Partnering to mature a service for a virtual experience
Rapid prototyping and delivery to learn, iterate and shape the direction for a service that needed to pivot from face-to-face to virtual amidst the pandemic.
CLIENT:
Over the course of 2020, the ongoing compromises of doing things remotely meant many organisations had to translate successful face-to-face services to an online experience.
For a global consulting firm, this brought a need to rethink their approach to engaging and recruiting from the mature workforce: a vital demographic in delivering on their workforce diversity and inclusion strategy. The firm’s policies meant that employees were encouraged to work from home and visitors weren’t yet allowed in offices.
This presented a challenge for STCK’s collaboration partner Maturious who needed our help to adapt their successful face-to-face recruitment assessment centre model to a virtual, remote environment they could deliver for the consulting firm.
Maturious is a dual-service, 360-degree capability profiling and talent matching platform that connects hiring organisations with mature-age job seekers. Driven by a passion to remove the barriers many mature-age job seekers experience during recruitment like discrimination and bias, Maturious’s intelligent talent -matching platform.
Maturious’s compelling purpose of creating employment for all ages aligned with STCK’s own vision of crafting a better tomorrow and pointed to a natural partnership to tackle this challenge.
Core to this challenge was supporting a positive experience for candidates who were faced with the usual nerves that go with the recruitment process, which were then amplified by doing this through a potentially unfamiliar virtual environment.
For the consulting firm’s recruitment team and hiring managers, the ability to observe participants’ behaviours and interactions, which was core to the assessment centre’s nature.
Approach
In helping Maturious and their consulting firm client to adapt a service to be delivered virtually while supporting a positive experience for candidates and observers alike, STCK approached the challenge in a number of ways:
1. Start with a focus on rapid prototyping to learn, and inform an iterative service development approach to address the immediate need for a virtual experience delivered quickly
Conduct just enough research about the service to move us to a testable prototype we could continually improve (instead of a traditional, deep-research-first design approach)
Rapidly designed prototype service for live testing, covering both backstage action (facilitation) and frontstage experience (participants and observers)
Defined clear levels of fidelity for future development, creating a service development pathway
Iterative learning and feedback capture to identify improvements, then deliver and test these in subsequent workshops
2. Design to respond to the varied needs of participants with a focus on the impacts of virtual environment to candidate confidence
Rapid desktop and guerrilla research using Maturious’s existing knowledge to understand the needs of mature age workers (aged 45+) demographic encompassing workers looking for meaningful employment and or career-change pathways.
Designed a candidate experience which:
Provided pre-workshop interactions to boost confidence with technology and the process
Scripted the sessions to support confidence, energy and varied personal communication styles across 2.5 hours
Selected and staged the use of technology with features that supported a virtualised version of the previous face-to-face workshops, including rotating breakout rooms and virtual whiteboards
Used facilitators to remove distractions in navigating a virtual whiteboard during group work, allowing participants to focus on the activity at hand
Designed a recruitment team experience which enabled live observation and post-session moderation of assessments
Outcomes
Live prototype ready for delivery in a short, two-week timeframe in November 2020
Iterated prototype from testing results and feedback as an MVS across three sessions in February 2021
Orchestrated the efforts and experience for nearly 50 participants, observers and 8 facilitation team members across 4 sessions in total
Supported Maturious to place 7 candidates into roles with the consulting firm
Candidates shared feedback indicating that:
Their confidence in using technology to participate increased as a result of pre-session support and facilitation during the session
They enjoyed the session as an opportunity to do something different and learn something new in a recruitment experience
What participants said
