For a lean recruiting team to find the most entrepreneurial engineers in the US, only the slickest TA suite will do.  

Olsson Associates is in the business of civil engineering, both consulting and design, for multidisciplinary public and private infrastructure projects. What makes Olsson different is that it’s employee-owned, which means workers are more invested and the stakes are higher. So when Mandy Wehner, the company’s HR specialist, started shopping around for a new TA Suite, it didn’t take long to find, and ultimately choose, SmartRecruiters.

Thanks for chatting with us today, Mandy. Can you give us a brief history of the company?

Olsson Associates was founded in 1956 by John E Olsson, an East-coaster who decided to attend the University of Nebraska – Lincoln for engineering. Our headquarters are in Lincoln, and we have around 1,100 employees in eight states, and over 25 offices.

When did you join, and what attracted you to Olsson?

I became a part of the Olsson family in March 2015. What attracted me the most was how the organization fostered entrepreneurial thoughts, innovation, and encouraged employees to come to the table with new ways to solve problems. I love waking up every day knowing I get to make decisions, take ownership of my actions, and bring in new ideas to drive Olsson forward.

How did you find the hiring set-up when you arrived?

When I started at Olsson, the hiring was a bit different. In 2015, we had maybe 50 positions open at any given time. Since late 2016, we’ve had 90+ open positions to fill continually, and I don’t anticipate that slowing down at all. Our Human Resource team is starting to have some employees specialize in recruiting, so they’re really taking the lead in the ATS, knowing it inside-out and able to take the reins on the candidate experience.  

What were your biggest challenges, and victories, as you settled in and got things going?

Some of our challenges were being creative in trying to fill some challenging positions, creating talent pipelines, and building recruiting plans. Victories would include implementing a new ATS to help us become more efficient at our jobs, and more efficient with recruiting. We’ve been able to maintain better contact with candidates, and thus make their candidate experience enjoyable, with SmartRecruiters.    

How long was it before SmartRecruiters came into the picture?

We’d used a couple of ATS vendors before transitioning. We are still fairly new to SmartRecruiters, only having implemented the system in late September 2017.  

Was there a eureka moment that made the transition to SmartRecruiters a reality?

As we continued to grow, we realized we needed to upgrade our ATS to a system from which we could send emails, offer letters, and other documentation. Our old system just didn’t have that functionality. Our HR team is lean, and they were working too much outside the ATS, and it was taking too much time to complete tasks.

Did you know exactly what you needed to, or did SmartRecruiters come as one option of many?

We knew that we needed a new ATS, that was not a question. I had been doing a lot of research and SmartRecruiters actually was never on my list. It wasn’t until we were looking into onboarding systems (Clickboarding) that SmartRecruiters was mentioned, and when I looked into it, I was interested immediately.

What made you go with SmartRecruiters in the end?

Our HR group enjoyed the demo, because it was personalized for us. We felt the sales team really took the time to use our logo, and personalize the presentation to include our values, mission, etc. The functionality was top-notch compared to what we had before, and we felt SmartRecruiters would go the extra step to be a great vendor and to really work with us to get the most hiring success out of the ATS.

How long did it take to implement, and when was that?

We signed the contract to implement in July 2017, and we were up and running the end of that September. It was a very quick turnaround time for us, so we were really proud of the quick progress we made. The hardest part was getting our data out of our old ATS, but implementing SmartRecruiters was pretty painless.

Did you find any ways to make the software work for you that you hadn’t anticipated?

We have found that SmartRecruiters has new functions we didn’t initially anticipate using, ones around which we continually evaluate whether or not we should change our process. We especially like that SmartRecruiters has regular rollouts of updates – we didn’t have that with our old ATS so that is very promising.

What is the biggest thing SmartRecruiters has allowed you to do that you couldn’t before?

SmartRecruiters has allowed us to take a look at integrating our background check and drug-screen companies into the system. We’ve been able to save time and energy by completing tasks within SmartRecruiters that we couldn’t with our old ATS. We love the functionality of the system and look forward to continued improvements.

Now that you know what the GDPR will require of you legally, and, in principle, by design, we enlisted one of our own Smartian brainiacs to share what product designers are dealing with on the ground, and in practical terms. You’re welcome.

There are many takes on how to bring your company into GDPR compliance by May, but while your amazing product and legal professionals are busy interpreting the letter of the law, the next step is to work within those definitions to manifest the requirements into simple, clear UX for end users.

In SmartRecruiters’ case, we have several users to think about, and we needed to remove recruiting teams’ worries about “Am I being compliant?” while also being upfront with candidates about what we’re doing with their personal data.

So what is that sweet spot on how far to technically and legally push the design in end-users’ favor, without your site’s front-end looking like a multiple-choice questionnaire?

Keep asking questions

Once you have a list of GDPR requirements laid out, such as where in your product you require active consent, where you need to provide the opportunity to withdraw, etc, start the design process by asking yourself some questions:

• What exactly are you doing with visitor information/data?
• What can I do to make for a smooth user experience?
• How do I balance that smooth experience with my own technical and business needs?

Allow us to work in hyperbole to give you some examples. For instance, if you allow users to create profiles on your site:

This is Bad UX

We know you want to prevent users from deleting their profiles, but you shouldn’t put a long flow in a way that a user might feel disappointed, rushed, or any combination of less-than-positive emotions. Not only would friction alienate these users, this would also not fit the GDPR  requirement for “easy access”.

There is also Too-Literal UX

A big red button hits the requirements of “easy” and “clear,” but that kind of prominence obviously increases the likeliness of a click, which would come at a cost to you in higher numbers of deletes/withdraws.

