Candidate Stories
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, or background check decision-makers, see the human behind the check. I designed a flow, Candidate Stories, that lets candidates, or 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.
Checkr Company Kickoff
Presenting Candidate Stories to a 2,000 person audience
CA Civil Rights Department
I shared Candidate Stories to the California Civil Rights Department to demonstrate how background checks can be a tool for inclusion, not exclusion.
Design Sprint
I built and led a cross-functional team to help background check decision-makers see the human behind the check
About Checkr
Checkr is a background check company disrupting a dormant industry. Checkr understands how difficult it is for individuals with conviction histories to find employment and strives to help provide fair chances for the formerly convicted.
Taking initiative: how Candidate Stories started
This project began with a question:
How can a background check company reduce bias and expand opportunities for people with records?
Making our product more mission-oriented wasn't on our roadmap. I had two choices: wait for it to be prioritized, or build the case myself.
I chose to lead.
Here's how I turned a question into a shipped product:
Built the business case. I quantified the opportunity: 7% of total emails and 10% of phone calls were from candidates asking if they can share evidence of rehabilitation.
Organized stakeholder discovery. I conducted interviews with:
Candidate experience team: understand candidates’ frustrations
Customer success managers: understand customers goals and needs
Support: understand inquiries and how we can mitigate them through the product
Facilitated design sprint. I brought together Product, Engineering, Research, and Go-to-Market teams to ideate solutions. I came prepared with research insights and design stimuli to make the session productive.
Created design vision. I reimagined candidate mitigation experience, which became the foundation for building team alignment and securing resources.
Secured engineering resources. I presented the business case and design vision to leadership, successfully arguing that this should be pulled into our roadmap. I negotiated for 2 engineers to join the project.
Led execution. Once resourced, I led the team through research, design, development, and launch—driving decisions at each phase.
Presented and shared how we built Candidate Stories to an audience of 2,000 people, and to the CA Civil Rights Department.
This is how Staff designers operate: we don't just design what's handed to us. We identify opportunities, build the case, and make them happen.
Problem
Candidates
Individuals with criminal records, including the 650,000 people released from prison each year, face significant challenges when applying for work. Without a steady job, citizens reentering society are nearly twice as likely to recidivate, or return to prison, than those who do find work.
Many people with criminal records seek opportunities in the gig economy, where companies rely exclusively on background checks to determine if a candidate qualifies for a position without ever meeting them. The vast majority are denied jobs because of their background check.
Employers
Employers xperience the effects of the labor shortage who struggle to find enough candidates to meet their hiring needs
Checkr
Checkr had a costly candidate support problem of people reaching out to share their stories
There was no reliable way for candidates, or job-seekers, to share information about themselves or their records with potential employers. Whether it’s contacting the employer through phone, text, or email, the story rarely made its way into the background check decision.
Candidates trying to share context or provide evidence of rehabilitation was the third most common reason that people contact Checkr’s Candidate Experience team (a costly problem for Checkr). All the team could do was empathize, point them to the employer, and wish them luck. Their story rarely made its way into the background check decision.
Personas
To humanize the problem space, I worked with our UX researcher to build candidate personas. The focus was to create empathetic personas to remind our staff that our work affects real people. I wanted our personas to help us continue our mission to create the most humanizing background check process possible. Specifically, we wanted to build a fairness feature with Samuel in mind.
Design sprint to brainstorm ideas
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.
Early design decisions and tradeoffs
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 and concept tested with 7 key employers:
Structured questionnaire ❌
Hesitation over higher candidate drop-off with too many questions
Could work if employers can customize their own questions
Video stories ❌
While videos can be more personal, they’re more time-consuming to review and can introduce additional biases
Free-form text ✅
Allows candidates to fully express themselves and share what they find relevant
Design advocacy & leadership
Candidate Stories was hard to prioritize on the roadmap with competing demands from key customers and revenue-generating initiatives. This required me to be strategic about our scope, making sure we’re streamlining a real MVP that still delivers value for both our candidates and employers. To jumpstart this initiative, I brought together a CX manager close to the problem to influence my designs and an engineer who could build it.
Our tiger team of 3 launched Candidate Stories. Candidate Stories gives the best experience for candidates, and unlocks a new talent pool for employers. I advocated for us to turn Candidate Stories on for all employers and make it available to all candidates by default to maximize fairness.
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: “Candidate stories needs to be visually different from the consumer report so that it’s clear to the adjudicators that it’s supplementary information”
Design decision: Use modal treatment instead of in-line designs
Technical constraints
Working with a tiger team outside of the regular roadmap, meant I had to cut scope to the bare minimum viable product and then build momentum to prioritize iterations once we go live and demonstrate the value.
Solution
Candidate
Criminal records can be challenging to interpret, and circumstances surrounding the same charge can be very different between individuals. Candidate Stories gives candidates the opportunity to speak to the context surrounding their conviction and how they’ve grown since. Since many of candidates complete their background checks on their phone, I wanted to design a mobile-optimized experience.
Customer
The story appears directly on the background check in-context with where decisions are made.
Systems thinking
I created a journey map to show where Candidate Stories fits in the end-to-end background check experience for both employers and candidates.
Research insights 💡
I led both qualitative and quantitative research studies on Candidate Stories.
Candidate
Through quantitive Amplitude tracking, I found candidates were dropping off before submitting. To supplement, I did qualitative testing through UserTesting.com with 16 candidates to understand what’s going on. I found that 30% of candidates with records feel anxious about what to share.
Customer
Every day, approximately 777 candidates use Candidate Stories to tell their side of the story. However, only 21% 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:
Currently candidates often do not share enough details, which makes Candidate Stories feel noisy to employers
“Candidate stories are often incomplete and are not talking about their charges or giving the specific examples we need to make a decision.” ~Pilot
“My issue with candidate stories in general is typically the candidate doesn't provide us with the information that we need” ~Aramark
Employers have not integrated Candidate Stories into their workflow because they’re reading so many stories that lack the information they need to change their decisions