Getting the most out of any product release typically requires some thought around value proposition, design and the current business practices.

For many years, hirers have been used to the idea of receiving all their candidate applications via email. I mean, who can blame them, right? This behavior was set generations ago, where job applications were received via snail mail. You would see job advertisements in newspapers with instructions for interested candidates to send a copy of their resume to a certain office address. Then came the email evolution, and we see a change of office addresses to email addresses in these job advertisements.

Now, how do we move all the applications from the hirers’ email inbox to our recruitment centre?

First we look at our value proposition. What sort of experience can we provide our hirers that would set us apart from their email inbox?

Email Inbox

Image: Email Inbox

As a recruiter, a typical inbox will contain conversation with colleagues, hiring managers, potential candidates and applications to the job that was just posted! To overcome this, recruiters set folders and automated rules to group applications based on the job applied. Pretty smart right?

So can we duplicate the manual work of grouping candidates in our Recruitment Centre? The answer is a no-brainer YES! On top of taking away manual work, our key value proposition is to help hirers identify relevant candidates efficiently.

So what can we do that is better than an email inbox?

  1. We rank candidates based on the relevancy to the applied job, just like how Google would rank the search results to users’ search.

  2. For hirers who have specific criteria, for example, a limited hiring budget, we provide salary filters to narrow down to candidates that meet the budget.

So that is one part solved.

How do we then design it to be so natural and intuitive with the least learning curve for our hirers? We took inspiration from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Zalora and Lazada. It is a common shopping flow to use filters in finding and narrowing down the group of items that meet my requirement as a shopper. In SiVA Recruitment Centre, we re-created that flow and experience, so that hirers get a sense of shopping and narrowing down to the exact group of candidates.

Image: SiVA Recruitment Centre (Unprocessed Folder) Image: SiVA Recruitment Centre (Unprocessed Folder)

Image: Amazon Image: Amazon Website

Our last hurdle was a unique one.

Our current business practice encourages hirers to receive application via emails! How bizarre right? This was definitely the toughest change that we need to tackle together as an organization. Changing the customer’s mindset and current behavior to processing on platform started by turning off the feature that sends application to hirer’s emails. Next came the re-training of our sales and customer care units to support this transition. The sweetener in this process is set of features that actually complement the value proposition very well.

In our new SiVA Recruitment Centre, we manage to reduce the number of applications being sent to hirer’s email.

Image: % of advertisers who set job as auto-forward Image: % of advertisers who set job as auto-forward

As a result, total processing on platform increased 11% YoY. This translates to an additional 100k application changed on a YoY basis.

Image: Number of Application Status Changed (manual) Image: Number of Application Status Changed (manual)