Maria Laitinen  Design Thinking Innovation Final Exercise

Challenge    Applying for a job is a tough process. For the applicant there are a lot of different emotions,  creating a good application takes time and if one is chosen for interviews, they take even more  time. I’ve been in this kind of process myself during this autumn, so I’ve had plenty of  experience from different companies’ recruitment processes. In the end I decided to drop off  from several different companies’ processes I didn’t get the “good feeling” from the company or  some other reason. So I’ve been an “user” or a recruitment process and this is my insight to it.    The topic of this exercise was born when I start to wonder that what kind of reasons lead to  leaving the recruitment process unfinished? This is a valuable question and a real business  challenge for recruiting companies since it shrinks the pool of the applicants. In this paper I  focus on the question: Is there a way how communication could prevent this to happen? In the  recruitment process there can be a lot or lack of communication and this affects the applicants’  opinions about the company. There the better the communication and more alluring the  company, the bigger pool of applicants to choose from. This results to the better quality of  employers.    There are phases in the recruitment process where the applicants drop off themselves. I call  these exit points and in this paper focus on the role of the communication on voluntary exit  points: ​what kind of information design and communication is needed for the applicant  not to leave the process unfinished?    Selection    To tackle this challenge, I chose ​the journey mapping tool​ where the applicant is the  customer. The application process includes a lot of different phases and layers for both parties  and the journey mapping tool is in my opinion the best way to visualize these. It is very  important to understand the applicant’s different considerations because good communication  from the company side can have a big effect on these. I’ve attached my map to the end of this  paper.    In this paper I’ve used learnings from the Service Design Thinking course video 1. Also I’ve  used two books as a source for inspiration. The first is “​Service Design Thinking ​ ” by ​Marc

Stickdorn ​ . The second book is “​Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the

Customer Experience ​ ” by ​Ben Reason, Lavrans Lovlie  ​ and​ Melvin Brand Flu ​ .

Applying the visualization    Good visualizations are clear and precise. I created the customer journey map so that every  step of the recruitment process is one column and every row describes some kind of emotion or  an action. In this case the problem seemed to be the amount of information. If there is too much

Maria Laitinen  Design Thinking Innovation Final Exercise

information, the important bits of information can be lost. Once I started to map the customer  journey I realized that there are a lot of things I could add to my drawing. Should I map also the  internal company decisions for each phase? Are applicant’s considerations important or would  adding emotions be enough?    At some point I was not so sure anymore if I had chosen the right tool for the visualization.  Different companies have different recruitment processes; some have tasks for the applicant  before the interview. My customer journey map is just a model; in real life there are sidesteps,  several rounds of interview, negotiations of the pay etc.     Insight    What I learned from the exercise is that in a recruitment process different applicants have  different motives and emotions. In real life the recruitment situations vary a lot; some really want  to be recruited and others are just browsing for offers. This has also influence on the effect of  the communication. If someone is looking for a job desperately, the person is much more likely  to accept poor communication than one who already has a nice job but is just searching for  something better. So if the applicant decides voluntarily to leave the process unfinished, he/she  has different emotions than someone who is very eager to go through everything.    The bigger amount of applicants, the more the company has to choose from. But information  design and good communication require a lot from the recruiting company. There are several  internal decisions that the applicant does not see but have to be made in time to have a  streamlined recruitment process. For example if the person going through the applications is  burdened with a lot of work, the process can be prolonged. This can leave a bad taste in the  applicant’s mouth and lead the applicant towards an exit point. So to prevent the “voluntary  exits” of the recruitment process the company needs to communicate clearly to the applicants  what it expects and offers.    Approach    Next time I would still use a customer journey map but I would draw more than one of them.  While writing this paper I realized that there can be several different customer journey maps  when recruitment processes are modelled. In this case I should have first done an overall  customer journey map with basic steps of the recruitment. Then I could have created another  map related to the exit points. This customer journey map would have allowed me to focus more  on the reasons ​why people do not apply at all ​  or ​inform during the process that they are not

available ​ . If this tool would have been used in real life to solve a business challenge of a

recruitment problem, there should have been other stakeholders in defining the exit points as  well. Since this exercise did not include other stakeholders and it’s the weakness of my  submission. I could have used a different kind of visualization to map the roles of all the  stakeholders, in this case various people from company’s different departments and people in  other kind of recruitment situation..

Maria Laitinen  Design Thinking Innovation Final Exercise

Maria Laitinen  Design Thinking Innovation Final Exercise

THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP: EXIT POINTS IN THE PROCESS OF APPLYING A JOB

