Adecco

Overview

A staffing company's website has two customers who never meet: the business that hires and the candidate who applies. Most of Adecco's platform work in 2016 and 2017 was about the first. This work was about the second.

The Netherlands portal

Adecco Netherlands wanted digital self-service for candidates and associates on one side and clients on the other, live early the following year. I shaped the candidate and associate portal around CV and profile management; job search and apply reusing Adecco's own Search and Match engine so results matched the public site; timesheets, feedback and training; and live chat, messaging and grievance handling from off-the-shelf products rather than custom build, with LinkedIn import, job recommendations and profile completion in a second phase. The client portal followed the same look, feel and technology stack as the Adecco Group and Netherlands sites, so internal IP was reused rather than rebuilt. The build was scoped to a minimum viable proposition in twelve to fifteen weeks, with design thinking and primary research written in to find the needs nobody had put in the brief.

The jobseeker journey

In July 2017 I led an ideas and opportunity analysis for the group that started with the industry rather than the site: 80 percent of staffing firms expecting growth, 60 percent naming the talent shortage as the obstacle, temporary jobs growing seven percent over three years, and 35 percent of skills demanded across industries expected to change by 2020. Google for Jobs was flagged as the disruptor, machine learning that knows a truck driver and a delivery manager are the same job. Two personas, Jenny, a 26 year old temporary system administrator in Atlanta wanting permanence, and Jim, a 32 year old integration architect in Provo wanting Silicon Valley, were walked through four stages with a recommendation at each: profile management and a 360 degree view of the candidate before the search starts; best matches first, profile-based prompts and apply from the results list during search; credentials and video at the point of applying, with an applicant tracking system that keeps people informed; networking and local services after the hire.

The audit

Adeccousa.com was audited against randstadusa.com and manpower.com feature by feature across registration, profile, search, apply and career guidance, more than sixty criteria, plus the things a candidate notices first: speed, content, one-click apply, three-click registration, how easy it is to find a branch. Randstad listed 11,888 jobs at the time, Adecco 4,309, Manpower 590.

Why it matters

The industry verdict in the deck was blunt: a lot of pain, effort and complexity for jobseekers everywhere. With application volumes now several times what they were and AI writing many of them, the candidate side is where the next generation of hiring platforms will be won or lost.

The screens

The two wireframes at the end of this page, the candidate and associate dashboard and the client portal, are reconstructions drawn for the portfolio from the September 2016 proposal and the jobseeker research: profile completeness as the first action, documents shown where they cost a match, requests as the client's unit of work, and accept or decline recorded in the list rather than relayed by phone.