Problem Statement:

What would you change or improve about ContactOut's onboarding flow and application?

Framework to work on the problem statement:

For this challenge, I would like to split the work into 2 halves: Discover and Delivery.

The discovery half will include research-related tasks to gain a thorough understanding of the problem statement, market, user base, and current implementation and then move on to addressing the pain points of the users by ideating and coming up with solutions.

The delivery half will include breaking down the solution into small shippable tasks and building, testing and deploying solutions that were derived in the discovery phase.

The steps included in the framework are as follows:

1. Discovery
   1. Narrowing the problem statement
   2. Understanding the market and user base
      1. Understanding user pain points and action items
   3. Understanding the product (ContactOut)
   4. Ideation / Solution
2. Delivery
   1. Design breakdown
   2. Task breakdown
   3. Implementation and quality assurance
   4. Experimentation
   5. Marketing

Discovery

Initial Questions

1. (a). Narrowing the problem statement

   • Initial questions to Joseph (to clarify the scope of the challenge):
     • In my understanding, the challenge question is pretty clear, but I would like to know a little bit about your expectations for the end result.
       • Does the scope of challenge only include improvements to existing feature flows and design, or can that be extended to suggestions of new features?
     • Between the Chrome plugin, Search portal, Data enrichment and Email campaign functionalities, which would you classify as your most important feature in the product?
       • Which of these has the highest user adoption?
     • When researching for data which user persona should be prioritised? Should it primarily be focused on recruiters or would you include sales and marketing teams as well?
     • Lastly, while using the application I couldn’t find the email campaign and mail merge features. Would it be possible to enable these features for my account? If not, would it be possible to provide access to a test account that has these features enabled?

2. (b). Understanding the market

   Since the challenge is time-bound, the focus for this challenge would be on the current user base that the product is targeting, i.e. Recruiters.

   • Questions to understand the market space
     • What is the size of the target audience or end-users of the product?
     • Who are the major players in the same market space?
   • Questions to understand the end-user
     • What does a recruiter's workflow look like?
     • What is the current product that recruiters use to facilitate this workflow?
     • What are the pain points that recruiters face with the current products?

3. (c). Understanding the product (ContactOut)

   Splitting the problem in terms of the onboarding flow and the application features, to understand how both of these work and what they provide to users.

   • Onboarding
     • What does the onboarding flow look like?
     • What are the pain points in the onboarding flow?
   • Application
     • What are the solutions/features implemented to facilitate the user's workflow?
     • What are the pain points in the application?

4. (d) Ideation / Solution

   Since the challenge is time-bound, the area of focus for this challenge would be to work on the communication side of the user workflow (The workflow is presented in the Summary section below under user research) for recruiting automation.

   • What will be the area of the product that provides the maximum business value?
   • What are the assumptions taken in the context of the problem statement?
   • What user stories need to be addressed?
   • What will the user experience be like?

Summary

• Scope of the challenge.

  After having a brief discussion with Joseph, to understand the scope and expectations of the challenge, the following conclusions were derived:

  • Focus on either the onboarding or the application. Pick the area which would make the biggest user impact.
  • The scope can extend to building new features and is not restricted to existing features and flows.
  • The Chrome plugin is the main attraction of the application. The USP is the accuracy of contact information when compared to competitors like ZoomInfo.
  • The scope for user persona research is not limited to recruiters and can include sales and marketing teams as well.

• Market research

  • On performing a search for recruiters on LinkedIn and going through articles online, two conclusions can be derived:

    • There are currently 2,150,000 people on LinkedIn with the role of recruiter, this is if you search only for the title Recruiter. [1]

      

    • There are currently 471,764 open jobs on LinkedIn for recruiters, this is if you search only for a job title Recruiter on a Worldwide basis. [2]

      

    • This number gives us a rough estimate of our target audience. There will be more people in the similar role who are not present on LinkedIn and similarly there will be more job openings on local job boards and other career-related websites.

  • Drawing reference from G2 and Linkedin, the following conclusions can be derived in terms of the market space

    • There are currently 400+ companies in the Recruiting Automation Software category

      

      

    • The following are the major players in the market space

      

      

• User research

  • The chart below highlights the key tasks of the typical daily Recruiter workflow.

    

  • The current products being used to facilitate this workflow are listed in the major players’ section above.

  • The following are the common pain points experienced by recruiters [3]:

    • Inaccuracy of lead sourcing tools.
    • Too few qualified applicants or too many unqualified applicants.
    • Lack of automation in the communication flow.
    • Lack of a common tool to follow the workflow.

• Product research

• Ideas to implement

Delivery

1. (a) Design breakdown

2. (b) Task breakdown