Aim for Sweet-Spot UX

Human mental models dictate that scrolling down is often where the action is. Footers are normally where you find unsubscribes in emails, sitemaps on websites, and they also keep exit actions out of a users’ line of thought, while not making them inaccessible either. In this case, it would be appropriate to place any “manage” or “delete” actions in a footer. But if you have the time, you can always user test to make sure this holds true for your context.

Be Clear and Honest

Once you have the answers to the questions above, ultimately the key is to be clear about your intentions.

Think about why GDPR is there in the first place: to give the sense of control back to users. Build this into your user flows. If they no longer want their data associated with you, understand why instead of going on the defensive. Where would they intuitively go to withdraw their consent? Do they know exactly what that means? How can we make it clear what happens when they press the button, enacting their “right to be forgotten”?

Forming and answering these questions can be fun, and approaching any regulation design in this way transforms compliance into less of a begrudgingly implemented requirement, and more of a way to do your duty in making the internet a better place.

When the European Union’s new data privacy rules are implemented on May 25th, the way the web is regulated will change forever, and it’s not just a legal issue. After the lawyers, product designers are next in the compliance hot-seat.

You’re no dummy. You’ve known for a while now the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation becomes enforceable on May 25th. You know that whether based in Europe or not, if you do business with an EU company or have even one European citizen on your payroll, you’ve had to rejig how you store personal data, either compiled internally on your servers, or gathered from your company’s website, be it from customers, new-hire candidates, or employees. You’ve consulted your legal department and even retained outside counsel to assure that when the clock strikes midnight on May 24th – in GMT+1, of course – none of your company departments will be left hanging in the breeze.

So where do you start when compliance means working backwards?

And since you’ve got that sorted, the next step is to examine how GDPR compliance will affect your product design, because chances are you have a website, and we’ll lay down cash money it wasn’t designed with GDPR in mind. So where do you start when compliance means working backwards?

The keywords here are Explicit Consent, and there are a few steps you need to follow.

The first thing to consider is permission. While we’ve grown accustomed to Silicon Valley software asking to access our smartphone cameras, photos and address books – and for the most part, forking over this intellectual-property gold without a second thought – GDPR demands that for you, digital business master, when an individual uses your website, they are provided clear notice that their data is being gathered, and given the choice whether, or for how long, you can store their data – anything from an email or a phone number to more complex information you could feasibly sell to other parties. The keywords here are Explicit Consent, and there are a few steps you need to follow.

Request Permission

By now we are used to clicking away the cookies permission box like a fly at a picnic, so your first line of site adjustment can be as easy as altering your cookies pop-up to include a permissions box to store visitor/customer data. In GDPR terms, this is an active opt-in, and in addition to this, visitors must be informed, in the sense that if you’re redesigning your pop-ups, you must make it clear that personal information may be shared, for either commercial or analytical purposes, and provide a clear choice to opt-in, or not.

Unbundle Your Presentation

The presentation of these terms and conditions must also be unbundled, which means personal data information must be presented outside the usual terms and conditions you may already have in place, and the methods and third parties of how the information will be shared must be named. If a user consents to have their data shared and, say, in a few minutes, days, weeks or months changes their mind, it must be easy to withdraw from data sharing.

Create a Framework

If, by chance, you’re a new business building your website, you have the advantage of being able to take GDPR into account from the ground up, and you’ll be pleased to discover there’s been a privacy framework kicking around since the nineties, called Privacy by Design, though its true urgency is just starting to be appreciated.

If you’re found to be non-compliant after May 25th, fines can reach €20 million!

Even if you’re dabbing beads of relief off your brow because GDPR doesn’t specifically apply to you, if you’re found to be non-compliant after May 25th, fines can reach €20 million, or four percent of your yearly global gross, whichever is higher. Not fun. But security-wise, this is the way the web is going, and a bit of forward thinking now could save you several migraines later.

“If I can get a meaning across without speaking I will,” explains SmartRecruiters Lead Designer Jason Hegyessy.

As a UX/UI designer, Jason brings the Scandinavian philosophy of minimalism and functionality to the SmartRecruiters’ platform. He studied traditional illustration at the Academy of Art, spent a few years mastering the ways of the web via the freelance world, and most recently, worked for Apple.

“The designs that last are extremely simple,” says Hegyessy. “They say ‘no’ to the other things that people might say they need to include. They reduce everthing to the bare necessity.”

Everyday Hegyessy reads Daring Fireball, a tech and Mac news blog. The site design has not changed in 7 years. A testament to fact that the internet is not just fads. Remarakable ideas, content, and design can pass the longevity test. Hegyessy believes, “Good design is like a timeless suit; it never goes out of style.” Not to say that everything that can be done has already been done; a good new suit can always be designed. Hegyessy points to Microsoft’s new homepage (designed by Paravel Inc) as an example of where modern design is heading.

When asked about influences, Hegyessy says, “I don’t follow a specific person. Good design is everywhere.” Before conceding, “There is also bad design everywhere. Graphic design is about solving a problem. People often don’t know how to ask the right questions; that’s why there is so much bad design.”

For Hegyessy, everything in front of the user must have purpose.

“It’s what you leave out. Why did I use red? Give some people a pallet and they’ll use every color, but why? The truth of the matter is space structures the universe.”

Through his years, Jason has formalized a process. Hegyessy’s Design Rules:

1. Put everything that will be on the page – all the content – just put it in there.

2. Can anything be removed? Is it functional? What would make a task easier?

3. After much deliberation, delight the user. Create visually appealing design, but never at the expense of simplicity and functionality.

Throw it all in there. Strip it all down. And make it elegant. “I’m a man of few words,” says Hegyessy in a few words. For Hegyessy, it’s time to start up.

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