Opportune

Project Description

Opportune is a smartwatch and mobile application to simplify and personalize recruitment. While targeted towards recruiters as its main users, it is also focused on the needs of applicants as well.

After signing up, applicants can create personal profiles through their work and information. This content can be created by linking their own personal websites, LinkedIn and other third-party sites.

Recruiters, using the Toq smartwatch, can save applicants they have met by tapping on their names as they appear on the watch. When selected, the watch provides a conversation starter for the recruiter and applicant. Using the app’s tag system, recruiters can organize applicants they meet for later organization on their phone. Recruiters can then quickly and easily view and manage applicants profiles on their mobile device.

Design Process

Brainstorm Process

We began with considering how watches were used in everyday life and how to extend those capabilities. Ranging from a multitude of topics, we narrowed it down to four:

1. Marked News - a tracking app for the everyday news reader

2. Kudos Dish - a food recommendation app

3. Where-U-At - an app to time arrivals for carpoolers

4. Digital Fist Bump - an app to exchange business cards using common hand gestures

After careful consideration and feedback, we decided to go with the Digital Fist Bump for its focused user group and practical use. We wanted to focus on incorporating the watch into common, everyday social gestures, especially fist-bumps and handshakes.

Design - Idea, Sketches, Variations & Wireframes

The idea was to stick to Google’s Material Design guidelines as much as possible - but within that framework some work still had to be done on what information to display, and how to display it. Early feedback was focused on concerns about the size of the phone in relation to a resume. From our contextual inquiries, we also learned that it was important to be able to sort all applicants by what school they came from, as well as what team they would be working with, since there was usually a recruiter who was ‘specializing’ in one project team or one area of work (like design interns, for example). Therefore the designs here focused a lot on how to organize and display information.

User Studies

• At career fairs, the goal is to get personal face time with candidates and carry on a conversation
• Collect 250-400 resumes per event. There are events on average every week. Recruiters can go to as many or as few as they want, depending on their role and their preferences.
  
• Aim for 5 minutes of face time with applicants, but in reality the times differ greatly
• Note-taking: short notes, usually only 3 lines. Type of job, area they're interested in, and recruiter's initials so other recruiters can follow up later. People recruiter want to follow up with right away will also get marked, and technical interview results are also noted. Short notes on the backs of resumes are for efficiency and for preventing bias.
  
• Currently gather contact information through resumes, or through tablet form entry. One company we observed tried using tablet but it intruded on conversation time and created lots of backlog, so they went back to hardcopy.
• Hard copy resumes need to be scanned by hand into whatever CMS the company is using.
  
• Applicants and recruiters usually have one hand free to shake hands and gesture. The other one is holding a clipboard, pen, folder, other career fair swag, and so on.
• Career fairs are really crowded, busy and loud. If you put something down or give something away it's hard to keep track of it. Reaching over tables to put away stacks of collected resumes, or to just get a water bottle, is physically inconvenient.
  

See file below for in-depth contextual inquiry:

Personas

Recruiter Rick: Recruiter Rick is in his early 30’s and has been in the recruiting business for 8 years; he’s worked at several big and small tech companies and knows his ropes well. Energy drinks are his lifeblood during recruiting season because he’s always running around and he has to keep up a high energy level. Rick is passionate and loves talking to people at career events. He utilizes a clipboard & pen for receiving resumes. He favors handshakes when meeting people and tries to keep up eye-contact when talking to applicants.

Engineer Evan: Evan is in his early 20s and he’s been working as a back end web developer since graduating from undergrad. This is his first time helping out with the recruiting team, and he’s excited to be able to take a break from work and do something different. His project team is looking for new hires so he’s invested in getting to know students. The logistics of getting resumes, asking the right questions, making sure the correct notes are taken are still a bit fuzzy to him, so he still needs some guidance from the lead recruiter.

Lead Recruiter Laura: Laura is in her mid 20s and is the head of the recruiting team. This is her first job out of college, but she’s managed to reach head recruiter in 3 years. She’s a self-professed workaholic who wants to be able to work on the go on her smartphone. Coffee is her constant companion, as well as a pack of chewing gum. She carries her essential items in a small side bag since it’s hard to retrieve things from behind the recruiting booth. A lot of her time is spent coordinating her front-line engineers who are talking to applicants, making sure they ‘unload’ their resumes from their clipboards, and that there is enough ‘swag’ on the table at all times. 

