How to Build a Healthy Medical Recruitment Process for the MEDIjobs Platform

Medical care is a vital part of our lives. This aspect became even more evident during the Spring of 2020, when, suddenly, the entire world got hit by a pandemic. It might sound like a cliche, but it became clearer to all of us that technology can play a big part in the medical recruitment process. Having the right people with the right set of skills who can immediately start work and help patients became an urgent matter. That’s why MEDIjobs, the career marketplace for healthcare professionals, came to me and the Durran studio to ask for help regarding their platform. The main challenge? To streamline the process of hiring through the platform. Read on to see the entire Design Sprint process and the solutions we found.

Outcome summary

During our Durran Design Sprint workshop, we went from identifying the main challenge of MEDIjobs’ platform — scheduling interviews between candidates and medical practices — to having a tested and validated solution that streamlines the interaction between them, saving time for all those involved. This results in increased user satisfaction and reduced load on the support team, while guiding the customers through the whole hiring process. Also, the newly proposed solution aims to increase the revenue generated through the platform.‍

Context

What is MEDIjobs?

MEDIjobs is a career marketplace for healthcare professionals that provides fast access to relevant candidates for medical practices in Romania and the US.

As with many other services, the medical sector started to search for ways to digitize its processes.

During the pandemic in 2020, the platform saw a 227% increase in hiring needs. MEDIjobs’ main goal was to become the most relevant platform for both medical clinics and professionals. But for this to happen, they knew that more work had to be done to ensure that the platform efficiently solves their customers’ needs.

I have to admit; this growth mindset is precisely what drew me to this project when I first got in contact with its founders, Catrinel and George Hagivreta. This approach and passion totally match the core belief we have here at Durran — we believe that the startups of the future should focus on people and the reality they live in, and you can’t do all of that without knowing and fully understanding their context.

The Problem

We started our collaboration with a UX Discovery Workshop to identify the main pain points with insights from MEDIjobs’ founders. After going through the process — which meant mapping the competitors, analyzing the market and the context of the product, defining a user persona, and a customer journey map — we had a better understanding of where users got stuck.

The main issue: the process of scheduling interviews was not happening on the platform. And, as you may expect, this was putting a lot of pressure on the customer support team as they had to schedule calls manually. Even more frustrating was that the company was losing out on potential revenue because they didn’t know if the hiring process was successful or not.

The Team

For the workshops, we tailored the team set up to maximize the outcomes at each step. The Durran team was in charge of facilitating the workshops and preparing the designs. From the MEDIjobs team, we had:

Product Marketing ManagerSales ManagerSenior recruiter CEO & Co-founder — Catrinel — also the decider during the workshopCOO & Co-founder — George

The Process

UX Discovery Workshop

When Catrinel first reached out, the issue she wanted to address was related to some key screens that needed to be redesigned. But, we soon realized that a simple redesign would not solve the deeper problems. The UX Discovery Workshop — which is the first part of our Durran Design Sprint process — really opened our eyes. So, we took things one by one.

First, we had to understand the entire context in which the product operates. We started the remote workshop with a structured discussion covering the most critical aspects of the business — the product, the problems it solves, competition, main stakeholders, and the value created for its customers.

The company operates in 2 markets, the United States and Romania. Our main focus was the Romanian market, so we put together a user persona that would help everyone involved get a clearer picture of what the actual people who are using the product look like. The customers.

Through the Customer Journey Map, we were interested in the way these people interact with the MEDIjobs platform, the way they behave. This is where things got very interesting because we soon identified a tricky onboarding section.

But besides this somewhat expected issue, we also noticed that the platform didn’t properly cover all the steps necessary for scheduling interviews. Instead of completing the entire recruiting process within the platform, customers were leaving the app and scheduling interviews through the support team. Basically, they were making phone calls or sending emails instead of synchronizing with candidates through the platform. On top of that, once people left the app, they never came back. So, MEDIjobs had no real idea how many people were actually getting hired through their platform.

What did we do next? We used all the insights and information collected during the workshop to fill out the Lean Canvas. Then, presented the findings back to the founders of MEDIjobs, which agreed to run a Design Sprint workshop, fully remote to solve the main challenge we discovered; the process of scheduling interviews while considering both sides’ availability and probably, the most urgent aspect, to keep them in the platform throughout the entire process (user retention).

