Like much of everything we do at BlackBox Vision, BBV Hirings was born after we realized we had a specific need: optimizing the onboarding process for new team members joining the company.
The early days
In the beginning, when it was just the 3 founders, we handled things quite informally and without a process. We used to send an email listing what data we needed from the person we were onboarding.
Data such as full name, current address, front and back photos of their national ID, etc. Sensitive information that we were handling ourselves.
Sometimes we forgot which fields were required and had to dig through previous emails to remember. As you can imagine, this wasn't going to scale anytime soon.
The first Form
That's why we decided to group these fields and streamline this initial process by creating a Google Form, avoiding the issues mentioned above.
We thought it was a good idea and right away started designing and implementing the form. It took us 2 days to build it and was a bit more costly than we expected, since we wanted to adapt it based on several conditions — some of them quite tricky. For example: adding N dependents for health insurance purposes meant having a section for each family member, forcing us to set a maximum number of sections for possible dependents.
The design was pretty standard, but hey, we managed to achieve the goal of automating the process and sending the form out for the first hires. We were quite happy with the result.
What if we go further?
Most of our team members completed this Form and the feedback they gave us was mostly positive. But since we're restless by nature, we said: "why don't we improve it?".
We believe in the saying that a worker's first day largely determines how they'll end up seeing the company and whether it meets their expectations or not. So we tried to pay attention to every detail, even making filling out a form as painless as possible. And that was the trigger to start the BBV Hirings project.
The architecture
For a first version, we proposed building a web application that displays a custom form, taking the previous Google Form as a starting point but simplifying and unifying those sections that felt awkward.
We designed the system to work like this:
- The new team member receives a link to the web application
- They fill in their data in the form, which validates the inputs
- The data is sent to the backend, creating a new team member in our database
The technologies we used were NextJS (React framework), the Google Drive API, and the Google Spreadsheets API.
The team
Who better to build a new form than those who used the original one? Delfina Caradonna, Nahuel Berg, Gabriela Tapia, and myself were in charge of making it happen.
The process
Analysis
The first thing we did was analyze how the existing Google Form worked and identify areas for improvement, then turn those into functional requirements. In this first stage I was a bit more involved, helping the team with general definitions such as backlog setup, technology choices, security, solution architecture, and infrastructure.
Design
Then we started with the design, which was the result of a great collaboration between all team members. Everyone contributed ideas and joined calls with our Stakeholder Brenda Salas (Administrative Officer), who gave us feedback and helped improve the system.
Starting from an initial sketch, we ended up with something truly beautiful and functional.
Implementation
The frontend implementation was done by Delfina, who managed to make the site look great and perform well on both desktop and mobile, while also validating all input data.
The integration with Google APIs and the creation of new team members in the backend was Nahuel's work. He researched the necessary requirements to make it happen and delivered the automation we so badly needed.
Project management was handled by Gabi, who also created the Figma designs for mobile, proposed UX improvements, participated in testing on both desktop and mobile, and always kept the team motivated.
And I helped the team with technology-related research, giving feedback, and participating in deadline planning.
Learnings
I think it was a really great and challenging project where we all learned something. That's why I didn't want to miss the chance to share our experiences:
"Being part of Hirings was and continues to be an incredible experience. It gave me the chance to acquire a ton of technical knowledge and tools that will be useful in future projects, and to put into practice what I learned during training. Little by little I started developing the ability to research things on my own, to become more independent in assigned tasks, and to not get frustrated when something doesn't work out and move on to other things. The good vibes and communication within the team also helped a lot day to day in making the project turn out so nice. From Hirings I'm going to take away a lot of useful things, advice, and points to keep working on in the future — it's been a really great experience." — Delfina Caradonna, Frontend Developer
"The Hirings project was challenging and, at the same time, fun. Figma was used for the UX/UI design of both desktop and mobile versions. In my case, I supported the team with the mobile screens. I take away the learnings about shared libraries and the implementation of plugins for screens like the steppers. There was a lot of team participation in the design process, as viewpoints were shared during the Daily Scrums, and there was a lot — really a lot — of willingness and collaboration from the whole team. It was a super enriching experience." — Gabriela Tapia, Digital Project Manager
"This project was very interesting and challenging for me. I used things I had never used before, including: Google APIs like Drive and Sheets, NextJS API Routes, and Apicurio Studio. I really enjoy learning new things, and having had the opportunity to be part of a project with all these tools makes me very happy and motivates me to keep learning. Also, the organization and constant communication with the team were key to helping each other and unblocking as quickly as possible, which really speeds up the whole development process. I'm happy to have been part of the team and I hope more projects like this come up!" — Nahuel Berg, Backend Developer
Next steps
We're very close to going to production. And we hope that by mid-April, new team members joining the company will be able to use this new system and give us their feedback so we can keep improving the experience for everyone who joins our team.
