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Year Up was struggling to bring students into its training program. My team investigated the problem and designed a revamp of the applicant experience, which resulted in a 60% increase in interest and an estimated 5,000 staff hours annually redirected from routine tasks to personalized support.
Challenge
Year Up is a national nonprofit that trains low-income young adults for meaningful careers. In 2016, the organization's ability to expand services began outpacing its ability to admit students.
The Admissions team had grown to 100 staff across 15 cities, relying largely on word-of-mouth and with little intentional design or standardizatin of processes. It wasn’t clear what was needed to scale up.
Approach
Our first step was to assemble a core team that included key stakeholders from Admissions, Marketing, and IT functions, as well as a working group of front-line Admissions staff to ensure we had input and buy-in from those who would be most impacted by changes and implementing solutions.
Admissions was large and complex, and we needed to focus our efforts. We made a decision to start with the early “Consideration” phase of the applicant lifecycle, knowing improvement there would impact the greatest number of applicants.
Through interviews, focus groups, observations, and mystery shopping, we gathered as much information as we could about the current applicant and staff experience. Then, in two half-day sprints with the core team, we mapped the applicant journey, developed an "as-is" service blueprint, and identified our key challenges and opportunities.
Setting a vision
If we were going to change a complex system and meaningful improve the experiences of applicants and staff, we needed to be crystal clear on what we were going to accomplish. So we grounded ourselves in Year Up's values of equal access to opportunity, transparency, and support. Our central question become:
How might we ensure that all applicants feel Year Up’s signature support and professionalism throughout their consideration process?
Opportunities, "to-be" blueprint and validation
Our core group identified a shortlist of 11 major opportunities that would bring the applicant experience in line with Year Up’s values and applicant expectations. These changes amounted to a complete overhaul of the experience and current operations.
We mapped the new experience and process we envisioned to talk it through with our Admissions staff working group and with applicants.
Applicant and staff feedback led to several adjustments, such as the addition of a sign-in form for info session events. Feedback also informed prioritization and helped us understand interdependencies, which was important because we knew we would need to implement the changes in stages.
New digital journey sketched out for input and feedback
Example: Streamlining information collection
One key opportunity we identified was streamlining information collection for applicants, particularly early in their journey.
If a student wanted to register their interest in the program, the existing website asked them to spend 4 minutes completing a 21-field form. This form had a 70% abandon rate.
Applicants loved the idea of shortening the form. Staff were concerned about losing data. Together we sketched out where these data were put to use, and identified a later point in the applicant journey where collecting it made more sense.
We changed the website to allow students to register interest in less than a minute, and a sign-in form for info session events allowed staff to digitally take attendance and collect data they needed when they needed it.
New interest form
New sign-in form
Implementation
Taking a phased approach and working through our cross-functional team, we implemented the changes we'd outlined, amounting to a total revamp of Year Up's applicant experience.
Results
In addition to both applicants and staff reporting a much better experience, we saw:
60% increase in applicant interest
40% increase in info session attendance
5,000 repurposed from staff performing routine tasks to personalized support in the first year
This work also helped set the stage for ongoing work around the applicant experience, notably Admissions-led work to overhaul applicant assessment, using a similar process, the following year.
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