Outcomes

A common understanding of what MEDIjobs does, its target audience, and the problems the product solves for both medical centers and professionals.A clear and defined list of competitors, user persona, and Customer Journey Map.An overview of how customers are currently using the platform and their main challenges.Clearly defined next steps to solve these problems and help the client increase business metrics.

Design Sprint

Once we had established the challenge for the Design Sprint, the Durran team used the insights acquired during the UX Discovery Workshop to prepare and pre-populate the exercises. We like to do this because we want everyone to have a smooth remote workshop experience. And, before jumping straight into the workshop, we sent out a questionnaire to MEDIjobs’ Sprint team to gather even more insights about the challenge.

Day 1 — Aligning the team regarding the challenge, future goals, and target

The first part of the day was all about aligning and understanding the main goal of the Design Sprint. We talked about the process, set expectations, and familiarized ourselves with the tools we would use (Miro and Butter) before diving into the actual workshop.

To understand all aspects of our challenge, we started with the Expert Interviews. The founders talked us through the recruiting process, which made it easier for all of us to understand how crucial this aspect is for the entire business. To get to the root of the challenge and remove biases, we invited existing customers to show us how they’re interacting with the product and walk us through their hiring process. Even though the MEDIjobs team started the project believing that their clients don’t use and won’t use digital calendars, we collected insights that would point in the opposite way.

In the meantime the whole team was taking How Might We notes, to further explore the challenges and generate new perspectives. Then grouped the How Might We notes based on the addressed topics to make sense of all this data.

Now, we couldn’t just go ahead without taking a look into the future. The 2 Years Goal is the next exercise in which we asked everyone in the team where they see MEDIjobs in 2 years if things went well. Giving each team member the opportunity to express their perspectives, it was time to pick the goal that best reflects the company’s mission: MEDIjobs to become the Uber of recruiting — Easy and fast. But for this to happen, we still had quite a big challenge to solve.

We then wanted to uncover the challenges that might occur along the way, through writing down the Sprint Questions. As you would expect, each team member had his own vision.

We took a look at all of the post-its and then started the voting process. Then the decider, Catrinel, selected the ones she felt were most critical for achieving our established goal. So for the rest of the workshop, we focused on those.

Based on the insights from the Customer Journey Map we created during the UX Discovery Workshop, the Durran team partially filled out the map. We used that as a starting point, and went through the flow with the MEDIjobs team, starting to add the missing pieces of the puzzle. Then, we completed the map by adding the top-voted How Might We notes and selecting the target area we would be working on during the Sprint.

Now it was time to put our detective glasses on and take a closer look at how other companies solved similar challenges.

Having the target area and challenge in mind, using the Lightning Demos approach, everyone — from the Durran & MEDIjobs teams — spent 45 min of independent, offline work to collect insightful examples from other companies. We then gathered all this information in a structured way and put it into the Design Sprint Miro board for everyone to take a look at all these solutions.

Day 2 — Getting inspired and coming up with solutions

Our second day of the remote Design Sprint workshop started with a walkthrough of the collected inspiration pieces — from platforms like Rally.co, Calendly, Setmore. It may sound surprising but we took inspiration even from Clubhouse, which is a great example that sometimes you may need to take a look in different markets to find new ideas.

Then, everybody had the chance to vote on the exciting parts before selecting the one Lightning Demo they found the most inspiring.

There was already a lot of information and we felt that we should create a little summary before moving on. So, the next step was to grab a piece of paper and everybody, individually, took notes about the selected 2 Year Goal, Sprint Questions, target area on the map, and also the Lightning Demos and How Might We’s.

To add a bit of visual to our notes we moved to Doodling and then the Crazy 8s, which was our favorite exercise. We had to rapidly sketch 8 ideas in 8 minutes. Exciting, right? It was pretty interesting because this exercise is meant to explore ideas for our final solution, also called the Concept Sketch.

Sometimes, a pen and paper are all you need, so this is what we went for. Using a pen and boring piece of paper, each member of the team had to sketch their vision of how to solve the challenge. Now, of course, we didn’t expect them to be beautifully designed, the only request was to be self-explanatory so that each team member can easily understand the concept. Then, we moved them to Miro.

