Chegg Skills Vault

Chegg is an organization whose focus is on helping students succeed throughout school and into post-graduation life. Currently, there is a gap between qualified candidates and organizations looking to hire them. The recruiting and hiring process is long, tedious, exhausting, and often futile for both parties—candidate and organization. Chegg is looking to change that. With a large number of organizational partnerships and an even larger pool of potential candidates, Chegg is looking to bring the two together and match candidates with the open positions they best qualify for—increasing the chances of employment for both the candidate and organization looking to hire.

Problem

As an organization looking to grow, it is laborious and discouraging to sift through applications, conduct numerous interviews, and potentially hire someone only to realize that they don’t have the skill set you understood them to have. As a candidate, it is daunting and exhausting to make your case and demonstrate your capabilities to numerous companies who each have a unique process in place to evaluate a candidate’s skill set. Chegg is looking to lessen the burden on both sides of the hiring process and increase the likelihood of gainful employment. The challenge is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The world is full of countless companies that each need specific talent in order to succeed. Even two companies hiring for the same position may need varying levels of experience for a given skill. In addition, that same world is full of millions of people looking to fill those positions who are anxious about embarking on the journey to do that. Building a solution that brings these worlds together and lessens the burden and anxiety that come with them is obviously important, and obviously challenging.

Solution

In a nutshell: Chegg is looking to provide a credible, singular space for candidates to verify their skill set so that companies can easily see who qualifies for their positions and candidates only have to demonstrate their skills once. This seems simple when wrapped up with a pretty bow, but the process of getting this right is arduous. And we knew when starting this project that we wouldn’t get it right on the first try. User feedback is paramount, and we don’t want to chance missing the mark. So, the plan is to test and iterate until we get there. We started with a [Design Sprint]. A pair of designers immersed themselves in the problem space and began thinking through what the team agreed to be the biggest obstacle in accomplishing this—verifying a candidate’s skillset. There are a lot of moving pieces to be solved in this puzzle, but we recognized that one of the most difficult would be getting candidates to self-assess their skills. The hiring process is already stressful, as is taking a test, so why in the world would someone voluntarily add more stress to an already stressful situation? We brainstormed ways to make the skill verification process less stressful, identified tactics we wanted to avoid, and pressed onward. The interesting thing is that, even with Chegg’s abundant amount of data, this was new territory for everyone involved. We learned a lot each day and realized that communication was more important than ever. To keep everyone aligned, we had daily touchpoints with the Chegg team to work through decisions being made and questions that came up. After many ideas and discussions, we decided on a direction and began building out an interactive, in-browser prototype to be thoroughly tested. In the end, we finished this phase of the product life cycle with an initial prototype that will help to direct our approach moving forward. Next steps? Chegg is moving forward with user testing and research, and we’ll refine accordingly.