On Demand Interview Mobile Web
In July of 2019, I worked with a team to redesign HireVue’s On Demand interview experience for the mobile web. The On Demand interview is the core experience that many candidates today go through while applying for jobs. This is an asynchronous experience where the candidate is presented a series of questions, given a short period of time to prepare, and allowed a few minutes to record their response.
All of this can be done in the comfort of the candidate’s home. The recruiter can then watch the uploaded video interview on their own schedule. This greatly improves the efficiency of interviewing while allowing the candidate the opportunity to fully and sincerely present themselves and their abilities beyond what a resume can do.
As we audited the five year old experience (yikes!) we immediately noticed that much of the language and prompts throughout did a poor job at preparing candidates for what would come next from screen to screen.
One prime example of this was the fact that the only time that a candidate was presented with the choice to request accommodations due to a disability was on the very first welcome screen, before they were given any information regarding what they would be expected to do.
Helpful Tips
Our research for this project consisted of reading the CSAT verbatims collected from candidates, going through support cases and interview logs, as well as observing candidates that identified as on the spectrum for autism while they took interviews. This was possible due to the partnership our company had created with a non-profit group that worked to help these individuals seek employment. All of this data helped us to understand that a large portion of candidates took the interview with a very low level of confidence and high discomfort for a variety of reasons.
This led to a hypothesis that there was insufficient preparation offered to the candidates, and that the on demand experience was too cold and impersonal. Based on this, we created a new series of onboarding screens to provide helpful tips and instructions before they started the interview.
Tone and Color
We then worked with copy writers from our marketing team and representatives from customer support to craft a new tone for the language used in the on demand interview experience. We strove for as warm and friendly of a tone as our stuffy enterprise clients would allow.
We diagramed the candidate onboarding flow and then recreated it to allow us to present necessary instructions, helpful tips, and words of encouragement.
This resulted in a slightly longer, but much more simple approach that helped to avoid cognitive overload during this unavoidably stressful experience.
We also took advantage of this to incorporate more color via pleasing imagery wherever possible.
Practice Questions
One surprising bit of data we collected from reviewing support cases with our customer support team was that a number of candidates were getting confused and thinking that they had completed their actual interview when in fact they had only answered the practice questions and had not ever even started the actual interview.
After performing a round of user tests, we discovered that the language of the practice questions as well as the practice question review screen was causing this confusion.
The practice questions were actual questions that you might expect in a real interview! All we had to do was replace those questions with instructional text that helped the candidate to understand they were still in “practice mode”.
This, combined with a much more clear and concise practice question review screen with more understandable button CTAs resulted in a much higher level of comprehension during testing.
Video Responses
Answering questions by recording yourself talking on camera is the most common interaction a candidate goes through when completing an On Demand interview. The old desktop version tried to accomplish too much without using enough recognizable patterns, which resulted in extremely poor test results, particularly for those who fall anywhere on the spectrum for autism.
By focusing on only presenting necessary information when it is needed, we simplified the experience and lowered the number of items the candidate tries to process while the timer is counting down. And speaking of timers, we also tested and found that changing the timer from counting down and having a progress bar that empties to one that counts up and has a progress bar that fills to completion resulted in noticeably lower stress levels among candidates, too.
This was really where testing and iterating on the smallest of things ended up making measurable improvements.
Other Question Types
Taking what we learned in our experiments of questions with video responses, we then applied those same theories to the other question types. On the desktop, for example, candidates may be asked to use a drag-and-drop UI to associate items with a label, or to rank items from best to worst, etc. Handling this on a mobile device initially seemed challenging, especially when taking the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards into account.
In the end, we were able to design and test a modified drop-down interaction that effectively allows candidates to view a list of items within the context of a descriptive label and make a selection. This tested excellently and was simple for our devs to implement.
And, as mentioned earlier, we made sure to give a boost of confidence to candidates when they complete their interview to try and leave them on a high note.