Day 3 — Selecting the Concept and creating the Storyboard

The last day with the Sprint team started with voting on the specific aspects each liked in the submitted concepts. Why was this important? It helped us create a heatmap of the most exciting areas. Then, each team member selected the concept that he felt best solved our challenge and answered our Sprint Questions, validating his choice to the team.

After understanding each opinion, MEDIjobs’ CEO, Catrinel, the decider in the workshop, expressed her own choice regarding the concept she wanted to move forward with and the reason behind that.

Once we had a clearer image in mind, we wanted to create a short user flow, just to highlight how a customer would interact with the proposed solution. Everyone in the Sprint team wrote down their version and then presented it. Similar to the Concept Sketch, we had a voting session, and then the decider selected the final version used in the Storyboard.

The last part of our day was spent creating the backbone of our prototype — the Storyboard. First, we laid out the selected flow on the board, and then we added parts of the concepts that matched the description. Just like making a puzzle.

Finally, we added all the needed elements at each step on post-its to have a complete picture for prototyping.

Day 4 — Creating the clickable prototype

Starting from the Storyboard and using all the insights gathered during the workshop, it was time to create a clickable prototype for the improved interview scheduling flow. We wanted to test this new solution with 5 of MEDIjobs’ customers. We used Figma to design the screens.

Day 5 — Testing the new solution with 5 MEDIjobs users

The last day of the Design Sprint workshop — and probably the most exciting one — was all about testing our solution with 5 of MEDIjobs’ customers.

For this to happen, we participated in the call to help with guidance, if needed, ask follow-up questions, observe and take notes in Miro, on our Wall of Truth.

Now, we at Durran, encourage our clients to get in contact with their users and lead the testing process, because this way, they’ll feel safe to do it all over again, later on, becoming a habit.

How do you think the users reacted to the proposed interview scheduling flow solution?

It’s straightforward. It is super ok.

It’s way better, more intuitive than what is right now.

On top of this positive feedback we received, we also learned how important it is to remove biases throughout the process.

Through the Expert Interviews and when testing the solution with real customers, we actually found out that these users would prefer to sync their calendars with the platform if that resulted in a better outcome.

Also, features we planned to add later, like a chat functionality to talk with the candidate or an option to schedule multiple interview stages with the same candidate, were well received by the customers we tested with.

I really like this option to add another interview. I don’t have to call you anymore.

We can even message each other — cool.

We loved seeing how much they appreciated MEDIjobs’ impact on their lives and business.

Without this platform, I don’t know how I could hire.

Not everything was perfect, obviously, but that’s also part of the process. After the user testing session, we had to do some minor tweaks, like updating some labels that were too confusing or working on the chat functionality, and prepare the designs for development.‍

“The project with Daniel started from our decision to fix one important flow from our platform — how candidates and medical practices manage to schedule interviews that take into account both sides availability. This needed to be fixed ASAP since it was the major point in our application where users were dropping off due to bad UX. The design sprint took 5 days and it was quite intense, but it was well worth it. The sprint forced us to move fast through evaluating the problem, finding solutions, prototype and test. Throughout the process, Daniel was extremely professional in both managing the exercises and facilitating the flow of the conversation. I’ve previously worked with Daniel on several design projects, so I knew the depth of his expertise, but this project had a major impact on our product roadmap and business overall. “ — Catrinel Hagivreta — CEO

Outcomes

• Alignment between the MEDIjobs team members about the target customers, challenges, solutions used, and next goals
• Generated 6 new concepts to solve our challenge and 1 clickable prototype
• Tested and validated the solution for scheduling interview candidates
• Idea bank for the team that they can refer back to

Feedback

At the end of each workshop, we ask for feedback from the teams we work with to improve. Even if there were new tools or some get a bit lost through the multitude of Miro boards, here are some of the thoughts we got from the MEDIjobs team:

I liked that we uncovered a lot of ideas and voted on the ones we considered the best.

I loved the way we worked together, with ideas coming from unlikely sources. Very intense and tiring in parts, but with good reason.

I really liked the wireframe exercise. I think this particular exercise helped everyone visualize better what needs to be done. Overall, the workshop was efficient.

Next Steps

Do you have questions or want to experience the power of a Durran Design Sprint for your own business? Send over an email, and let’s talk about it. We’re here to help meaningful startups live up to their potential and positively impact customers.

We also put together a PDF version of this case study that you can download straight away.