Overview
Greenhouse Onboarding sought to enhance the onboarding process for hiring managers, a group previously lacking tools for tracking new hire progress and frameworks for effective integration. The initiative aimed to introduce new features to support hiring managers more effectively.
The team
Product designer
Product manager
Data scientist
Engineer manager + 2 engineers
Product overview
Greenhouse Onboarding is a product designed to automate and enhance the employee onboarding process. As part of the broader Greenhouse talent acquisition suite, it offers tools for creating personalized onboarding plans, assigning tasks, and tracking new hire progress, aiming to improve the integration of new employees into a company's culture and workflows.
Hiring managers weren’t really doing anything in GHO, and this was a missed opportunity for revenue generation
Discovery: User interviews
We discovered that hiring managers feel particularly stressed about ensuring their new hires' success, a sentiment echoed by new hires concerned about their integration. This insight led to a pivotal realization: the success of onboarding is a shared goal, emphasizing the need for a structured and empathetic approach to foster mutual success in the early stages of a new hire's journey.
“The success of my new hire onboarding well and becoming integrated into the team and organization is a shared success for me as as their hiring manager.”
With the insights from research we gathered, I put pen-to-paper to conceptualize, collaborate and iterate. My triad used the Shape-Up method to facilitate the collaboration.
Problem statement
Hiring managers faced challenges in structuring and monitoring the onboarding progress of new hires, affecting the overall success of the onboarding process.
Objective
To create a more structured and visible onboarding process for hiring managers, improving the integration of new team members.
User journey
Hiring manager and New hire flows
I mapped out the hiring manager's workflow for the new feature, complementing it with the new hire's experience and how they will flow in en concert. Because the product itself did not yet support app-wide notifications, we leaned on an email campaign that would serve as the notification system for the hiring manager. This would create awareness around the new feature, education around it and serve as a guide to keep them on track.
Design concepts
Data-backed default goals
During the hiring process (specifically within the Job Kickoff Form), the hiring manager outlines to the talent acquisition manager their expectations of what success looks like for the would-be new hire's first 30-60-90 days.
Collaborating closely with our data scientist, we analyzed that set of qualitative data provided by hiring managers during the recruitment process. This comprehensive analysis enabled us to compile a curated list of the most common goals, which now serves as the out-of-the-box selections for first-time users of this feature. This approach aims to provide an expedited and guided experience for a hiring manager guiding their new hire within their first 30 days.
This would be incorporated into all concepts.
concept a
For Concept A, I explored an approach that would integrate visual charts and graphs to offer hiring managers a glanceable yet comprehensive view of each new hire's progress. The core idea was to distill complex onboarding milestones into intuitive, easily digestible visual data representations. By showing a dashboard-centric design, the concept aimed to empower managers with real-time insights into each hire's journey, progress and status per onboarding goal item.
This design strategy was centered around the approach of visual storytelling can heighten the user experience by making information more accessible and actionable. In a later stage, I envisioned color-coded progress indicators and dynamic timelines that would alert both users if the new hire is at risk of not completing a goal during the onboarding process.
concept b
The strategy behind Concept B is grounded on the principle of simplifying the user experience while providing a more flexible framework that can adapt and scale as the feature set expands.
By consolidating the interface into a single page with side navigation, we significantly reduce the cognitive load on hiring managers, minimizing the need for excessive clicks and page transitions that can lead to frustration or task abandonment.
Furthermore, by designing with scalability in mind, we lay a solid foundation for future enhancements without disrupting the core user experience. This ensures that as the needs of hiring managers evolve, the platform can adapt, offering new functionalities or information without compromising its usability or efficiency.
After weighing tradeoffs among time and resource constraints, we moved forward with an iteration of Concept B that leverages the existing tab menu navigation for scalability.
Hiring manager experience
Delivery
By allowing a hiring manager to select and add goals for their new hire, it would create more visibility into the new hire’s ramp up period, foster collaboration between hiring manager and new hire, and contribute to a better overall onboarding experience for both the new hire and hiring manager.
I contemplated whether the user should be able to build their own from scratch by choosing from a set of options. However, I ultimately decided on presenting the user five commonly utilized themes for onboarding. This execution provides the hiring manager out-of-the-box default goals that, according to data, are commonly included in a new hire's onboarding plan.
For flexibility, the user can delete or add more goals from a pre-curated list of options.
