Designing for Recruitment and Retention
Tags: UX Research, Content Strategy
Timeline: January 2020 — May 2020
Background
How do we market ourselves, products, and services to our respective audiences? How do we recruit people to our causes and retain their interest? These two questions were at the forefront of a project to develop recruitment and retention initiatives for the Department of Rhetoric and Professional Writing at Saginaw Valley State University.
In winter of 2020, I led a team developing recruitment and retention initiatives for Saginaw Valley State University’s Department of Rhetoric and Professional Writing. The Department of Rhetoric and Professional Writing serves over 50 students across four different programs. As a small department, their goal was to increase their recruitment and retention rates and improve the department’s visibility at the university.
Role
To develop recruitment and retention initiatives, I managed an eight-person team as we engaged in user experience research and design methods.
Process
Risk Assessment
My team began with a brief risk assessment. We discussed our strengths and weaknesses, how we best learned, what skills were unique, and the team roles we liked to fulfill. This pre-established framework set expectations and boundaries moving forward.
Mapping Strategies
We used stakeholder and empathy mapping strategies to focus on the goals and needs of both our client and our client’s audience. We began with stakeholder mapping, identifying project stakeholders to be current and prospective students, high school counselors, university admissions and advising staff, and the client. We considered each stakeholder group’s goals, needs, expectations, and resources. The client’s goals were to improve the recruitment and retention of their students. The department needed effective solutions and each faculty member had a different investment level in the process. The client’s resources were knowledge, time, money, and support, each with varying levels of access.
Building on our stakeholder maps, we created empathy maps that identified each stakeholder’s thoughts and feelings toward recruitment and retention. This located potential pain points. For example, from our stakeholder maps, we noticed that our client may not have a lot of time to invest in enacting elaborate recruitment and retention solutions, which could feel frustrating and draining. From this, we deduced solutions should be accessible and sustainable.
Persona Development
Our mapping strategies laid the groundwork for persona development. The personas focused on our stakeholder mapping groups: high school students, high school counselors, SVSU Admissions and Advising staff, and transfer students. Each persona detailed a stakeholder group’s strengths, weaknesses, connections, influencers, fears, solutions, goals, needs, expectations, subject matter expertise, and technological skills. The image below highlights the SVSU Admissions staff member. The personas provided improved understanding of stakeholder knowledge and gave a foundation for building solutions.
Affinity Mapping
We created an affinity map to coalesce our findings and identify themes. We placed research findings onto sticky notes and organized them by commonality. This highlighted the connections between stakeholders and solutions.
The below image highlights categories like classes, communications, online resources, physical resources, and transfer students, each listed with their associated needs, expectations, and potential recruitment solutions.
Challenges
No project is without its challenges. Midway through developing recruitment and retention initiatives, our physical workplace shut down due to the pandemic. My team quickly detailed a backup plan and we moved our communications to Discord, where we shared progress updates as we went through design sprints.
Recruitment and Retention Recommendations
As we developed research-based recommendations, I led my team through a series of design sprints. Each sprint focused on one recommendation and the systemic structures that would support it. My team’s primary recommendations fell into three categories: student engagement opportunities, social media presence, and sharing recruitment resources.
Outcome
We presented our findings to the Department of Rhetoric and Professional Writing. Our recommendations were implemented across the program, supporting and recruiting students to one major and three minors.
This project was foundational in my project management philosophy. It taught me the value of open communication and trust as vital components to the success of the project’s success. It also taught me how to delegate tasks and support my team members when they needed it.