ATS Automation Opportunities Discovery Research
Research Objective:
Identify the most impactful opportunities for automation within recruiting and Associate engagement processes. More specifically, identify the most tedious tasks in a Colleague's day that prevent them from being able to focus on the key functions of their job or work efficiently.
Core Team:
Sr. User Researcher
User Researcher (me!)
Product Director
Why The Business Needed This Study
Building out suite of solutions for the new ATS and need to know which Colleague problems to sovle first, which would make the biggest impact with the least cost, and how to build out the product roadmap to build or source solutions to those pains.
The organization was configuring an entirely new Applicant Tracking System and user experience to launch in the following year. The product leader over the initiative wanted to understand what the existing user pains were so that they could take that information and use it to influence the product roadmap.
Research Planning
Before jumping into a new discovery project, we got business stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) together for a workshop to understand if the business had attempted automation before, and if so, what the outcome was. We also wanted to clarify what is it about "automation" that has stakeholders asking for this research, what problem do they want to solve and who do they want to solve it for.
Screenshot of workshop activities inside Miro.
Stakeholder workshop
-
Context setting
-
Identify the problem
-
Opportunities brainstorming activity and dot voting
-
Top research questions brainstorming and dot voting
-
-
Defining the audience
-
Understand past initiatives
-
Define success
-
What's happening right now?
-
Headwinds for getting automation going
-
Current automation initiatives across the business
-
My role
Participate in workshop design sessions, assist in facilitation by note taking and documenting voting results for participants.
Primary Research Questions
One of the outcomes of the stakeholder workshop was a clear understanding of what we needed to go learn from our field Colleagues. We ended up with four primary research questions:
-
What are the tasks that Colleagues perform that take up more time than they reasonably should?
-
What do Colleagues feel are the most repetitive tasks they do each day?
-
How much time do these tasks take to complete?
-
-
Is there a difference between Colleague’s perception of what would make them more efficient and what actually would improve efficiency?
-
What are potential risks of automation within the Colleague experience we can identify and mitigate?
Methodology
Twenty virtual 1:1 interviews with Colleagues representing five job roles; Staffing Assistant, Recruiter, Operations Manager, Ramp Implementation Manager, and Staff Performance Manager. The Product Director observed every interview session, participated in interview debriefs, and played an active role in synthesis sessions.
Synthesizing what we heard
-
Organized a synthesis board inside Miro to give a base structure for the session
-
Copied stickies from each interview debrief into the corresponding synthesis board
-
Clustered stickies to identify themes
Interview debrief boards
Synthesis session boards - largely mirroring the debrief boards but modified to better suit full research synthesis
Final Results
After synthesis we were able to distill nine areas where automation could make an impact. We uncovered a lot of information that would be important for our operations team stakeholders and product leaders to take with them into decision making and want to present that information in a way that would stick, so we used Miro instead of a traditional slide deck.
What surprised our stakeholders
-
The amount of physical paperwork still happening out in the field.
-
The amount of time colleagues were spending on documentation
What our research validated for stakeholders
-
How manual the companies systems and processes are
-
The amount of time colleagues spend managing communication with associates.
The immediate research impact
-
Permission to send a validation survey
-
The UX Research team was able to set up a prioritization workshop with Operations and Product leaders to hone in on the top 3 opportunity areas that they wanted to validate. I cover this in more detail in my survey case study.
What I learned
1. Facilitating Workshop Breakout Sessions
When there are stakeholders participating that haven't been in a UX workshop before, it takes a little more work to build enough trust to get people talking and sharing their thoughts. This is especially true when you breakout into smaller groups and have people who don't typically work together or already know each other in a breakout room.
Next time
Choose activities that help participants ease into thinking out loud and taking a more active role. Creating a space of psychological safety is really important for collaboration.
2. Keeping session debriefs on track
During our debriefs we had a tendency to either go down rabbit holes or over document. As a result, synthesizing all twenty interviews was very challenging.
Next time
On my next initiative, I facilitated an interview observations, note taking, and debriefing orientation with the team before we kicked off the interviews. We went over how debriefs would be structured, the type of things we'd be documenting, and why debriefing efficiently helps set us up for success during synthesis. I also researched templates and debriefing methodologies to see how other researchers make the most of their sessions.