CASE STUDY

Assessment System
for the Freelance Design Community

THE CHALLENGE

Build a process and provide guidelines which help the design branch of expertlead freelance community to assess and evaluate new applicants.

COMPANY
Expertlead
TEAM
3 members
ROLE
Facilitator and Design Hiring Expert
TIME
6 months

THE PROCESS

For conducting the 6-month initiative, I have organised a cross-functional team of Expertlead product manager, community manager and freelance designers and led them through all activities to the successful results.

Discovered and analysed

— The types of designers presented in the freelance community and their skills;
— The connections between designers roles and skills;
— Market demand for freelance designers roles;
— Community assessment experience.

The common responsibilities of a Product Designer are based on our research and my own experience.

Defined

— The structure of the design branch which includes roles, responsibilities, skills and their relations;
— The 90 min assessment process for each role: live designing assessment session, Q&A session, scoring and report creation.

The questions types help keeping quality of the content and source it faster.

Designed

— Zoom Widget for scoring candidates during the interview;
— The UX/UI designer assessment report: categories, subcategories and topics;
— Question model and acceptance criteria;
— Task model and acceptance criteria;
— The process of crowdsourcing and evaluating questions and tasks through the community.

The database of live tasks and possible solutions.
The database of questions and answers.

Verified

— By several real interviews with new applicants;
— By several real interviews with new applicants.

Interviewers use special widget for assessing candidates.
After all tunings and fixes, we have started the recruitment and onboarding interviewers.

THE OUTCOME

— Prototypes for Zoom Widget and Report;
— 3-5 questions for each topic;
— UX/UI designer assessment task for each role;
— Documentation and guidelines for the community managers and interviewers.

The report is generating after each assessment interview.

IMPACT

The new assessment process decreased the time and effort spent by community managers on freelance designers evaluation. It also has significantly increased the quality of freelance designers being hired. Now with the support of community managers, freelance designers from the community can become interviewers for new applicants.