UX Case Study:

Interviewing at Hopper

A transparent interviewing process is key to the successful recruitment of top talent, especially when a company is planning to enter a massive growth phase. How do you make an inherently stressful process easier and as transparent as possible? I designed & developed an informational hub on the web for all of Hopper's job candidates.

MY ROLE

Designer & Developer

TEAM

Stéphanie Filion: Executive Program Manager

Cally Raven: Copywriting & Editing

The Problem

Why are we doing this in the first place?

Essentially, expectations did not meet reality for our interviewing candidates.

Our recruiting teams received feedback from candidates that there could be more transparency about our interviewing process, especially the length, number of steps, and technical challenges for data science and engineering candidates.

The necessity to fix this solution became only more evident as Q1 started, as we planned on hiring a lot of people in the coming year and continued to receive similar feedback. This project quickly turned into high-priority and high-profile, with stakeholders from multiple levels of the company, ranging from recruiters to the CEO.

Sketches of different ways to layout the home page and the flow of information.

Sketches of ideas for how to layout each step of the interviewing guide and some interactions for hiding content.

Research

How do we begin to tackle this?

To find out more about the problem, we went to the recruiters and hiring managers of each team, surveying them on what pain points they’d like to improve. We also had each head write up their own interviewing process if it was for a technical role or had special considerations, like in data science or engineering and development.

We discovered we would need three main content areas covered:

Details on each step of the interviewing process that all roles shared
Technical sections for both data science and engineering candidates
Hopper’s culture documents

Constraints

What issues would we face?

Format. After collecting the feedback and initial content ideas from the recruiters and hiring managers, we realized we had a lot of important information to convey to make the interviewing process as transparent as possible. Overall, there were over 40 pages of Google Docs that needed to be included. Avoiding information overload would have to be at the forefront of my mind while picking what format this would take.

In addition, our research showed that anywhere from 58% - 80% of people job hunted on their mobile phones, while 35% - 50% preferred to apply for jobs on their mobile phones^1|2. This indicated whatever format the interviewing content took, it would have to be suitable for both desktop and mobile viewing.

Resources. I had no dev resources for this project and was on a timeline. I was the sole designer and developer on this project which eventually became a 13 page website in 3 languages. I had just started building on Webflow a few months prior and had to simultaneously learn more about this platform while building out the Interviewing at Hopper site.

An early site map.

The final site map.

Ideation

What format would this take?

Due to the amount of information deemed necessary by the stakeholders of this project, we had only a few options for what format it would take: video, PDF, and a website.

Video. Due to the resource and time constraints, a video format of this project was not possible.

PDF. Information overload and fatigue would be hard to avoid with this format. As PDFs show the amount of pages contained, our candidates would immediately see just how much information they would have to read through and start the interviewing process already overwhelmed. PDFs also are not interactive, only lend to a passive absorption of information, and are not mobile friendly.

Website. Perfect! Websites are flexible, interactive, conducive to parsing information into digestible bits, and most importantly – mobile friendly.

Reasoning & Decisions

Why did I make the design choices I did?

Throughout my explorations, I focused on the main goal of creating a website that was easy to use, friendly and did not cause information overload. For this reason, I decided to have the core design use accordion style FAQs and other “click-to-reveal” based content. As a considerable portion of the content was under some type of fold, at first glance the user wouldn't be overwhelmed by too much text. I also gave extra care to site navigation so the user would always be able to find the information they needed, would never reach a dead end, and would always know where they were if deep inside a funnel.

One of the ways I reduced the chances of information overload - collapsible content.

Validation & Results

How would I have validated my design choices?

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, layoffs and hiring freezes occured at Hopper and this site was never launched. In that case, I can only say how I would have validated my solution:

Surveys.

Candidates who got to the final stage of interviews. At this point, the candidates would have had the opportunity to visit the website during their different stages of interviewing and would have accessed multiple parts of the site.
Candidates who did not end up applying but still visited the site. This qualitative user data would allow me to see if it was the site's structure or content that deterred them, or if it simply just wasn't a good fit.

Example survey questions.

How would you rate Hopper's transparency during the interviewing process? (1-5)
How prepared did you feel for the interviewing process after visiting the site? (1-5)
Was there anything important you felt was necessary to know about our process but was not included?
Were you able to figure out if Hopper would be a good culture fit from the information provided? If no, please explain why.

Metrics.

Repeat visits. This would allow me to see if it was functioning the way we wanted - as a centralized resource that people can refer back to throughout the process.
Drop-off rates. Depending on where the drop-offs occured, this metric would show where users no longer felt engaged or couldn't find the material they were looking for.
Ratio of applicants that reached each interviewing stage. As we had never released this much detailed information about our interviewing process before, we hypothesized that candidates would be better informed, better prepared and consequently would move further along the interviewing process. We also had never before released our culture content externally, and the chances of someone reaching the end of the interviewing process only to reject an offer or pull out at the final stages due to a culture misfit would be greatly reduced. This would have resulted in much-needed savings in recruitment resources.

Video Tour