Simplicruit is a web application based on MVC architecture pattern powered by IBM Watson AI. It can facilitate the interview process by helping HR with Screening candidates prior to the second-round interviews. It features automated appointment scheduling, AI Screening, and documentation creation.
Project background: Simplicruit is a teamwork project of three people over the course of the part-time coding bootcamp. This project began with a research question 'how hiring teams can accelerate the hiring process and mitigate common issues in talent aquisition?' brought by our teammate Farrah, a former HR. Simplicruit MVP covers four aspects:
Product Design
UI/UX Design
Front End
Back End
- Research -
Though we had assumptions on the possible difficulties in the hiring process, to better understand the challenges that hiring teams encountered and be able to pinpoint the pain points, we conducted user interviews before the "Sprint Day", attempting to understand their needs. The interview process built a good foundation for a product experience that aimed to help hiring teams to solve their problems.
01 Interview Goal
a. Understand common challenges hiring teams encounter trying to hire great candidates.
b. Identify frustrations hiring teams experience during the process of interviews with candidates
02 Interview Questions
1. Can you describe your current schedule and how you search for, arrange and conduct the interivews with candidates?
2. If you had to name one thing as your biggest hiring headache, what would it be? How does this make you feel?
3. How long does it take on average to find a suitable candidate and complete the interview process? Is there a method to make the process efficient?
4. Is there any way in which you feel these challenges could be resolved?
03 Participant characteristics
Ages 25-35
Different genders
Greater Tokyo area
IT recruiting
We conducted video interviews with 30 people, including recruiters and hiring managers, who work throughout different recruiting stages in hiring teams. Based on the record, the target narrowed down to the recruiters for start-ups, since bigger companies tend to have larger, more powerful HR departments, which leads to more centralization and structure in hiring, whereas start-ups are usually less structured and often requires an urgency to hiring.
04 Aggregate Empathy Map
After Synthesizing the replies from the interviews, the next step is to map out an aggregate empathy map.
- Define the problems and unlock the solutions -
After mapping out the empathy map, we moved forward to nail down the pain points.
Though the hiring process varies from company to company, and multiple factors come into play, the hiring has always come with similar logistics: screening CVs, interviewing candidates, scheduling follow-up interviews with other hiring managers.
We found the common hurdles from the CVs review phase to first-round screening interviews. Here are the main pain points:
Candidate interview scheduling is time-consuming and tedious
A pile of calendars and deadlines make the process error prone
The time spent on screening resumes takes up the largest portion of time-to-fill
Manual data entry and repetitive admin tasks for documentation
01 Persona
Now that we know the user pain points, the next step is to create the persona, representing a solid users group, from where our team can build an app around it.
02 User Story
From the persona's point of view, the user story has been crafted to lay out the obstacles and state the ultimate goal, which helped make user-centered design decisions.
As a talent recruiter who is constantly juggling and coordinating a fair number of candidates, I want to evaluate candidates easily and schedule interviews quickly so that I can spend more time on building a talent pipeline of more qualified talent and hire fast.
03 User Journey
The User journey is built off the persona and user story. From the journey mapping, we could identify opportunities to improve the user experience.
- User Journey Map -
Goal: fast and streamlined process from resume screening to a first-round interview
- Ideate and understand the constraints -
After completing the user reserach, on the sprint day, our team brainstormed possible solutions to problems that we had nailed down in the "Define" Phase. We tapped into “Crazt Eights” exercise. With Crazy Eights, each of team member sketched eight different designs, each with a new idea for solving the user’s problem.
- Synthesized "Crazy Eights" Sketch -
Our team sketched solutions without limitations and no thoughts to practicality.
In the following stage, we took the user journeys being outlined previously into consideration, and also understood
the technical and the time constraints.
For privacy reasons, there is no access to the existing talent database that we can tap into
The AI APIs that we can resort to is not intelligent enough to parse the resume
The web development skill is not adequate to support the interactive component
Due to the short project cycle, there is inadequate time for user testing
In this ideation phase, new blockers came up along with the constraints, we examined the solutions and vetoed the unpragmatic ones before moving to the prototype.
At the end of this phase, we carefully evaluated our programming capabilities and printed out the roadmap. Also, we nailed down the IBM Watson API that would be utilized for the resume and screening purpose.
- Map Out The User Flow, build the DB Schema and Prototype -
The next step is to create a user flow to layout the user’s movement through the product,
mapping out each step the user takes—from the entry point right through to the final interaction.
01 User Flow
We started with a bare-bone user flow to represent the path a user goes through when using our product from the start point to the final interaction.
Then we fleshed out the fundamental user flow to cover the various steps a user needs to take to complete a specific action
02 DB Schema
Based on the user flow, we started print out the "blueprint" of the database. We created DB schema to define how data would be organized within a relational database and communicate the architecture of the database.
03 Wireframe
After nailing down the user flow and DB schema, I proceeded to create a wireframe with two questions in my mind.
a. How do I organize content clearly with good findability?
b. How to highlight the intended function of our product?
04 Development
Because of the short project cycle, we started back-end development as soon as we had the prototype and moved the phase of determining the visual design principles backward when starting the front-end development.
- Visuals -
01 Color Theme
The color theme is blue, aiming to bring users a professional and calm visual experience.
∙ Simplicruit’s primary color is Ateneo Blue
∙ Simplicruit’s secondary color is Diamond Gray
- Simplicruit's color theme -
02 Typography
When it came to choosing the right pair of typefaces for Simplicruit, the top two considerations were
∙ Readability of the typefaces
∙ The objective of the product and message to be delivered
Two typefaces were chosen: Heebo and Helvetica. The two typefaces make a harmonious pair, fulfilling the purpose of a lucid visual hierarchy.
- Simplicruit's Typeface -
The base font size changed for multiple breakpoints and used the same scaling ratio of 1.25
Product Design
UI/UX Design
Front End
Back End
Ages 25-35
Different genders
Greater Tokyo area
IT recruiting
Candidate interview scheduling is time-consuming and tedious
A pile of calendars and deadlines make the process error prone
The time spent on screening resumes takes up the largest portion of time-to-fill
Manual data entry and repetitive admin tasks for documentation
For privacy reasons, there is no access to the existing talent database that we can tap into
The AI APIs that we can resort to is not intelligent enough to parse the resume
The web development skill is not adequate to support the interactive component
Due to the short project cycle, there is inadequate time for user testing
