Recruiter Search Notes
Promoting collaboration and improving the daily workflow of a Bolster recruiter.
Contributors:
Martin Banuelos
Bolster started as a closed talent marketplace, helping CEOs find full-time or fractional executives. In 2021, Bolster pivoted to become a full-fledged executive recruiting company, and now has an internal team of recruiters who are the primary users of the platform.
Notetaking is a crucial part of the workflow for the highly collaborative recruiting team. While the existing UI allowed for notetaking in each search, the input was small, limited to plain text, and notes were tedious to access.
As a result, members of the recruiting team primarily kept their notes off-platform, leading to miscommunication and confusion about candidates and search status. The team wanted an in-platform solution; a single source of truth that would allow collaboration without adding complexity.
Because Bolster’s recruiting platform is used internally, the research and discovery process allowed us to directly ask recruiters what was working and what needed to be improved. Based on our discussions, we summarized the needs into two buckets. The recruiters needed:
When wireframing, I thought through how a recruiter would want to see and use their own notes. The previous two-column layout, where the notes and the input were separated, left a lot to be desired, and it was difficult to read through a long list of notes.I explored a messaging-style layout, but again, the usable space was crowded and the hierarchy was way off. I moved on to other options.
Prioritizing the readability of the completed notes, I designed a UI that reorganized the hierarchy of the viewable notes and the input, while also adding a sticky section for any additional documents the recruiting team might want to add.
This solution offered the best of both worlds: a larger, almost document-like typing space to easily take and view notes, and a place to store documents where they would be readily available. It had the additional benefit of offering control over client visibility.
During the discovery period, we found that most of Bolster’s recruiters type in a bulleted format since they are often taking notes mid-conversation. The new, much larger input, expands to fill the available height. It makes it much easier for users to read the notes and limits the need to scroll in order to reference previous points.
Keeping the input collapsed until it’s needed allows for the maximum amount of room to review notes, regardless of the user’s vertical screen real estate.
The section for pinned items is designed to be sticky and scroll with the page. Keeping the input at the top prevents users from losing the “add” button amongst a long list of documents and links. The design uses a dropdown rather than an inline implementation, which kept the development cycle fairly simple.
The recruiting team was extremely happy with the updated notetaking UI. The new design made it easier for them to take, keep track of, and share important notes. The changes saved time and simplified collaboration for the team.
