We wanted to understand who would use recruiters, so after learning a bit more about the industry we created a persona based on who we thought would benefit the most from recruiters. The persona we came up with was a startup founder, who currently had 15-30 employees. This startup would also have a Series A or B funding and would be looking to use that money to hire more experienced people for mid-level management. Furthermore, startup founders would feel very strongly about the company’s culture.

A recruiter would be able to solve many of these problems. By outsourcing hiring to a recruiter the startup founder wouldn’t need to pay for a hiring manager’s salary, but would still be able to find managers who not only have the right skills, but the right personality for the company’s culture. In addition, a startup founder is going to constantly be busy and would likely delegate the hiring of mid-level managers to someone else as opposed to doing it themselves.

The interviews not only helped validate our persona, but also the problem that many recruiters faced. We were lucky to interview recruiters as well as startup founders to understand their problems better. We also interviewed candidates that recruiters talked to as well as bigger companies just to make sure we weren’t missing anything. There were some things that we found out, for example, companies often used recruiters to fill very specific and specialized roles.

We thought about different ways for recruiters to prove that they weren’t just trying to make a quick buck. Upon talking to the client we learned that they collected data from recruiters, for example, how often they responded to clients or how successful the candidates they sent in were. This data was an untapped goldmine that they weren’t using, so we looked into that as opposed to trying to compete with LinkedIn as a social media platform.

Our solutions revolved around collecting and displaying key metrics. Some of these metrics included, speed, success rate, and frequency of communication. In addition, we suggested that Find Recruiter could come up with a overall scoring system to make it easier for companies to pick good recruiters at a glance if they were unsure which metrics mattered the most to them. In terms of collecting data, the website already collected some metrics, but we also wanted to get companies to complete quick surveys after the hiring candidates to make sure that they were actually a good fit.

Regarding the display of data, we used skill bars to show how good a recruiter was in certain areas, along with concrete data. Furthermore, we suggested that Find Recruiter allow companies to filter or compare recruiters to each other so that they could more easily see who was a good fit for them.

The founder of Find Recruiter himself attended our presentation and applauded it, saying that we had presented it better than he could have. He also agreed with our diagnosis of the problem and tried out some of our suggestions on the site (which are to remain vague as to not reveal company secrets). Unfortunately, he did not have any specific stats before and after the implementation of our suggestions.