MACQUARIE BANK | melisportfolio

Macquarie Bank - Candidate Experience

Context

Macquarie Bank wanted to redesign their careers website to attract the "best talent" in the market.

What is the approach when introducing a human centred design strategy to a business which is highly traditional and focused on investors?

How to overcome the barriers with Human Resources Department when introducing a new candidate centred approach, content, new tools and technologies to shift their mindset and embrace change?

About this project and my role:

Macquarie Bank is one of the most prestigious Australian companies which makes it very attractive for candidates. My role in this project was to review and redesign a new the careers website to attract the best talent including graduate students and experienced hires.

As an Experience Designer, I had to think of the overall candidate experience and not only the website so I brought a holistic approach of a review of the candidate experience from the first contact to the first day in office extending to high level onboarding ideas.

The goal from Macquarie Bank's perspective was to attract the "best" candidate.

At the end of the 4 week research period, I reframed the problem and the goal became to "respond to the candidate's needs while making them understand the Macquarie difference".

I've started the project with analyzing my entire recruitment experience and prepared a research plan to conduct further candidate and employee interviews. I continued the research deeper by analyzing market trends, global human trends with a deeper look into three generations (Gen X, Y and Z), digital HR, the future of work and the new technologies in talent acquisition. To summarise the research, I prepared a document to present my findings and my design approach with the key stakeholders.

I ran this project with a design thinking methodology and gathered the team around insights and ideation workshops to generate ideas that we would use as design solutions. This was a great empathy exercise for the team and we explored together the opportunity to innovate and transform a stressful job search and recruitment process to an experience where candidates feel valued and understood.

As a result of these workshops, I've reframed the problem for the HR Team and made them understand of the current challenge with how Careers section was designed.

I prepared an internal presentation for the HR teams to explain the reason behind designing in phases and the importance of testing and iterating. I've prepared a design road map in 3 phases where we would build the foundations first, then test and iterate, and finally work on additional features such as chat bots, 360 interactive work videos, gamification possibilities for selective hiring, candidate assistance and so on. I have suggested additional recommendations around a new content strategy including social media, where we would start building our relationship with candidates. Within the new content strategy, I suggested a new blog area where we would communicate more transparently and add new data collection points which would also allow us to personalize the experience in the future for different candidate profiles.

Working directly with HR teams was particularly challenging. They had a clear ambition of what they wanted and wanted the execution of that. It was also challenging to make them accept the iterative approach as they wanted to have some features like chat bots as immediate goals and believed that it would solve the problems. I used my research findings as artefacts to explain the reason behind the phasing of the solution.

A big part of my role involved educating the team on the human centered design approach and at at the end I enjoyed seeing people getting more involved in co-design workshops.

The business mindset shifted from everything focused on Macquarie to everything about the candidates and the team got familiar with the design thinking methodology.

My design for the new Macquarie Careers was built and the new Content strategy was applied. Post hiring graduate survey revealed a positive feedback about the overall candidate experience.

My candidate experience review has created awareness within the business and Macquarie decided to engage with an external consultancy to implement new ways of working and to review also the employee experience.

I was asked to deliver similar work for the Personal Banking to review the Wealth Management Platform. I have done a current state assessment and identified opportunity areas.