Project Overview
Template Builder was a project done as part of my work at Xref to provide a free, best-practice, tailored questionnaire template in minutes for HR professionals to collect references.
Information provided here is limited due to a non-disclosure agreement.
Opportunity
When collecting references from a potential candidate, Human Resources (HR) pros and recruiters need to ask questions about that candidate. Asking the right questions is not an easy job and people might invest a considerable amount of time finding and improving a good set of questions to ask. All too often, they rely on a standard reference template that they use across the board, for every hire, at every level, in every country, at every office.
While consistency is important for references taken on candidates for the same role, a lack of template tailoring means the reference process delivers less of the insights that make for a truly informed hiring decision.
Xref collected thousands of reference checks over the past few years and gathered data for every question answered. Hence, we could analyze what works and what doesn't.
Solution
With the goal of helping HR professionals collect better references in less time without asking inappropriate questions, our team at Xref collected and consolidated the most effective questions used in the platform over the years.
Using this pool of questions, we've developed Template Builder where you can create a best-practice, tailored template in minutes and it’s completely free to use. This solution allowed us to give something of value to the community while also advertising Xref.
Process
Initially, based on the data collected at Xref and the interactions we had with clients when setting up their reference questionnaires, we noticed there was an opportunity to guide clients to ask better questions.
Following somewhat of a Design Thinking process, we conceptualized various solutions among our team. We then defined what goals we were trying to achieve with a solution (e.g. improve reference quality; reduce support to setup questionnaires) and validated the ideas against these goals.
Once we defined the idea that would possibly achieve the goals, I started the prototyping phase. I've used Sketch and InVision to create the prototype and went through a few iterations running usability tests with Xref's Customer Success team as well as random users. After a few iterations and when the product seemed ready from a concept perspective, we've started developing it.
