Context

Intuit’s HR team recognized that the employee referral process was extremely cumbersome. Recruiters gave it a net promoter score of -10. It took them exhausting time and effort to review candidate profiles in a hard-to-use HR software, and respond to their applications with a simple “yes” or “no.” Although 30% of hires came from referrals, recruiters weren’t reviewing candidates quickly enough, and therefore weren’t meeting the business KPI of 5-days-to-respond to referrals. This was hurting business efficiency metrics and slowing down hiring times for the company.

The Challenge

I was tasked with designing and launching a new referral experience that would benefit recruiters, referring employees, and candidates - and help the business meet their 5-day response KPI. The product’s success would be measured by the change in net promoter score.

The Result

I designed a new experience that increased the net promoter score by 80 points: from -10 to +70.

My Role & Impact

When I started the project, I was given a set of theories around what the problem might be. I decided to conduct further research; I interviewed recruiters and hiring managers and found some key themes:

1) Recruiters’s inboxes were flooded, and they needed a way to conveniently see the most high-priority applicants (referrals) front-and-center.

2) Recruiters needed an easy way to accept or reject candidates, and exercise minimal effort to communicate this to all parties involved.

3) Referring employees and candidates needed visibility into the application status.

The most interesting insight of all came when I used service design to map out the experience. I found that there was an imbalance between the level of effort required in the process, and the most motivated person in the process. Using psychology principles, I theorized that if we put the most effort on the most motivated person, we would achieve a more efficient process.

Armed with these findings, I partnered with my designer to create a new experience that re-balanced workload and slashed inefficiencies - thus resulting in an 80-point NPS increase.