Candidate Stories

Historically, background checks condensed the history and context of someone’s life into a single label. 

There was no reliable way for candidates, or job-seekers, to share information about themselves or their records with potential employers. Whether candidates contacted the employer through phone, text, or email, the story rarely made its way into the background check decision. In fact, candidates asking to share context or provide evidence of rehabilitation was the third most common reason that people contacted Checkr’s Candidate Experience team. Sadly, all the team could do was empathize, point them to the employer, and wish them luck.

I led a cross-functional team to help adjudicators, or background check decision-makers, see the human behind the check. I designed a flow that allows candidates to share context and evidence of rehabilitation alongside their report. I drove this team—Candidate Stories—forward, acting as both the lead product designer and lead product manager.

Since its launch in April 2020, 102,637 Candidate Stories have been shared with employers and over 8,350 candidates have been hired because of this added context.

I published a Medium post to announce the launch of Candidate Stories.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Leadership. Drove this project forward from discovery to launch, acting as both lead designer and lead product manager

• Design Sprint Facilitator. Facilitated a design sprint to encourage brainstorming  

• Discovery. Led research with internal teams, candidates, and customers 

• Content. Wrote all the product copy and guidance for candidates 

• UX / UI. Mapped the flow and designed the hi-fidelity prototypes

• Analytics. Wrote the SQL query to determine the success of Candidate Stories

I ran a Design Sprint to brainstorm how we can further promote fairness in the background check process.

I assembled a diverse team of candidate experience representatives, designers, product managers, and engineers to voice differing opinions and to approach the problem from their unique perspectives.

Through the structured design sprint, we thought of creating a form for a candidate to contextualize their background check results and provide positive information about themselves that an employer could easily review.

I published a Medium post about the design sprint process. 

Discovery

Internal Candidate Experience team

After our design sprint, I followed up with our Candidate Experience team to see what they thought of our idea. I found that asking to share evidence of rehabilitation is the third top contact reason candidates call into Checkr’s Candidate Experience team. 

From January to February 2020, 7% of total emails and 10% of phone calls were from candidates asking if they can share evidence of rehabilitation.

All the Candidate Experience team could do was listen and empathize. They were directed to send the candidate to the employer, who often doesn’t have a formal pipeline to listen to or log candidate context or rehabilitation.

Customer

I pitched the concept to Lyft, Uber, Amazon, Grubhub, Doordash, and Postmates.

I found that complying with Individualized Assessment policies is a laborious process for employers. The issue is exacerbated by the many channels that additional candidate information can come in through. Emails, phone calls, and texts are rarely consolidated into the candidate's report successfully.

There was real customer demand to make this process easier by proactively giving candidates a way to share more context alongside their report without any manual outreach. 

Candidate (Job-Seeker)

I helped with the creation of our candidate personas. We focused on creating empathetic personas to remind our staff that our work affects real people. I wanted our personas to help us continue our mission to create the most humanizing background check process possible.

Personas

Specifically, we wanted to build a fairness feature with Samuel in mind. 

Since being incarcerated, Samuel has been developing his professional skills via a reentry program and volunteering in his community. He's currently living with his parents, so his first priority is to secure a reliable income and move out. Inspired by his prison counselor, he'd eventually like to start his own business. His understanding of employment laws and hiring processes is improving, but he's aware he has a challenging road ahead.

Candidate

I started with lo-fidelity whiteboard wireframing to map out the flow for what it’d look like for candidates to share information about themselves and their charges. I coined this human-focused feature, “Candidate Stories.”

Customer

Hi-fidelity designs

Candidate

For those who were previously incarcerated, Candidate Stories provides a way to share who they were before, during, and after incarceration. Like our persona Samuel, many people accomplish significant goals during their incarceration — such as completing college, obtaining master’s degrees, and becoming certified counselors and coaches.

During my discovery research, I worked with companies to determine what information would give them more confidence in hiring someone with a record. We created example prompts so candidates can share the most relevant information and speak to the context surrounding their conviction.

Customer

Through Candidate Stories, customers are able to:

• Request additional information directly from the candidate. 

• Review additional information from the candidate in context. 

• Filter by candidates who have submitted additional information for quick review.

• Streamline workflow so that customers can ask for candidates to share their story through Checkr.

Product demo

I created a deck to show the value proposition, demoed the prototype, and onboarded Grubhub, Doordash, and Postmates, among many customers.

Here’s my walkthrough of the prototype. Note there is sound.

Usability testing and iteration

I tested the flow with 6 candidates and found that the flow sets the right expectations for candidates and gives realistic hope: candidates felt more confident about their chances after sharing additional information but still understand that it’s up to the hiring manager.

Through testing, I also found that candidates wanted better guidance around documentation and understanding of what would be helpful to upload. 

Based on the feedback, I adapted the design to include better guidance around documentation.

Performance

I wrote the SQL query to determine the success of the feature.

Since launch in late April 2020, over 102,637 candidates stories have been shared and 8,350 candidates have been hired because of Candidate Stories.

Scaling impact

These numbers are a great start but the stories have so much potential for influence.

Many people reviewing background checks need top-down guidance from their company to use Candidate Stories in their decision-making process. I worked with our legal team to create a Candidate Stories Guide to give to the leadership of each company to create their top-down policies.

Takeaways

What I did well

• Leadership. Led the Candidate Stories team from discovery to launch, acting as both lead designer and lead product manager.

• Discovery. Talked with our customers, candidates, and internal teams before launching Candidate Stories to create the best possible solution. 

• Iteration. Iterated based on usability testing findings to include documentation guidance.

• Tracking success. Wrote the SQL query to understand the actual impact of Candidate Stories. 

• Impact-driven. Creating a guide after seeing the metrics to get even more candidates engaged.
  

What I would improve

• Customer enablement pre-launch. If I were to relaunch Candidate Stories, I would have introduced the feature with a Candidate Stories guide so that customers could create policies around Candidate Stories and we could have launched with a larger impact.  

• Determining success beforehand. I also would have established quantitative success benchmarks beforehand to determine if the feature meets / does not meet expectations.