Scenarios

We considered the three main scenarios that we would focus on - contact exchange, tagging and third-party integration. When a recruiter and applicant meet, the two could exchange contact info. By clicking on the applicant's card on the smartwatch, the recruiter saves the applicant's info to their profile while the applicant gets a new contact when they view their own account. 

For tagging, the recruiter utilizes again the smartwatch to add tags to the applicants info saved to the recruiter's account. This way, the recruiter can easily organize and follow up with applicants of interests without having to write these notes on paper.

For the final task, third-party integration, the applicant wants to present all their skills easily. These days, these skills and portfolios aren't limited to just paper but through multiple mediums such as code repositories, digital portfolios, film and more. The applicant has a choice on how to show their profile information by supplementing it with LinkedIn (for now) and other options later.

Competitive Analysis

The competitive mobile space for recruitment apps is still small but growing. Many popular and early apps such as Jobscience and Bump seem to have been discontinued. Our main live competitors, LinkedIn’s Recruiter and HireVue, all had great features in them but lacked a key feature of keeping recruitment still personal. Our goal was to make talking to recruiters in person an enjoyable experience for both parties. Recruiter, HireVue, and Jobscience kept that personal interaction abstracted through technology while Bump required clunky movements that strayed from our goal of keeping a recruiters hands free.

LinkedIn Recruiter: Built upon their popular networking site, Recruiter allows recruiters to view current contacts profile through small business cards. They could then forward that information to other hiring managers. Recruiter provided a method to organize contacts into projects. Recruiter however was limited to just LinkedIn information while we wanted Opportune to be open for applicants to display any media from any source. It also still forced recruiters to either search up an applicant or vice versa.

HireVue: HireVue’s focus was to become a tool for recruitment by allowing “in-person” interviews on the go. Supporting that use, HireVue built out a platform based on its SaaS (software as a service) across multiple devices such as mobiles and tablets. The app required applicants to talk or record in skype-like fashion for live interviews or as personal pitches which might turn away some applicants. The mobile portion of their app is dedicated to on interviewing applicants, which abstracts the in-person interaction we wanted to promote. Also, this method of interviewing forces users to hold up their phones which can be uncomfortable and tiring.

Jobscience: Like HireVue, Jobscience started as a SaaS that built out into the mobile sphere. Similarly to LinkedIn’s Recruiter, it allowed a recruiter to view applicant information and forced recruiters to look up or be looked up by an applicant. It’s interface was also cluttered, messy and unorganized.

Bump: Bump was our idealized model to build upon. By touching two phones together, Bump allowed users to transfer contact info, photo and files to each other. We wanted to model this same feature using smart watches in handshakes or other social hand gestures to transfer business card like information cards. This would allow for smoother transfer method rather than the clunky phone touch method that Bump utilized.

Final Design

Technical Challenges

We started out with an ambitious vision for the app, with a contact exchange being automatically triggered between individuals based on distance, time or gestures. However, we were limited by the capabilities of the Toq watch available to us as developers, and eventually settled on a pre-populated list of cards instead that users can choose from.

We also received highly positive feedback on our idea of note-taking using a smart watch and were initially keen on implementing it, but it proved to be difficult as there is no way to write with swipes on the Toq touch screen. Instead, we opted for pre-populated tags that users can choose from.

Technical Information for Users

After opening the phone app, the Toq watch will update with cards containing candidates’ information. Each card comes with a list of tags as menu options; tap them to assign tags to a candidate.

In order to view the updated tags, open up a candidate’s profile, and the tags will be listed under the candidate’s name and position.

Summary

We set out to create an app that would modernize and digitize the entrenched traditional methods of recruiting and exchanging contact information. In that, we succeeded in creating a prototype that showcased our vision for a smart watch app that would augment rather than detract from personal interactions. Based on feedback that we received during the poster session, many others agreed with us in the need for a solution and the potential for our app to bring real value to the market, even with the current limitations.

However, considering that our app is closer to a proof-of-concept rather than a full-featured app, much would still need to be done to develop it into an effective solution. Contact information needs to be passively pushed to the user to remove the need for having to scroll through a list of contacts and opening the right one. We need to pull user’s information from existing sources that are not restricted to LinkedIn, but also Facebook and Github for example. A note-taking feature is also sorely needed.

That said, the novelty of being able to manage one’s contacts with one’s smartwatch is an intriguing one. Used correctly, the smartwatch has the capability to be the trigger for meaningful and sustained conversations, and we hope that Opportune is only the start of many such opportunities to come.