State of California - COAST Hiring Platform
The state of California had a problem - they needed to hire over 7,000 correctional officers within two years, but their current processes and tech needed to be better. They were still working with paper folders for candidates; their software was built decades ago and was little more than a front-end for an access database, and they've failed 5 previous times to replace said software.
With five separate business units that handled different phases of hiring (testing/assessment, background investigations, medical, mental, and certification) and a hiring cycle that can take upwards of two years, we had an enormous scope with only a single designer and 5 engineers. And we only had a year to wrap up the entire application.
The Problem
Each business unit had an entirely different mandate and set of applicant information that they needed access to. However, they still needed to be able to cross-communicate and share information.
Developing a candidate profile interface was straightforward enough, but navigating individual profiles with almost a thousand fields would slow down users significantly and introduce unforced errors - the easier it is to be in the wrong place, the more damage you can do.
The Design
Enter the concept of a Task View - a view dedicated to a specific task or workflow that contains all the relevant information to make decisions or process candidates, along with inline interactions that allow actions without navigating to the candidate's profile.
The smart design of task-oriented views can supercharge processes - it allows users to prioritize work, track their performance, and enter a state of ‘flow’ that can’t be achieved with stilted manual tracking or out-of-date reporting.
The medical team needed to quickly glance at what records had been requested, and what records had been received. In this view, they could understand the state of a candidate’s medical records just by glancing.
Iconography & Color for increased responsiveness
We relied on iconography to do the heavy lifting regarding a given candidate's state, keeping information density high and making large tables scannable. To ensure that iconography had high learnability, we paired icons with their label verbiage in other places in the app, and tooltips were applied to all of our icons with the appropriate label and (sometimes) additional information.
Smart Filtering
Our user bases needed to be able to work on candidates assigned to them, but also required to work on candidates for other users who are out of office or for different regions entirely.
The most used filters were placed above the task views, making them easy to apply and reset. More advanced filters were kept in the table headers to maintain their importance and repetition, as well as the high-use ones.
Exposing high-use filters at the top of a task view relieved users of needing to constantly click on the tiny filter icons in the table header and the additional clicks that come with it.
The testing team was able to bulk reschedule and enter course times all in one task view.
Actionable Tables
We made sure that the primary purpose of a task view was clear, and we removed as many opportunities for unforced errors as possible. This meant keeping the actions available in a task view fairly specific - in a physical fitness exam task view; I can modify a candidate's schedule, enter the course time, or add notes. Anything more than that, and I could quickly go into the candidate's profile.
Pragmatic Automation
With little time to evaluate user efficiency or discover bottlenecks in their process, we knew we would need to augment manual processes with automation. But with automation, it's easy to overtune and automate your way into a series of problems that must be unwound.
We focused on high-repetition processes with straightforward decision criteria and a low-risk profile to automate. We launched automation jobs for exam scoring, scheduling events (physical fitness, in-person evaluations, fingerprinting, etc), and more, freeing our users to focus on the more complex challenges.
Event Management for Physical Fitness Testing (PFT) done smartly meant that we could automate 95% of candidate scheduling, completely eliminating a task from the testing teams workload.
The Result
The State of California launched an MVP of COAST within 4 months, and a complete end-to-end application rollout within a year. Their backlog of candidates has already been processed, they're handling physical fitness exams with 1,000+ candidates a month, and they're now looking to a future they never thought possible.
COAST won a “Best of California Award in Innovation” at the California Innovation Summit, summer 2024.
