Automating employee onboarding

The challenge

Personably were starting to gain traction with a handful of hyper-growth start-ups in London. Whose people teams were faced with the difficult challenge of onboarding 10–100 hires per week. Ensuring each hire had a personal experience and didn’t rescind their job acceptance, or leave the company within 3–6 months was a growing concern. Adding headcount to the people team was not a scalable solution.

The approach

The initial product was built off of insights built up by the founders — form interviewing HR managers and leaders across London. I leant into this “build with our users” approach, and incorporated it into my day-to-day product and design development work.

I used that approach when working on: redesigning the marketing site (twice), iterating and adding automation to the Tasks functionality, and on the Welcome Dashboard (a new product aimed at new hires).

To make sure we were building the right thing, I collated feedback into Productboard. Pulling in feedback from Intercom, sales calls and demos, emails, usability sessions ran in Userbrain, observations from FullStory and from user interviews. Then the team and I scored and measured each new feature based on effort and impact.

Being an early-stage startup we wanted to make sure we were working as smart as possible, and an important part of my role was to help identify what the “smartest” — or rather the highest impact relative to effort — projects we could work on. The other side to my role was to make sure what I designed was also as easy to implement as possible, utilising a component library that I helped design and build.

The team

CEO, CTO and 2 engineers.

My impact

Research and planning

• Interviewing 20+ people team members, hiring managers, and employees who have recently joined companies
• Using FullStory to observe current user behaviour
• Using Userbrain to run usability tests for new and existing features
• Sharing insights using research and product docs
• Using research and planning docs to inform product roadmap

Design

• Component library (design and frontend), using Sketch, React and StoryBook
• New iteration of “Tasks” which enabled automation of tasks like welcome and “Your first day” emails — growing usage from <20% of users, to >60%.
• Soft rebrand — and launched it across our web app, marketing site and social channels
• Product videos for outbound sales emails and our marketing site
• New marketing site (twice)
• Launching on Product Hunt, and being #3 Product of the Day (Oct 14, 2018)
• New “Hire dashboard” for new hires to use before, during and after joining a new company and being onboarding

The work

People Dashboard

The web app was the main interface that people teams and hiring managers would use to arrange their onboarding curriculum, schedule sessions and run tasks (i.e. scripts) to send invites and emails to hires.

To make sure I could the experience as intuitive as possible, I regularly spoke to existing customers, watched session on FullStory, and ran fortnightly usability testing via UserBrain.

Hire Dashboard

I spoke to several customers and recently onboarded employees about what they would want to know when joining a new company, and their best onboarding experiences. As looking at what large companies who had built their own onboarding dashboards had done.

Marketing site

The goal was to improve the conversion rate of the marketing site, as well as reduce the amount of queries we were getting about the product. I started by speaking with 5 people that fit our target market, hiring managers and people team members.

They all had not used Personably before. I asked them to tell me what the most important things they wanted to know when looking at software to help them in their roles. Then took them through the current marketing site, and the first version of the new design. I used the feedback from the participants to improve the content and ordering — to make the page as compelling and informative as possible to visitors.

Live site: personably.co

Product video

I developed a product video for us to use on the marketing site, Product Hunt, send out in sales emails and to use on social. I produced the video using Adobe AfterEffects.