Self-service temping
Disrupting the temping business: Self-service systems to make temp work easier, faster and more affordable.
Context
YoungCapital wants to disrupt to the temp work market with a new self service platform. We want to offer the flexibility of a platform with short term jobs, while offering the security of a temping contract. For candidates more short-term and diverse jobs become available, without the need for registering a business as they will be employed by YoungCapital.
Problem space
The current procedures of temp work requires various manual actions from recruiters. Operation costs can be high due to exchanging information and documents. To hire flex workers as a customer, rates are relatively high for small and medium-sized enterprises. This is why recruiting flex workers for short-term jobs is not always profitable for YoungCapital.
Approach
After multiple brainstorms with stakeholders and the product team, we started designing a proof of concept: a very simple version of the product. This was used to pitch our ideas and validate if the concept would be understood by customers. The proof of concept consisted of creating a job, managing the job and inviting candidates.
Minimum viable product
The first goal was to deliver a working minimum viable product (MVP), in which customers and candidates can find each other for work arrangements. With an MVP, we could validate whether customers would want to interact with such a self-service platform, and learn about the complications that could arise here.
Goals for the MVP
- Candidates and customers can work together without much help from our operation
- Fully self service for external users: customers and candidates.
- Lower internal overhead
Thereafter the development team started building the minimum viable product. When the MVP was build, we started a pilot program with a small amount of customers and candidates. From this point on, we went through multiple design iterations. New features and functionalities where based on insights from customers and feedback from the operation.
As the product grew we implemented the product in the YoungCapital Candidate app. This made it possible for candidates to browse and apply on short term jobs. Working with feature flags, we could control the amount of users. This way we could offer a good balance in supply and demand.
User testing
To validate if the product is understood and used as intended, various research projects were executed. Together with our UX researcher, we tested the products with multiple end users.
Due to the covid restrictions mid 2020, customers were hard to reach. For that reason we tested an early stage of the customer environment with account managers and recruiters within YoungCapital. This was the next best thing as they have a good intuition of the customers needs. Here we discovered that posting a job to the platform went fluently. When reviewing the product with customers themselves we discovered that the the product was used as intended.
Testing the candidate app
During usability tests with candidates, we tested the onboarding flow and the ability in finding suitable jobs on the platform. We discovered that the product proposition was unclear for new users. The difference between regular jobs and flexible day jobs had to be made more clear. This aspect we want to improve on over time. All participants were pleased with using the platform and succeeded in applying for jobs.
Outcomes and advices from the user tests were shared with the development team and translated in tickets for new sprints.
Output
The product consist of four main platforms:
1. Customer environment
2. Candidate environment
3. Recruiter environment
4. Dashboard
My Contribution
As the UX/UI Designer on this project I was responsible for the whole design process. My contribution consisted of proposing user research, thinking along in the proposition and strategic product decisions, designing flows, wireframes and pixel perfect designs.
The development project team consisted of a product manager, UX designer, engineering manager, quality assurance coordinator, data scientist, 3 backend developers and 4 frontend developers.
Press
Emerce: Youngcapital lanceert selfserviceplatform YoungCapital Direct
FD: YoungCapital schudt uitzendmarkt op met digitaal zelfbedieningsplatform