New hire experience
Enabling new hires to update their progress for each goal item set by their hiring manager fosters transparency and enhances visibility into their onboarding journey. This directly addresses a recurring concern we identified through user research interviews – the challenge new hires face in communicating their progress to their managers, particularly in remote work setups.
Measuring success
The overarching objectives of this project were twofold: to elevate the level of engagement of hiring managers within Greenhouse Onboarding and to enhance the collaboration between hiring managers and their new hires. In light of these objectives, the following metrics were identified as critical for tracking our progress:
Usage
The number and percentage of organizations that have sent goals to a new hire
Percentage of new hires at an organizations that are using the goals
Repeat metric: Number of organizations that have sent more than one new hire goals
Usage
The number and percentage of organizations that have sent goals to a new hire
Percentage of new hires at an organizations that are using the goals
Repeat metric: Number of organizations that have sent more than one new hire goals
Views (proxy to engagement)
Long term, we want specific actions that speak to engagement to be taken by the users. For the short term, we look at Views of the feature as a proxy to engagement.
Long term, we want specific actions that speak to engagement to be taken by the users. For the short term, we look at Views of the feature as a proxy to engagement.
While user behavior data was coming in, we noticed something that we wanted to dig further into.
Hm? Users weren't modifying the default goals.
Upon observing click-rate data, we noticed that the default goals were hardly modified (i.e., deleted or replaced) and that users were not interacting with the add more goals button option at the bottom of the list. The larger bank of options were also backed by data because they are goals hiring managers had outlined in the hiring kickoff phase. We wanted users to take advantage of them, but we weren’t sure why they weren’t adding further goals.
our speculation for the lack of interaction:
The default goals we chose were exactly what users would have wanted to choose, OR
Users were overlooking the option because it’s a tertiary button and easy to miss, OR
Users didn’t care about adding more, whether the default goals were enough or not
Users were overlooking the option because it’s a tertiary button and easy to miss, OR
Users didn’t care about adding more, whether the default goals were enough or not
hypothesis
IF the button to add more goals were more discoverable, THEN we should see an increase of their usage in our data after 6 weeks.
To test our hypothesis of increasing the feature’s visibility, we updated the UI from a tertiary button to a secondary button and moved the action to the top of the list near the section header.
To test our hypothesis of increasing the feature’s visibility, we updated the UI from a tertiary button to a secondary button and moved the action to the top of the list near the section header.
so, did it make a difference in user behavior?
While results from data did show an increase of utilizing additional goals, most users continued to use the default goals without any of the additional goals provided. This leads me to believe that our data-backed default goals were what the users were looking for already when it comes to onboarding their new hire.
Version 1: the action to add more goals was not prominent and thus lowered discoverability
Version 2: CTA to add more goals changed to a secondary button and moved further up in the page
Annotations for development delivery
So how did the feature perform? After collecting data over six months, the results were in.
Results
40% adoption rate among customers (156 companies). Within this engaged user base, 3,000+ goals have been generated, showcasing the feature's impact. Additionally, 47% of new hires have proactively updated their onboarding progress status, underscoring the feature's effectiveness in driving user engagement and participation.
What's next?
Templates by department for new hire goals
Extending the collaboration support up to 60 days; 90 days
Reflection retro between hiring manager and new hire at the end of onboarding period
Shared goals between hiring managers within the company
AI analysis of data inputted within Job Kickoff Form during hiring process vs. actual outcome in New Hire Goals during onboarding process
Adding more color to the supporting and guiding role of the email campaign implemented.
Email communications
Due to technical constraints within the product, we chose to implement an email communication campaign to enhance the discoverability of the feature, streamline notifications, and foster accountability for the onboarding process of newly recruited individuals.
Collaborating closely with product management, we pinpointed key moments within the onboarding journey (reference user flow), facilitating strategic communication to empower the hiring manager in setting objectives and prompting the new hire to update their status. This initiative aims not only to establish a structured framework for goal-setting by the hiring manager but also to offer valuable insights into the progressive journey of the new hire.
A user with admin-level permissions would first need to enable the email communications within Settings in order for the hiring manager and new hire to receive them. While this is a hurdle in the feature's flow, we worked closely with the Customer Success team who had concerns about the users (hiring manager and new hire, in this case) receiving emails potentially without the admin knowing about the feature or the email campaign.
Once enabled, hiring managers and new hires would receive the following email messaging over the course of 6 weeks.
Email to New hire on their first day to access their goals directly from CTA
Weekly status update of new hire's progress delivered to both Hiring manager and New hire for visibility and accountability