Challenge
To start modernizing the People Domain, Plus HQ asked Product League to come up with a custom solution for hiring and onboarding new employees. The largest user group for this solution was going to be the (franchise) store managers. They are in charge of hiring and managing their own store employees, and some stores still make use of paper application forms. Next to that, the new solution also had to serve the hiring needs of P&O working for the HQ and the DC’s. Our challenge was to streamline the hiring and onboarding process of new employees while creating an easy workflow for the store managers to hire their own personnel, without additional support from HQ.
A Product Owner and UX Designer from Product League kickstarted the analysis of this challenge by first focussing on the needs of the stores. After researching the needs and problems of the store managers, they went back to the drawing table to determine a new workflow. They designed a solution for a custom vacancy application in which the MVP version would first go live for the stores. In a second phase, the features would be scaled to make the application suitable for the work of P&O.
Solution
The solution resulted in a custom ‘Vacancy Management System’ (VMS) which is responsive for Mobile and iPad. This is a back-office application for the store managers and P&O recruiters to easily publish vacancies, manage responses and invite candidates. Vacancies that are created in VMS are published on a new front-end career website for Plus which was also developed by our scrum team. The application process has been redesigned to make it easier for talent to apply and submit their interest. The MVP version of VMS and the career website went live within three months in 2019 followed by a roll-out plan for all the stores. In the second phase, more features were added to make the total solution suitable for P&O as well.