Borderless is a technology platform which manages the end-to-end international hiring process. Current customers are UK care providers, helping recruit care workers from abroad to help fill nearly 200,000 vacant positions in the UK care sector.
As a young but fast-growing business, the current product has been built in a rush and needs a full revamp to support medium-term scale.
Sprint:
7 weeks
Deliverables:
Web app to host end-to-end recruitment process
Team:
Myself, Shaimaa Osman, Zeb Cumberland
My roles:
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Presenting
Branding
Design Systems
Discover
We facilitated interviews with care home owners, managers and recruiters who informed us that when hiring, they rarely hired from abroad as the process is very complicated and hard to understand, as well as being timely and expensive.
The main qualities they value in a candidate are relevant experience, necessary qualifications, and reliability - i.e. commitment and attendance, and valid documents (many were concerned that candidates would lie about who they were or forge documents).
As an alternative research method, we performed a full heuristic analysis of the Borderless website against four competitors as a comparison and found that it had a lot of room for improvement.
Areas that required significant focus included ‘visibility of system status’ and ‘aesthetic and minimalist design’ as we found information architecture to be illogical and the navigation to find what we actually wanted was unclear.
Define
It was clear that there were two key experiences to consider, that of the customer (employer) and the candidate, so we created a persona and problem statement for each.
Jill, Care Home Manager
Goal:Maintain a smooth operation of business.
Pains: Struggling to fill vacancies due to a UK care worker shortage. Finds sponsorship process unclear.
Jill needs a way to quickly recruit qualified care workers from abroad within budget because there is a labour shortage in the UK and she finds the visa sponsorship process lengthy, expensive and hard to understand.
We believe that by showcasing qualified candidates from abroad and fast-tracking the visa/sponsorship process, we will achieve a quicker and cheaper hiring process for Jill.
We will know this to be true when Jill recruits a candidate through the Borderless platform.
Kehinde, Carer
Goal:Secure a better-paid job in the UK.
Pains:Doesn't have the right to work in the UK and can’t afford an immigration lawyer.
Kehinde needs a way to find sponsored job opportunities in the UKcare sector because she is currently underpaid and lacking career opportunities in her home country.
We believe that by providing a platform for Kehinde that showcases her qualifications and connects her with potential employers, we will achieve a higher chance of success in getting her a sponsored job in the UK.
We will know this to be true when she accepts a job offer and her visa application is successful through our platform.
Ideate
There were three main aspects to consider: the public website, the candidate-focussed product and the employer-focussed product. This lead us to identifying over 20 individual actions and accompanying user flows. We prioritised two main flows, the onboarding for candidates and the employer dashboard.
The employer dashboard would enable users to quickly create an account and start browsing candidates, with the option to invite some to interview, track the application process and send messages.
The candidate onboarding sequence would include a ‘job application’ style form which would allow users to create an account, then build a profile for employers to view.
Goal: As an employer, invite a candidate to interview
Goal: As a candidate, set up a live candidate profile
Design
We identified a core colour palette and simple typeface that would enable us to build a clean and modern aesthetic that would not restrict the client to the care industry but allow flexibility to expand into other verticals.
More colour was injected into the content focussed areas of the website to bring the users a more joyful experience. The colourful design was paired back where the users had a task to do such as onboarding or using the dashboard.
We prioritised a mobile-first interface as research shows that 71% of web traffic in Asia and Africa comes from mobile devices. This also motivated us to include non-type fields such as multiple choice buttons or slider bars where suitable as type fields are harder to engage with on small touch-screen devices.
When considering the onboarding flow, we understood the importance of allowing the user to create the account quickly, requiring just email, name and password fields. We also included an email verification step as we know that a service that helps provide UK visas would be a likely target for bots.
Once the user has created their account they have the freedom to navigate straight to it, but it is made clear that their profile will not be visible to employers until all mandatory fields are completed.
A competitor analysis of long-form onboarding led us to opt for a one question per page format. While this increases the number of steps in the flow, it reduces the number of tasks to be completed per page to just one, which helps the user to avoid making errors and avoids an overwhelming experience.
Section dividers, breadcrumbs and a progress bar gives the user total visibility of where they are in the process and progress can be saved at any time, allowing the users to exit and complete another time.
Having been “inspired significantly” by our work, the client started implementing our designs less than two weeks after project delivery.
The original product had limited user freedom for the employer and no candidate-supporting features beyond a plug-in application form on the homepage.
With our consideration of both user groups we have built a product that supports candidates to showcase their best assets, in turn allowing employers to find the right candidate for them quickly and without stress or great expense.
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