Overview
The IBM Design Talent had an initiative to hire 1500 designers and evangelize design across all of IBM’s 400,000 employees. The scaled effort would align IBM portfolios under a single brand, drive user experience as the north start, and increase revenue through brand cohesion, usability and loyalty.
To achieve mass design change at scale the team had three main goals:
Hire 1,500 top design talent by 2017
Design an efficient way to hire top talent at scale
Evangelize Enterprise Design Thinking to shift mindsets internally and externally on how to approach user needs and desired outcomes arriving to desired impact.
Opportunity
Design a Better Way to Hire Top Talent
The team had limited resources and had put together a system to quickly react to the development of the team as well as fulfilling the demand to hire top designers. When I joined, the team had turned over once already - because recruiters worked independently of each other there was not a central resources for archived information, active candidates, or processes.
We had the following pain points:
No consistent information about candidates
Personal tracking excel docs all organized differently
Lost data because of copy and paste
Communications about candidates lived in multiple places (email, slack, and calendar invites).
No accurate way to track candidate data.
Research
Jobs To Be Done
The sketch shown depicts the brainstorm activity to uncover the original process of design candidate review. The challenge was to take a waterfall approach filtering 10,000 candidates a year to a funnel approach. Each gate would act as a candidate pool reduction as we narrowed top candidates from all incoming candidates.
Understanding our Users
The recruitment team works with many groups: candidates, reviewers, hiring managers, and the teams own needs. Focusing on the candidate was the priority, also by focusing on the candidate would best solve for all other users as it created a trickle effect.
Goals for the Reviewers:
Assessable tool that doesn't add more work
provides opportunity to network with other designers
Goals for the Candidate:
Provide transparency
Respond timely
Provide accurate and direct feedback
The solution
We went off-grid from the legacy recruitment tools at IBM. They were blocking usability, our workflows, and ultimately speed to hire. We flipped control of the candidate selection from recruitment to the entire design organization, so designers were hiring their colleagues based on a 5 point assessment scale. Within months we turned around the process and accomplished hiring goals within the year.
