Multiple Offer Forms

Background

In Lever, an offer form contains all the necessary fields for the recruiter to complete in the offer creation process. The offer form would be configured by the system admin on the talent team and they would add fields like the candidate start date or the sign on bonus. Once the offer form is configured, the recruiter would fill out the fields in the offer form to create an offer for the candidates.

The Problem

Customers are limited to a single offer form for all types of offers. This limitation results in a long and disorganized offer form, creating bottlenecks in the offer process.

The Goal

Provide customers with the ability to create multiple offer forms in Lever, to streamline the offer process and reduce the time required to send offers out to candidates.

An example of a customer's very long offer form that the recruiter would fill out

Discovery Research

To begin the design process, I started the discovery research by leading user interviews with my product manager. For the user interviews, I wanted to understand how customers are currently configuring their offer form and identify the downstream effects the single offer form has to the rest of their offer process. The participants for the interview consisted of 3 internal Lever employees and 6 Lever customers who held the talent ops role, as they typically serve as system admins responsible for configuring the offer form.

Research Findings

User Pain Points:

All configurable fields needed in an offer have to be added to the offer form
Required fields can’t be set in the offer form
A long offer form is difficult to complete and approve

“Our offer form is way too long, mostly because different locations and teams need to collect different information. This is unwieldy and leads to potential errors (each recruiter needs to know which fields are required for their specific offer, so it's easy to make mistakes).”
— TA Ops, Lever Customer

Downstream effects to the offer creation process:

Users have to verify the field they are filling out is required since required fields cannot be added to the offer form
Error prone and tedious process
Customers have added instructions to their offer form and need to provide additional training to the team

Downstream effects to the offer approval process:

Slow approval process to validate the required fields are filled correctly
Repeated revisions to the offer form by recruiters lead to frequent re-approvals
Increased workload in a time sensitive phase of the hiring process

Design Explorations

Working with my product manager, we were able to include a redesign of the template placeholder page into the project scope. Redesigning this page would be beneficial, as it is currently outdated and this page is used to create offer fields that users can add into their offer form.

For the offer forms page, I started with some wireframes to generate the possible functionality and workflow users would take to create a new offer form. During these explorations, I tested out a full page experience to see how users would be able to add the offer form details and configure the offer fields. I also experimented with conditional offer fields to provide users with more flexibility and to prevent the offer form creator from creating different offer forms that have slight nuances.

Throughout the design process, I would meet regularly with my product manager and tech lead to gather design feedback on my design explorations. This collaboration helped the team finalize the functionality needed for the initial release. By meeting regularly with the team, I was also able to design with technical feasibility in mind and could also account for any edge cases or project limitations from the get go. After multiple syncs with my team, I polished up the designs to create a high fidelity solution and prototype.

Usability Testing

After finalizing the first iteration of the final solution, I led usability testing sessions with the customers we had interviewed in the previous user interviews. These sessions helped us in collecting feedback from customers on the new designs.

Feedback to the new offer field page:

Users found the UI a huge improvement
Users overlooked the “Offer fields is used for” section
Helper text ability will improve the offer process

Feedback to the new offer forms page:

Users did not see the value of having sections
The pencil icons did not present a clear action
Preview would be a nice addition

The Final Solution

Customers will be able to configure offer forms in Lever based on department/team, location, work type, or profile origin. The “best-match” offer form will automatically be populated for recruiters to fill out upon offer creation.

*The best-match offer form is determined by how the offer form configuration matches up with data from the candidate profile.

The Redesigned Offer Fields Page

The improved usability and additional functionality on this page will allow for better management of offer fields. From this page, users will be able to create offer fields that can be used in the offer forms.

Users are able copy placeholders for Offer Templates with a button
Users are able to search on this page
Offer field creation is limited to this page

Adding Helper Text to Offer Fields

System admins can add helper text to the custom offer fields to provide guidance to recruiters filling out the Offer Form.

Recruiters will makes less mistakes filling out the offer form since there is explanation provided in the helper text
Recruiters can create offers without extensive training

Multiple Offer Forms

Creating and approving offers is more straightforward as only the relevant fields are included on each offer form.

Custom offer forms can be created for offers to best-match the selected criteria
The default offer form will apply to all offers as a fallback when there is no applicable custom offer form

Creating Multiple Offer Forms

Users can set the criteria for each offer to reduce the number of offer fields needed to be filled during offer creation.

Offer forms have some “default” fields that are always required and cannot be deleted
The edit field will take users to the Offer Fields page to configure the offer field
UI improvements were made and sections were removed based on usability testing feedback

Populating the “Best Match” Offer Form Upon Offer Creation

This helps streamline the offer process and prevent users from selecting the incorrect offer form:

The best match offer form will be displayed based on the candidate profile data
When the same number of criteria match, the matching criteria will be weighted in terms of importance as follows: (1) Location, (2) Team, (3) Department, (4) Origin, (5) Work type

Success Metrics

With the release of Multiple Offer Forms, it has proven to be a success for Lever's customers. The solution was effective because the "best-match" offer form was automatically populated for recruiters, preventing them from selecting the incorrect offer form and reducing bottlenecks in the offer process.

44% decrease in the number of offer fields in a single offer form
Increase in Offers feature adoption post-release
Average time to send an offer decreased by 5.82%