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.

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:

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

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

Design tradeoffs

There’s an inherent tension between candidate vulnerability and employer’s needs.

I had to balance an experience that makes justice-impacted individuals (sensitive population) feel comfortable sharing, while creating a response that is valuable to employers and will drive decisions.

Determining the right level of configurability to give employers while making sure the candidate experience is top of mind was a difficult balance. I worked to provide employer guidance in customizability about using human-friendly language and not asking too many questions to not overwhelm candidates.

Scalability

Ultimately, I found that 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

Design systems contributions

Atoms

Accordion

Molecules

Mobile step indicator

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:

Candidate story

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

Impact of Candidate Stories product

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.

Product vision

I designed a conversational AI chat experience to continuously prompt candidates to share specific context and determine that they've shared the information needed to drive a better adjudication decision. In 2024, a hack week team executed on the concept and won the Candidate Impact award 👑

Through AI, candidates can be empowered to share a meaningful and context rich story, strengthening their opportunity to be engaged. When candidates share relevant context, customers will start integrating Candidate Stories into their workflows and use these stories to change more decisions.

Tradeoffs & challenges in implementing AI

We are exploring building this solution once we can guarantee the conversational AI won’t hallucinate and fabricate candidates stories. The foundation of this product is building trust between employers and candidates, and we fear introducing AI at this time could erode that trust.