🧘♀️ BETA: Supercharged Application Inbox
Project: 🧘🏻♀️ Application Management Type:🚀 Feature User: 🏢 Company
Key changes
- Response Rate 100%: New interactions, celebration and recognition for responding to all applications.
- Organised, and clean inbox: Tabbed views, more sorting options.
- Usability enhancements: Position dropdown enhancements, preview candidate location
Why?
When we launched cord, tech talent was in such high demand, tech hiring was all about sourcing. Fast forward to today, the landscape has changed, with a 40% spike in job applications in the last 12 months. Reduced Hiring Teams are now overwhelmed by volume, and candidate experience suffers as a result.
As the market has changed, so too has our product focus. In the past 3 months, we’ve been obsessing over building the best-in-class product to receive applications. Starting with the challenge of supporting busy Talent Managers in dealing with such high volume- at speed.
The first major release brings you a new inbox and a new workflow… purpose-built for managing a high volume of applications in seconds. It’s now more intuitive and faster than ever for a Talent Manager to review and respond to every application on cord.
Your hard work will get recognised too. Talent Managers with a 100% response rate will get instantly promoted up our real-time leaderboard of companies using cord.
What?
What?
1. Response Rate 100%
Responding to every application just got easier, and you get celebrated for doing so.
- A new workflow means you move instantly to the next application after responding to the first. Responding now feels fast and pleasurable.
- Celebratory visualisations give you instant recognition for responding to all applications. Reaching application bliss never felt so good.
- Instant updates to the cord Leaderboards give your company recognition in front of peers and candidates. You will look as good as you feel.
2. Clean Inbox Management
Clean, simple and effective.
- A new tabbed layout sorts your inbox into Requests, Conversations and Declined. It’s now easier than ever to manage your pipeline.
- New sorting options; Newest, Best-fit & Unread enable you to find what you’re looking for instantly
3. Usability enhancements
Details matter. Smaller updates will make managing applications easier too:
- Improved position selection means your positions are prioritised and paused positions are now sorted beneath your active positions.
- You can now see the candidate's location in the message preview so you know where the applicant is based before viewing the entire profile.
How?
These changes began nearly 3 months ago with interviews with over 20 of our current companies’ users run by Anna (PO). Thanks to every user who took part, it helped us to deeper understand the challenges companies were facing in new market conditions.
One thing that really stood out was how much the people hiring on cord cared about candidate experience. They wanted to respond to every application, but have a tough job doing so. It became clear to us we wanted to not just make this easier for our users but to give them the recognition they deserve for doing it.
Read the other key opportunities identified here
What are our key opportunities?
📥 Streamlining communication and inbox management:
- More template options for streamlined communication, ie beyond accept/reject templates.
- Ability to order inbound messages based on the best fit or alignment with criteria.
- Checkboxes or filters to exclude applications that clearly don't match specific requirements (e.g., work eligibility).
- Improving the organisation of templates to navigate them more easily.
📭 Enhanced organisation and workflow:
- Introduce features that encourage and motivate the user to get to inbox 0
- Space to leave visible notes for the team and the ability to tag team members for better collaboration. [probably more of a nice to have]
- Reminders or notifications to alert team members about specific candidates or required actions. [could introduce in-app alerts]
- Create a holding state that users can put the candidates in, which also lets the candidate know that they are being considered or reviewed.
💻 Improved interface and dashboard:
- Dashboard that organises messages and applications by role and gives overview of activity
- Status indicator on cord to track candidates' progress through the process [or ideally, bi-directional ATS tracking!]
- Enhance the inbox by decluttering, including the ability to mark items as unread and expand the incoming requests section so it is easier to navigate.
- Automatically archive rejected conversations.
👩🏼🔬 Enhanced Candidate Information and Filtering:
- Provide more detailed information on candidates' citizenship and right to work status.
- Stronger discouragement for candidates who do not match location or visa requirements from applying.
- Implement checkboxes or filters to exclude applications that clearly don't meet specific requirements.
- Make matching criteria move obvious (either through highlighting or with AI) to help users quickly identify candidates who would be a good fit.
We realised quickly that our current inbox wasn’t fit for purpose, both from a UX and a technical perspective. We decided the most impactful place to start would be improving the organisation and workflow of applications on cord. Designs were completed flawlessly by Katerina (Head of UX/UI), user testing ran by Anna (PO).
Andres (FE Lead) and Vinu (FE) picked up the build. It would be the biggest single change to cord’s product in a few years, and it required a total refactoring of the message inbox. It was no small job, but with the thoughtful stewardship & talent of Andres and the relentless speed of Vinu we got there: A purpose-built new inbox for our users, built on new code to speed up future changes. Now, we release it to BETA users who opt-in and give ourselves time to collect feedback before we move it to the default option for all users. Turn it on here.
What’s next?
Improving the experience of receiving applications has only just begun. So far we’ve released Application Blocking and the Supercharged Application Inbox BETA. Our next releases will help you better manage your pipeline, respond faster and surface quality.
- Position Management view: A central place to manage and visualise the pipeline of your positions on cord
- Mark as Read/Unread: Keep on top of your ongoing conversations by marking as read/unread
- Profile/Position match score: Data-led breakdown of candidate’s matching criteria, based on their logistical, experience and interest fit
- AI Decline messages: Instantly generate detailed feedback to applications you decline.