Citi employs over 200,000 people across the globe and is continually seeking top talent in every region. Building a robust team of talent to stay ahead of competition requires investing in recruiting efforts at each level of employment, including students and recent graduates. In order to remain competitive in attracting the best talent, Citi utilizes a variety of channels with an ever-increasing focus on digital. The human resources team asked us to explore the merits of its Citi on Campus app in regards to connecting with talent, converting students, and matching applicants with the best-suited roles.
Even though Citi on Campus launched 3 years ago, the majority of applicants are still applying through the careers website. Given the small dataset of Citi on Campus applications, there is not sufficient evidence that it has connected applicants to better fitting jobs. The app as a whole has not evolved beyond a few small feature changes since its initial launch in 2015.
Moreover, there is a disconnect in the recruitment process between the tools available to potential applicants. The positions listed on the website do not always appear to be consistent with those listed on the app, and application progress made on the websites does not translate to application progress made within the app. This misalignment stems from resource constraints and multiple digital teams working in parallel.
Citi’s culture and its mission of growth and progress do not come through clearly in the current recruiting assets; without communicating Citi’s differentiating features, students may not feel invested enough to engage further. This speaks to the need for a more robust recruitment system that showcases the best aspects of Citi, guiding potential applicants through a streamlined process that gives them access to tools to find their perfect internship amidst a sea of job opportunities.
We started out by researching the recruiting ecosystem at Citi, along with students’ experiences applying for internships. One-on-one interviews were conducted in addition to on-campus intercepts in an effort to evaluate Citi’s process and app against general recruiting practices. Through the findings we crafted insights and identified the pain points that were most prevalent amongst the interviewees.
After assessing user patterns, we then created user profiles that represented three applicant types (shown below). Based on our insights and the patterns needs expressed by our user types, we formulated opportunity areas; we then conducted two ideation sessions to map out and prioritize the concepts.
A new set of interviewees were recruited to test our first prototypes. Through remote interviews with shared documents, we were able to see the users interact with our concepts in real time and pose questions based on their choices. We then refined the features and conducted a co-creation session with users to discern what they thought the most streamlined application flow would be. In subsequent prototyping sessions we further tested the features and flow through processes to arrive at our MVP.
We delivered a Citi on Campus playbook — a 73-page document— that explores concepts for innovation around Citi’s student recruitment processes based on the pain points and the potential impact we uncovered in our research.
It can be used by the mobile product & strategy team, human resources, team leads, designers, developers, and content strategists to align around an approach that can enhance the future of Citi’s recruitment for students and, ultimately, larger markets.
We proposed a comprehensive strategy for a revised ecosystem that includes a revised flow of the overall application process, feature recommendations, and suggestions for implementation to make the content more accessible (97% of the students we interviewed were opposed to downloading an app).