Persona

Overview

Aquent agents have the difficult task of placing top talent with the biggest companies around the world. It costs time and money to calibrate what type of talent is needed for what type of role, especially when positions' responsibilities vary from company to company. I wanted to equip Aquent agents with a tool that more quickly and accurately screens for qualified talent. This is something I realized Aquent didn't have at the time, so I built a working prototype with engineering to pitch the idea. I created a skills and deliverables map across a typical design workflow. When agents speak with hiring managers, and hear certain skills and deliverables needed, they can identify where in the workflow these are paramount.

Then, I created graph that expressed the same workflow to talent, and asked them to identify and stack rank their own competencies with a limited currency (in this case, number of blocks). By comparing a talent's profiling against the hiring manager's skills and deliverables map, agents were able to effectively visualize whether the designer being screened might confidently match the type of designer being requested by a hiring manager.

After getting buy-in from the CEO, 2 engineers and I conducted a design sprint to deliver a working prototype which we then evolved into the live tool once adopted by a squad to develop. At that point, I straddled product ownership and lead designer to ensure the concept was successfully brought to fruition. Once live, Persona decreased the time 'to first submit' by 12%, increased lead volume by approximately 20% in its first 6 months deployed, and resulted in 72% of leads being successfully filled.‍

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More detailed information about the research, strategy, execution, and success of this project is available on request.