Contextual inquiry - Handshake employer users
Introduction
Handshake had been struggling to see adoption of their paid offering, for small and mid-sized businesses, at the pace they needed to become a profitable business. The vast majority of their employer users were not paying for the company but receiving value that had them returning each recruiting season. This research was aimed at observing small and mid-sized employers use our product and gain understanding about what they found valuable with the expectation that Handshake would then be able to identify needs that were worthy of charging a fee, and potentially discovering unmet needs that could be monetized when a solution is developed.
My role
I acted as the sole researcher for this project, collaborating with the Program Director and two of his Program Managers, to identify potential paths to direct the line of questioning following their demonstration of using the product. Ultimately leading to share out insights as quickly as possible from this specific employer user subset.
Method
Contextual inquiry – An ethnographic field study qualitative technique used to study someone in their natural environment. Typically involving watching and talking with someone while they perform a task to understand thoughts and motivations in the moment.
In this project we observed employer users performing their regular hiring activities on Handshake while I asked questions around motivation and intent.
Participants
8 employer users from a variety of small and medium companies of various industries recruited through a Qualtrics screener and then selected for diversity in size, industry, and product tier (someone were free users, others were already part of the paid product).
Results
Interviews were conducted and recorded on Zoom for later transcription via Reduct.video. Notes were taken and highlights were pulled out to be immediately shared with stakeholders via a team Slack channel, of 75 employees, dedicated to employer growth and development. Then a summary was written up and shared at the end of each day. which consisted of 3 interviews. The summary included sections:
- Basic demographics – Employer size, recruiting need, industry
- Jobs-to-be-done – What they are trying to accomplish on the platform
- Notable quotes – A selection of 3-5 powerful quotes from the user.
- Challenges – Problems and bugs they run into along the way
- Highlights – Platform specific wins for Handshake
Following the final interview, all of the contextual inquiries were wrapped up into a larger “employer knowledge” document with the results of previous employer research efforts to make a repository of evolving user knowledge.
Restrospect
This project was launched incredibly quickly by request from the Director of Employer Growth between Thanksgiving and Christmas after a difficult conversation with leadership where he was unable to explain the reasoning behind decisions on the product. He came to me and his PMs asking for greater understanding of employer users of small and medium size.
With that in mind, it was actually quite a successful research project that led to great conversation and new solutions. Including the desire to conduct similar projects on a quarterly basis to remain connected to employer users. There isn’t a lot here that I would do differently if asked to conduct the study again, however I wasn’t happy with the engagement I was receiving on the interview summaries atter the first 2 participants and restructured them into something more digestible mid-way through the project that saw a lot more engagement, including multiple exclamations from the Chief Product Officer.
I think contextual inquiry may have joined my stable of frequent methods following the success I saw here.