THE PROBLEM

The hospitality sector in South Africa has a high turnover rate for personnel, especially within larger franchise organisations.

The recruitment process for these organisations is often tedious and complicated, due to the many levels a candidate needs to be vetted by before they can have the first interview.

Discover

Hirable was first conceptualized in 2022 to meet the needs of this sector’s employers and personnel.

The strategy was to expand on the Handy Cats existing line of recruitment products, by repurposing the Recruit a Guide code base with a fresh coat of paint and new features.

Explore

With a clear business strategy and product framework to work off, I focused my initial research on competitor analysis and hospitality market data.
My primary source of data was sites like Hospitality Jobs Africa and Indeed along with the agencies Career Pathfinders and LeapFrog.

We also conducted user interviews with hiring managers at the franchise organizations, Bootleggers Coffee and Hungry Lion.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

We gained the following insights and problem areas from the research conducted:

• Filtering through the initial batch of resumes is the longest process, because a lot of irrelevant or unqualified candidates apply.
• Communicating via email with candidates can be a lengthy, unreliable process.
• Hospitality is a personality and appearance driven industry, and candidates don’t have adequate ways to portray these qualities in a traditional resume.

Develop

After presenting my findings to the Product Owner and Development team, we brainstormed possible solutions for these user issues that could effectively be built into our existing recruitment platform.

We already had a personality driven approach to displaying the candidate resumes to the employers that we would expand on and refine, by redesigning the candidate profile creation flow, to encourage candidates to complete more sections with greater detail.

To improve the filtration of potential candidates applying to jobs, an extra step would be added to the application process in the form of a customizable questionnaire, created by the employer, that candidates would have to complete before their application is sent to the employer.

Test

With a rough features outline, we started by building a SQL database model in Vertablo with all the table schemes and data fields that would be required. I discussed this model at length with the Lead Developer and would continue to refine it as I iterated through early design prototypes.

I then went to the drawing board and sketched out ideas for how the new candidate profile creation stepper would flow and outlined all the required forms and data that needed to be collected during this process.

I also sketched the Employer’s profile creation and create new job flow out early, so as to make sure no input fields were being left out and the candidate’s profile data was marrying with the job posts filtration criteria.

Listen

During the first phase of the project, I was having product meetings with the Product owner regularly to discuss the direction I was going with the branding and design patterns I was implementing in the prototypes.

The goal was to improve the efficacy of the profile creation flow for new candidates, and have a more granular approach to how we filtered the job post that candidates could view and apply to. As well as building a system that could be easily scaled with more industries at a later date.

Deliver

The final high-fidelity prototype was signed off at the end of July 2022, and initial development started.

While I had been working on the designs for the product, the developers had already been refactoring and updating the existing Recruit a Guide codebase to Vue 3. The Flutter app was being refactored with more reusable components.

We broke the project down into user flows and tasks, starting with the overall theme style changes and component redesigns, and linking up the new SQL database. I am overseeing the project management and testing each completed task.