Offer Approvals

Company: Lever
Released: 2021
Design Duration: 4 months
Team: Product Manager, Tech Lead and 5 Engineers

Role: Design Lead
Research, Wireframe, Hi-Fidelity Design, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Engineer Handoff and Design QA

Background

In recruiting, sending an offer to a candidate is a time sensitive step for talent teams. To guarantee the desired candidate gets hired, it is required to send out offers promptly. With Lever's Offer Approvals feature, users are able to add the necessary approvers to each of their offer approval chains to automate and speed up parts of the offer process.

The Problem

Customers are unable to create the offer approvals chains they need in Lever's Offer Approvals feature due to the lack of flexibility in the current functionality.

Customers are unable to:

Create approval chains based on multiple departments/teams, locations, and work types. For instance, customers are limited to selecting one location per approval chain, so they would have to create an approval chain for each location.
Create approval chains with conditional triggers
Replace a user in an approval chain if they are out of office

User Workflow Audit

To reimagine the current Offer Approvals feature, I started the design process by conducting a user workflow audit. This helped me discover areas for improvement, understand the current user workflow and capture the pages that would be impacted by these changes in Lever.

Design Audit

Since this feature hasn't been updated in a while, I checked to see where we can incorporate components from the design system into the redesign. I also tracked opportunities for UI/UX improvements from the current experience.

Design Explorations

In the design explorations, I utilized the user stories and user needs to create screens necessary for the user workflow. In my designs, I tested out new ways to display the approval chains, ways in which users would create the approval chains with the additional functionality and ways to optimize the page hierarchy.

The Final Solution

Customers can build custom offer approvals that will automatically route requests to the correct approvers, ensuring the offer is approved in a timely manner.

Redesigned UI with Improved Usability

The redesign provides users with a cleaner and more modern look. Users can now understand the high-level information of each approval chain and create new approval chains seamlessly.

Users are now able to search on the new Offer Approvals page
Approvers are displayed in each row
Deactivated users in existing approval chains will be highlighted

Building Out Approval Chains With Multiple Criteria

Users will be able to create approval chains based on the department/team, work type, locations and custom fields. The configuration details would trigger the appropriate offer approval chain to populate in the offer process.

Users are able to add custom approvers that get selected during the offer process or select from a user list

Adding Conditions

Users are able to add conditions within each approval step to dynamically populate approvers when necessary.

Option to select AND/OR between each condition

Super Admin Override

If a user in an approval chain is deactivated or out of the office it would cause the approval chain to become blocked. With the override function, a Super Admin can approve on behalf of other users to keep approval chains moving forward.

Success Metrics

With the release of Offer Approvals, the team received high praise from customers as it allowed talent teams to create the approval chains they needed in Lever.

14% increase in Offer Approvals adoption 6 months post-release
Reduction in time to approve and send offers 6 months post-release
Customer feedback post-release confirmed that users found new functionality like conditions and Super Admin override valuable