Project Overview
As the team’s first full-time UX Researcher, I was tasked with developing Comeet’s user Personas. While the company had launched several years before, there had never been established Personas. My goal for creating these key deliverables were to align the Product team on who our users were so we could ensure that we were always solving for the needs of these users.
What is Comeet & Who are their Users?
Comeet is a cloud-based recruiting platform for companies who want a better way to source, engage and hire talent. Comeet’s technology, along with their user-first mindset, brings collaboration to the forefront of recruiting.
As an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Comeet’s mission is to acquire, engage and hire talent. Unlike other ATS’s that are built primarily for Recruiters, Comeet is geared towards improving collaboration between everyone involved in the hiring process. Because of this, Comeet’s users represent multiple Recruiting team members including Recruiters, Recruiting Coordinators and Head of Recruiting and Non-recruiting team members like Interviewers and Hiring Managers.
What was the ask?
I was tasked by the Chief Product Officer to create Comeet’s first user persona. We decided to focus on two Primary Personas: Recruiters and Hiring Managers. We chose these two users because they represented the most important people involved in hiring.
Typically, Recruiters are in charge of managing the entire hiring process - they launch new positions, communicate with staffing agencies, coordinate with interviewers and oversee the candidate’s journey from application to interview to hire. On the other end you have Hiring Managers, the people who are looking to add a new member to their team. These individuals are the final decision makers - they decide who moves forward in the process and select tthe candidate who ultimately gets hired.
As such, we felt that if we could identify the needs and goals of these two personas we would be able to design a platform that not only provided them with an efficient hiring solution, but would also help their supporting team members perform more efficiently by pinpointing the aspects of recruiting that were inefficient.
How did I go about this?
To begin, I compiled a list of what I knew to be true about Recruiters and Hiring Managers. Like most professionals, I’ve had my fair share of interactions with people in both of these roles so it wasn’t difficult to define their overarching needs.
However, like any good Researcher I know that I am not my user and that I would need to rely on research findings to properly develop these personas. I used both Qualitative and Quantitative Research to do so.
The Recruiter
Recruiters are by far Comeet’s most important users. They are influential in deciding which ATS the company works with and they spend most of their day interacting with the platform. According to our data, Recruiters spend an average of 54 minutes a day on Comeet, which is almost 5x more than Non-recruiters. They spend most of this time screening resumes, communicating with candidates and members of the hiring team and tracking the progress of all of their open roles. After analyzing their usage on the platform and speaking with users, I created the below persona to represent this use.
The most important objective for Katie, our recruiter, is to meet her target hire date for each of her open positions. This means that she needs to have qualified candidates in her pipeline and timely feedback from her team in order to be successful.
The Hiring Manager
Like Recruiters, Hiring Managers wield a lot of power in the hiring process. Unlike Recruiters, Hiring Managers are less concerned with the specific features of an ATS and are more focused on finding the right candidate to fill their position. While this type of user spends less time on the platform, the outcome of the recruiting process greatly affects them.
From our data we know that these users log on between 1-4 times a month and spend an average of 11 minutes on the site. Unlike Recruiters who manage the hiring process for multiple positions and are in the weeds with the details, these users are much more task oriented and use Comeet on an as needed basis. By looking at the pages and feature that these users interact with most we know that they spend their time interviewing candidates and scanning the tasks assigned to them. With this in mind and from conversations I had with four Hiring Managers about the elements of hiring that are most important to them, I created the following Hiring Manager persona:
Next Steps
Now that we knew who our primary Personas were and what they each needed out of the system, we wanted to understand how and when they would interact with an ATS and what they did before and after. As such, the next project I worked on was creating User Journey Maps which would allow us to identify important touchpoints that users had with our platform.