Day 23 — My Journey with 2020 Inspire Matsuri
Tags: Interview, Recruitment, Business Ideas, Pitching, Henngeadvent2020

What is Inspire Matsuri?

Inspire Matsuri is an internal corporate business innovation program at HENNGE. We find the pain that we want to solve. It can be either for our clients or a pain that we face at our daily work. There are four stages of Inspire Matsuri: defining pain, providing solutions, pitching, and carrying out the idea into a real product (if the idea passed the pitching stage). However, 2020 has made Inspire Matsuri even more impressive than usual because “It is the only Matsuri that hasn’t been canceled during 2020” (Sai, 2020). And yes, we had this program fully remote in 2020.

I was lucky enough to find the other three members to join the program with me as a team. They are Bumi and Iskandar from the development team and Laine from the HR team (I would like to thank each of you again). Our daily tasks tied everyone up, but we were able to work together efficiently and, most importantly, had a lot of fun, which is the part I would emphasize. One of the most precious experiences is being able to work with people that I usually don’t.

Meet our team: Bumi (left), Iskandar (back), me (middle), Laine (right)

What is the pain we want to solve?

As a front-liner of HENNGE’s Global Internship Program, one of my most immense pain is arranging interviews for our candidates. Thanks to our firm and consistent branding strategies, we track more than 4,000 candidates for a year. Although the team uses several systems to help track and arrange interviews with candidates, the information and data scatter around different platforms. Thus, as an interview coordinator, I still need to memorize which candidates I already reached out, and which candidates have not selected their availabilities.

I believe every recruiter faces similar pain, more or less. After conducting several rounds of interviews with potential users (recruiters), we broke down the pain into three significant problems that we face every day.

The first problem is that there is no easy way to track the candidates’ interview arrangement status. We often lose track of which candidate has arranged their interview and which hasn’t. Then, our current existing services require recruiters to do many manual tasks, such as checking interviewers’ Google Calendar, creating a Zoom link, and much more. Finally, the current system works as a one-direction tool in terms of scheduling. It is always the candidates to select a schedule from companies’ availability, but sometimes the interview schedule we provide does not work for candidates. It leads to communicating back and forth with candidates and interviewers that takes unnecessary time and effort.

What is our solution?

The real pain originates from one root, which uses many different platforms without a dedicated tool to manage the interviews. Thus, our idea is Smart Interview: a tool that helps recruiters schedule and manages interviews faster and efficiently. We believe interviews should be a process instead of a one-time event.

An easy tracking board that allows recruiters to create the desired hiring flows for each position would make the interview arrangement process easier to track, so we will not miss any of the candidates, no matter how many they are. More importantly, recruiters can finish scheduling multiple interviews on our platform without going back and forth to different tools. The system will send an automated invitation on the interviewers’ calendar once the candidate selected an interview schedule. Besides, depending on the candidates’ situation, we create a two-way scheduling option for candidates to provide their availabilities for recruiters to choose from.

Smart Interview: one of the simple UI prototypes

To conclude, Smart Interview is a tool that helps recruiters to schedule and manage interviews better. 60 % of candidates abandon the process if the application takes too long (Human Capital Institute, 2018). We hope our candidates would not be any one of them in that 60%.

What happened after the pitch?

Unfortunately, our team did not pass through the idea pitch, so that the project will stop here this time. However, working as a part of the talent team, I was grateful enough to have a chance to share how much effort we are making every day to make the recruiting process run.

There are tons of great companies worldwide, and we appreciate every candidate who had previously considered joining HENNGE. We might not be the one running the best candidate experience at the time. Still, I assure you that a group of people inside the company is trying to improve it and envision better and more engaging ways to communicate with candidates.

Last but not least, I would strongly recommend every member of HENNGE to participate in Inspire Matsuri. I might not have the best idea to impress the judges, but I learned more about running a better recruiting process by researching and talking with different stakeholders. I believe that we all work for a better world, and Inspire Matsuri helps me identify the part that I can contribute to, maybe not now, but one day in the future.