Wehire

Background

After the release of our first App - Buzzpot, an unprecedentedly urge to create something original hit the Forehead team. It happened to be around Jan and many people chose to seek new opportunities for their career. We also needed new talent to strengthen the team by then. A very popular form of seeking talent by then is to post the JD on Wechat/Weibo(Chinese correspondent of Facebook/Twitter). We quickly came up with the idea of making an app for this specific process and named it - Wehire.

ROLE

Project Manager/Product Manager/Product Designer

TEAM

Front, Back-End Developer, UX Designer, UI Designer, Marketing Manager, Lead Developer

TIME FRAME

6 months

Challenges

From 0 to 1 with an original idea.
Budget Shortage with less than 6 months
Personnel Shortage(3 founder, 1 veteran, 4 new graduates).

Process

Brain Storm > Product Validation > Competitor Analysis > Product Design > UI design > Develop Iteration

Brain storm

The team had conducted several brain storm sessions in order to generate the best work flow for this process. Office walls were filled with stickers and drawings. The most important thing however, was to quickly extract and record the good ideas and turn them into prototypes the team can reference later.

User journey to share bounty on social media(Wechat in this mock up).

User journey to take the bounty by referencing another friend

Basamiq mock up were used to quickly draw out the user journey during&after brain storm session. After few iterations a minimum viable product was created. Pictures above have demonstrated the complete user journey of the core process.

product validation & competitor analysis

Before we moved on to further phrase of the development, market analysis was carried out to validate the potential risks and chances. It was a shocking discovery that head hunt agency would take an average of 30% of annual salary as payment. We believed the margin could get down to 5% by using our app.

2012 - 2014 revenue of top domestic internet hiring company

2013 - 2014 monthly user count for domestic hiring app

2013 - 2014 monthly user count for domestic hiring websites

2013 - 2014 revenue for domestic internet hiring market

Major competitors that has employed similar “bounty” system on the market, thou none of them has a systematic process from start to end. The closest one was suffering from varies UX&technical issues. This encouraged us to carried out the project into the next phrase.

product design

Complete wireframe with higher fidelity. I used them in the product feature specifications to help developer and designers to better understand/communicate with each other.

User B, friend of A saw the bounty and recommend C, friend of B. (Wehire installed)

User B, friend of A saw the bounty and recommend C, friend of B. (Wehire not installed)

Recommend a friend for a bounty on Wehire

UI design

Core user journey with graphic overhaul. This is also what Wehire looked like in the first release. We also held the Tesla Autumn hiring event on Wehire after V1.0 had published.

Recommend friends process with color markup

Visual guideline created by UI designer Yaojie

Develop Iteration

I used Trello to manage the project progress/iteration. Agile development process was adopted half way - through the development. The take out is I wish we had used it sooner.