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During the pandemic, university recruitments in India did not diminish but transitioned to a virtual format. Recent data emphasizes students' desire for improvements in the virtual placement process, indicating a possible 20% reduction in manual efforts and a 15% optimization in recruitment budgets. The project's goal was to tackle issues of virtual recruitments through a user-centric approach.
I conducted surveys and interviews for primary and secondary research, generating user flows, stories, and a sitemap based on informed data. These insights guided ideation, wireframing, prototyping, and style guide development. Rigorous testing, including guerrilla, moderated, and unmoderated usability testing, ensured a user-friendly final product.
Understood the critical role of user testing, where the success of an application hinges on its reception by real end-users. The evolution from a desire for uniqueness to embracing industry standards and meeting user expectations reflects the maturation of the designer's approach, ensuring the overall success of the application.
The outcome, PlacEasy, an application facilitating interaction among hiring companies, students, and university placement cells, was showcased to the university authorities. The concept garnered appreciation. Presently, the university is actively exploring opportunities to seamlessly integrate my solution into their existing systems.
“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.”
- Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800)
This butterfly effect illustrates how a seemingly minor event can have widespread and lasting consequences, reshaping aspects of society, including campus recruitments.The COVID-19 pandemic set off a chain reaction of disruptions across various sectors, including education and employment. Initially, colleges and universities in India had to quickly adapt to remote learning and virtual classrooms due to lockdowns and social distancing measures. This seemingly small change had significant ripple effects on campus life and recruitment processes. Companies had to rethink their recruitment strategies, shifting to virtual methods due to travel restrictions and safety concerns.
Quantitative data analysis
Institutions need to focus on improving their digital infrastructure to handle online selection processes, coordinate with hiring companies, release results, provide regular updates to students, and manage various other recruitment activities. This highlights the essential role of technology in facilitating recruitment processes. While it's true that virtual placements may see some changes or reductions after the pandemic, the trend towards digitalization in recruitment processes predates COVID-19 and is likely to continue.
These quantitative data points indicate that the demand for freshmen from universities has not decreased due to COVID-19; in fact, it has increased. This amplifies the urgency of addressing the issue.
To ensure an effective iterative process for my application development, I decided to incorporate guerrilla testing using low-fidelity sketches on the platform. After conducting the test, I then analyzed the results in accordance with the 10 Nielsen Norman's usability heuristics to identify any violations. These heuristics serve as a robust foundation for any UX design project, facilitating the creation of a successful product. Moving forward, my aim was to ensure that these heuristic violations are prevented in the subsequent stages of design.
View all job openings
Placement : Approve / Reject / ConsultStudent : Apply / Reject The placement officers have to approve a job opening by sending the job to the relevant student branches and keep a track of job applicants and update the same to the hiring companies.Students can apply to jobs by attatching their resumes or reject the jobs.
View test schedules on calendar
The placement officer has to approve an event and only then it is added to the calendar. The officer has an option to make sure no two events on the calendar are overlapping before adding these events to the calendar. Students can view these events and attend accordingly.
Create and view groups and Schedule group interview
This feature is the highlight of the entire app. It makes the process of grouping a rather huge amount of students into groups for group interviews and even easier to schedule these interviews on the calendar for the placement officers. Students can view these groups and check for their names in the groups and attend group interviews accordingly.
View feedbacks, shortlists and final selects
The most important information for students as well as the universities is to check the list of shortlisted students after each round of recruitment. Along with this, A feedback list is also available that a company provides after recruitment completion for the benefit of the students. These lists can be viewed on various parts of the app by students as well as placement officers.
Create and respond to various queries
Placement officers can view and respond to student queries or discussions. These queries are categorized and have labels that indicate what each query is about. Officers can also create a new discussion of their own to communicate important details to all students. Students can also ask and respond to various queries on this page.
Search and view student profile
Finally, The placement officer can look up the details of any student from their university. These details could be their resume, their job application and other profile information. Students can add new resumes and update other profile details on their side of the app.
Moderated and Un-moderated Usability test
I performed both moderated and unmoderated usability testing. Unmoderated testing was conducted using Maze.com, enabling me to gain insights into several key performance indicators that I had established to assess the success of my application. These indicators include the number of clicks required for task completion, instances of misclicks, task completion time, and whether users followed the expected user flow or adopted alternative flows to complete a task. The same observations were manually recorded by me during the moderated testing sessions.
Task analysis screenshots from maze.com after testing
Design Changes
Participants were slightly struggling to find various lists on the app.
Make a separate icon for "all lists" consistent across all pages on the app.
Add a floating button for "all lists" on the Jobs page as well since these lists are more relevant to jobs.
Most participants took longer than expected to find the group interviews icon and make groups as well as schedule them.
Label the group interview Icon as “Group Interviews” to make it easily accessible to the users
Participants were confused as to what the “Select Category” options while drafting a new discussion meant.
Make the categories in the list more self explanatory and descriptive. Also, increase the number of categories by 2-3 numbers to make better distinction between each category.
Placement officers will have to make multiple scrolls to choose students from group interviews.
Use student info boxes itself to reflect the selection instead of check boxes. This incorporates more names in one scroll hence reducing total scroll.
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Phone: +1 734-478-6644
Email: sbijjur@umich.edu
