X

analog to digital

the project

In 2019, I was part of an ambitious project to transform EY’s executive referral system from a collection of email lists and spreadsheets into a full-fledged web app.

My role

I was responsible for designing the job seeker experience, as well as the staff tool, which the Career Center team would use to manage seekers and jobs.

background

About 60% percent of Senior Managers at EY do not go on to become Partners. Instead, they leave the firm, often moving to potential or current EY clients.
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An internal study showed that if a departing senior manager goes on to work for an EY client, that client actually does less business with the firm. Cumulatively, this effect contributes to 1 million dollars per year of lost revenue.
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The EY Career Center was created to address this issue. By helping outgoing Senior Managers make a ‘soft landing’ at client companies, they increase the opportunities for new business with that client in the future.

current state

At its core, the EY Career Center has two main functions- to connect job seekers with opportunities at EY client companies, and to coach those seekers to make sure they are in the best possible shape when they go to interview. Currently, the system exists as a collection of email lists, spreadsheets, and relationships.

While this system has shown impressive results, its manual, high-touch methods were not scalable.
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We were tasked with building their manual system into a web app that would retain the Career Center’s personal feel, while allowing it to scale.

project goals

An X-week discovery phase revealed several key insights, which would become priorities when designing the new system.

Automate Low-Value Activities

The Career Center staff spends an inordinate amount of time on repetitive tasks that could be automated. This is time that could be spent on higher-value activities like coaching job seekers.

Expand access

Giving broader access to the Career Center would unlock network effects, and increase its visibility. maybe get rid of this one.

Maintain the personal feel

User appreciated the hands-on approach of the Career Center. They felt that staff understood their situation, and were well positioned to help with their job search. Maintaining this personal feel would be essential as the system scales up.

user definition and flows

Our first task was working with the EYCC team to create a model for how the system would work, at the highest level. This started with definitions of who would be interacting with the system, and what actions they undertake.

Next was a conceptual map of how users and opportunities would move through the system. This ultra-simplified series of flows was meant to give a top-level view of the system’s most important functions, and would later be built out into more detailed flows

system logic

The ad-hoc nature of the original system required an iterative approach- as we were diagramming the existing system, the EYCC team was making adjustments based on their past learnings.

interface concepts

For the job marketplace, the EYCC team gravitated toward the ‘long card’ concept. Having separate list and detail views for jobs freed up room for long job titles, and an exposed filter set.

sidebars for simplicity

As we moved to the staff side of the app, we realized that the EYCC team often needed to quickly switch between different lists- for example, pending opportunities and active ones. This lead us to the sidebar concept, where the lists would be persistently visible instead of hidden in a menu.

Visual design by Molly Denning

everything informs everything

Once the sidebar concept had been approved for the staff section, we reworked the job marketplace so the two sides of the app would follow the same interaction pattern. This process of letting one part of the system inform others became a common theme throughout the project.

automate the boring stuff

In the old system, Career Center staff had to collect email responses from seekers who were interested in an opportunity, aggregate them into a spreadsheet with other data, and email it to the partner. The new system automates all that activity, freeing up staff to engage in higher-value tasks.

seeker's view of an opportunity

packaged seekers for client

less time in excel, more time coaching

Career Center coaches can track members’ progress, without spending time updating spreadsheets.

zero degradation

the client loved the table-like view of the data on desktop, but that presented a challenge when going to mobile. We solved it like this and this.

training

The UX team’s work culminated in a two-day onsite training session. We taught the newly expanded Career Center team how to use the tool we designed, and ran through the scenarios they could expect to encounter in the course of their work.

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