhunters and staffing agencies — when hiring specialized roles. Users would not only be able to enlist help staffing a role with the click of a button, but the product experience would simplify the usually one-off and complex legal and financial framework of each transaction.
The Problem:
As an entirely new experience within the iCIMS platform, I was not only responsible for designing the look, feel, and functionality of the Agency Marketplace, but also for understanding how it would seamlessly integrate into the current product experience. This meant quick mock-ups, heavy collaboration with roles throughout the business — technical architects, legal experts, front and back end engineers, etc — while identifying project requirements as they revealed themselves.
Client:
iCIMS
My Role:
UX Architect
Launched:
January 2020*
1. In this example, a job has been stagnant for a set period of time, and the job is flagged as a candidate for the Agency Marketplace
2. User is prompted to select from one of the available recruitment firms integrated via the recruitment marketplace.
3. Once selected for the first time, one of the marketplace options expands into a brief overview of the service.
4. Once selected, BountyJobs integration is now active and can be used to source the position.
5. User is prompted with the terms, conditions, and estimated purchase price of transaction.
6. User has selected payment option, and is prompted to enter transaction details
UX & Interaction Design:
Rapid design & prototyping through collaboration.
How often are you on a project where each project stakeholder has a different idea of the project envisioned in their head, and conversations end up going in circles as a result?
With the very idea of the Agency Marketplace being so new to iCIMS, in order to make progress and unify the project vision I needed to be an incredibly astute listener as I gathered up how my teammates envisioned functionality in their heads, and translate that vision into visual assets everyone could respond to. As the owner of the product experience, but also the design expert, I needly to quickly create these assets in order to facilitate project discussions, ideation, and planning.
Somewhere between concept screens and wireframes, rapid design helped us think through an idea just far enough that we could discuss several hypothetical steps ahead without committing to a particular direction, and quickly iterate or change course as often as needed.
These early assets played a key role in moving the project forward and uniting the team in a common understanding of new ideas, what we’d be building, and how best approach this unfamiliar business development. They were also instrumental in sharing our project with users
UX Architecture & Product Design:
Outlining user flows, and capturing technical requirements to unite both halves of the project.
Similarly, each individual piece of the experience needed to be mapped out and tracked by multiple teams working on their own piece of the interconnected puzzle, so that everyone could agree on the overall flow of the product being built and keep sight of the big picture.
Outlining and sharing interaction maps after proved most useful in uniting discussions between the two major “halves” of the project being worked on in tandem: Agency Marketplace and Digital Commerce.
Agency Marketplace refers to the overall look, feel, and functionality of browsing, selecting, and integrating a recruitment partner into the hiring workflow. This is also the experience of learning how each agency works, how much it costs, and toggling them on and off.
Digital Commerce refers to the development and implementation of a net new system for conducting the transaction side, specifically how agent/agency commissions are paid out, and how bulk purchases are handled. It also refers to the experience of doling out purchasing entitlements to different users under the same license, terms, and legal agreements.
Due to my NDA I can’t share the really juicy stuff, but the above flow is a fairly simple representation of the type of deliverable I’d need to put together as output from a meeting.
Research & Testing:
Fostering an e-commerce ecosystem within the existing iCIMS experience.
Introducing such a radically new feature set to the iCIMS experience also meant we needed to regularly hear from iCIMS users to make sure they understood the product’s value proposition, and that our vision felt like something they could eventually see themselves integrating into their existing workflow.
One-on-one customer interviews: our first step in conducting user research was to invite the customers who already enlist outside agency staffing into their hiring process, to better understand how it fits into their business and the nuance of how different implementation differ from each other.
Extensive competitive analysis & legal research: we also needed to learn how to fit the complexities of hiring contracts, multi-page term’s of service documents, and commission structures into a usable experience. That meant doing competitive research with similar products, accounting for how and where the necessary legal framework would cross into the experience, and then also working with the legal team to better understand legal restrictions and/or requirements we’d need to design around.
Design Obstacle:
What happens when a pandemic strikes, and plans change?
This project was in active development when COVID-19 and lockdowns started, which meant a reorganization and broad shift in resources at iCIMS. Unfortunately, though early development and implementation of the Agency Marketplace was already well underway, iCIMS needed to pivot and reposition itself for a dramatically different hiring landscape in the coming years.
As the lead designer who’d sat through a lot of meetings wrapping my head around this project, this was a very difficult pivot but a good lesson in the importance of timing when releasing a product — sometimes you have the right project, but the wrong timing.
In Conclusion:
The Agency Marketplace is an exhaustively designed, detailed, and documented e-commerce experience just slightly ahead of its time.
This was a fascinating project to come into with a fresh set of eyes, and to play such an important role in facilitating productive ideation and decision making between very intelligent people. I learned a lot in a short amount of time, and look forward to a future where our hard work eventually finds its place in the modern iCIMS product experience.