An improved advanced search experience to help users find and rediscover candidates more efficiently
Company: Lever
Released: 2023
Design Duration: 8 months
Team: Senior Product Designer, Product Manager, Tech Lead and 5 Engineers
Role: Design Co-Lead
Research, Wireframe, Hi-Fidelity Design, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Engineer Handoff and Design QA
Talent teams have an extensive candidate database in Lever, that would be a great source of talent for new roles.
However with Lever's current search functionality, talent teams are finding it difficult to rediscover their past candidates.
Improve the usability and functionality of Lever’s search experience to enable candidate rediscovery.
To begin the design process, I worked with my design co-lead to:
“It’s more like digging through a stack of paper. Because it’s pulling everything, it’s really time consuming.”
— Recruiter, Lever Customer
For this project, my design co-lead would be responsible for designing the candidate search experience, while I would be responsible for the advanced search experience. To begin the designs, I started with mid-fidelity designs of how the advanced search query building experience could be. In the first round of explorations, I tried to emulate how a user would add their search terms into a full page experience, allowing users to progressively build the query by adding each field. From working on these explorations, it became apparent that the act of searching and "building a query" felt very disconnected in the designs.
Following more iterations and feedback sessions with my design co-lead, I worked towards a different direction. In the new direction, there would be a search bar that contains all the boolean search functionality and users would be able to add filters to the search query within a single experience.
From there, I was able to polish up the advanced search homepage and create the search results, saved searches and search history pages. To continue the iterative process, my design co-lead and I conducted usability tests with the new advanced search designs to gather feedback from our customers.
An improved and intuitive search experience in Lever to help users find candidates more efficiently. The improved advanced search will serve as a scalable query builder that enables users to rediscover and take action on past candidates.
A more accurate and relevant list of candidate to help talent teams find the best candidates.
Users can immediately take action on candidates from the search results page with bulk actions.
Users are able to save search queries to re-run their favourite searches
Users can access their search history and re-run searches from this page.
With the release of the improved Advanced Search experience, my team expanded the search capabilities to help Lever stay competitive with the other ATS in the market. It has also allowed customers to use Lever as a database to find and source their past candidates, which was not possible prior to the release.