Candidate Stories

Historically, background checks condense the history and context of someone’s life into a single label. One-third of Americans have a criminal record and are consistently denied jobs because of their background check. 

I built and led a cross-functional team to help adjudicators (background check decision-makers) see the human behind the check. I designed a flow, Candidate Stories, that lets candidates (job-seekers) provide context and evidence of rehabilitation directly on their background check. 

I pushed forward this idea and built Candidate Stories outside of our regular product roadmap, constructing the team and acting as both the lead product designer and lead product manager.

Since its launch:

• 744k candidate stories have been shared with employers

• Estimated 173k candidates have been hired because of their story. 

I shared Candidate Stories to the California Civil Rights Department in 2023, to demonstrate how background checks can be a tool for inclusion, not exclusion.

With personas to ground our conversation, I assembled a diverse team of candidate experience representatives, designers, product managers, engineers, and justice-impacted individuals, to voice differing opinions and approach how we can build better solutions from their unique perspectives.

Through the structured design sprint, we thought of creating a form for a candidate to contextualize their background check results and provide positive information about themselves that an employer could easily review.

Strategic reframing

The social impact and mission angle will always be hard to resource against top business-competing priorities. I repositioned this as a three-sided business problem:

Turning a customer request into strategic leverage

I looked for strategic leverage. A key enterprise customer requested secure document upload. Rather than shipping it as a narrow feature, I reframed it as infrastructure for candidate storytelling. This allowed us to advance a mission-driven initiative under the umbrella of a revenue-aligned NPI (new product input).

Building the team

Once I reframed the initiative, I was given the green light to move forward, as long as I could find the resources.

Since I wasn't going through the official roadmap process, I had to build the team through influence. I partnered with a CX manager who was closest to candidate support so we could stay grounded in real problems. I also brought in an engineer who really believed in the impact. He worked with his manager to dedicate himself full-time to the project.

The three of us moved quickly to launch Candidate Stories.

Early design explorations decisions and tradeoffs

How might we leverage the customer request to design a solution that’s more holistic and candidate-cenric?

To create momentum and visualize our idea, I designed quick wireframes and started circulating with the team. I started with lo-fidelity whiteboard wireframing and then started to refine in Whimsical.

I explored three approaches:

Exploration I: Structured questionnaire

Exploration II: Video stories

Exploration III: Freeform text with one question per step

Concept testing

I concept tested with 7 key employers and found:

1. Structured questionnaire ❌

   • Hesitation over higher candidate drop-off with too many questions

   • Could work if employers can customize their own questions

2. Video stories ❌

   • While videos can be more personal, they’re more time-consuming to review and can introduce additional biases

3. Free-form text ✅

   • Allows candidates to fully express themselves and share what they find relevant

Concept testing & validation

I was focused on the candidate experience in my preliminary designs, but concept testing quickly revealed that for this to be an impactful feature, there needs to be a robust workflow for employers.

Key feedback: “I need a better workflow to see what stories have been shared and be able to indicate which ones I’ve reviewed”

Design decision: Created a saved view around Candidate Stories and a way to easily indicate stories that have been read

Design constraints

Working with legal

I partnered closely with our legal and compliance to design Candidate Stories.

• Legal feedback: “It needs to be clear that candidate stories is supplementary information and not part of the consumer report”

• Design decision: Make it visually distinctive from the other the other screenings

Technical constraints

With limited engineering resources, I had to be strategic about scope. I designed for a true MVP with the plan to prioritize iterations once we go live and demonstrate the value.

Holistic journey map

Based on customer feedback, I created a journey map to show where Candidate Stories fits in the end-to-end background check experience for both employers and candidates.

Solution

Candidate

Criminal records can be challenging to interpret, and context around the same charge can be different between individuals. Candidate Stories gives candidates the opportunity to speak about their conviction and how they’ve grown since. Since many candidates complete their background checks on their phones, I wanted to design a mobile-optimized experience.

Customer

The story appears directly on the background check in-context with where decisions are made.

Product demo

I developed the value proposition, demoed the prototype, and onboarded our key strategic customers.

Many people reviewing background checks need top-down guidance from their company to use Candidate Stories in their decision-making process. I worked with our legal team to create a Candidate Stories Guide to give to the leadership of each company to create their top-down policies.

Here’s my walkthrough of the solution:

Design systems contributions

Impact

Here’s an example of a real candidate story that was shared

We, as people, are afraid of what we are less familiar with. When you actually hear someone’s story that makes a huge difference in their perceived risk. I’m happy to share that the candidate above was hired because of their story. They are not the only one:

This product is a huge mission win and delights employers. One of Checkr’s customers said:

I’ve had the opportunity to represent Checkr’s mission to the California Civil Rights Department. In 2023, I demoed how Checkr’s product sets the standard for fair chance in the industry. Checkr is working to make background checks a tool for inclusion–not exclusion.

Sustained impact requires iteration

Every day, ~780 candidates share a candidate story. 
However, only 20% of those candidates are engaged.

To understand this discrepancy, I aggregated feedback from 40+ customers through my customer discovery, documented NPIs (new product introductions), and recorded calls via Chorus that mentioned candidate stories.

I found Candidate Stories feel noisy to employers and they're not sharing the right information to drive decisions.

Give customers more control

Employers need more customizability and configurability. As a result, I designed and our team built allowing employers to select what charges matter and write their own questions to get the most impactful stories from candidates.

Select charges

Customize questions

Scaled impact since making these changes

We launched Candidate Stories as a 0 to 1 MVP. It was successful and widely adopted. Five years later, we revisited it, dug into the data, and redesigned it to scale. To me, great products are not static. They evolve as the problem evolves. The role of a Staff designer is not just to launch, but to steward and scale impact over time.