Overview
Discovery
Problem Diagnosis
Handoff
Conclusion
Project
Overview
Teach For India, a non-profit working to end educational inequity through its nationwide Fellowship program, partnered with us to streamline and enhance its recruitment communications.
The goal was to simplify a complex, largely manual process, creating a unified, efficient, and engaging communication system that delivers the right message at the right time. Designed to balance automation with personalization, the solution reduces recruiter workload, ensures consistency across channels, and strengthens the overall candidate experience.
My Role
I joined the project as a designer, responsible for developing the user flow and mapping the end-to-end candidate journey through the Service Blueprint. While the initial mapping framework was in place, I led the ideation and refinement of the blueprinting approach, its development, and the subsequent templatization of key communication collaterals. I also contributed to data analysis and insight synthesis alongside the project lead, while independently executing all graphic design work. This was a highly collaborative project, with clearly defined roles and strong cross-team coordination throughout.
Highlights
Timeline
Discovery
Wisdom Mining Workshop
We began with a two-day Wisdom Mining Workshop, a deep dive into the entire recruitment journey. By bringing together all the teams a candidate would interact with, we created space for cross-functional understanding, helping everyone see the process from different perspectives. This broke down silos, uncovered friction points, and surfaced shared challenges.
01
Introductions
We began by bringing together all recruitment teams to share their roles and interactions with candidates, building empathy across functions and setting a common understanding of the process. This session helped surface interdependencies early on, breaking silos and preparing the ground for collaborative problem-solving.
02
Personas
We developed two representative personas, Naina, a recent graduate exploring meaningful career options, and Varun, a working professional seeking impact, to anchor insights in real candidate motivations. These personas helped teams empathize with different applicant mindsets, guiding the tone, timing, and medium of future communication.
03
Open-Ended Problem Statement
Teams collaboratively reframed broad challenges into open-ended questions, encouraging deeper reflection on what effective, human-centered communication could look like. This exercise aligned everyone around the core purpose, ensuring recruitment communication not only informed but also inspired potential Fellows.
04
Hits, Misses, and Things to Start Doing
Participants evaluated each recruitment stage to identify what was working well, what created friction, and what new practices could enhance engagement and efficiency. This structured reflection helped prioritize focus areas for redesign and revealed opportunities for automation and more personalized outreach.
We also analyzed recruitment data, application highs and lows, drop-off points, and candidate feedback, to get a pulse on the system’s performance, giving us a quantitative perspective of where the experience could be improved.
User Interviews
The one-on-one conversations across teams and candidates, gave us a clear view of both strategic priorities and on-ground realities. Together, this mix of structured collaboration and candid dialogue helped us get to the heart of the problem. The key problems revealed were -
Candidates from diverse backgrounds, college students and working professionals, responded differently to outreach, revealing the need for tailored communication strategies.
Teams recognized the value of unifying messaging across platforms to build a consistent, inspiring narrative that reflects TFI’s mission and strengthens candidate engagement.
Variations in tone and quality across channels, especially on social media, created a fragmented brand experience and diluted TFI’s overall presence.
Problem Diagnosis
Uncovering the Root Problem
The initial goal was to improve communication, but a deeper issue emerged: the absence of a unified system. Messaging was inconsistent, visually fragmented, and manually intensive across teams. We audited 200+ content pieces, emails to social posts, using five criteria (visuals, relevance, structure, conciseness, tone) to find alignment gaps and built a scoring matrix with clear benchmarks for each.
Designing for Scale and Flexibility
We redesigned key emails for Gmail templates and refined them through RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing Exercise) testing with real candidates. Evaluation revealed that even templating just 10% of the materials improved efficiency and consistency, without losing personalization. An example of a design created is below with the comparison.
The Service Blueprint
We created a detailed service blueprint outlining every stage and substage of the candidate journey. It captured all touch points, front-stage and backstage actions, supporting processes, and collateral at each step. The review uncovered that 40% of routine touch points, intros, reminders,
follow-ups, could be automated, saving effort while keeping engagement high.
We mapped manual, automated, and semi-automated interactions with distinct line styles. Color-coded props and people helped trace communication flows, highlight overlaps, and uncover inefficiencies across the journey. The index and an example of use below.
The Ecosystem Map
To complement the blueprint, we mapped communication hotspots across the ecosystem. It exposed duplication, like multiple email IDs, and highlighted opportunities to consolidate channels, ease management, and reduce team fatigue.
From Communication to Structural Transformation
What started as a messaging redesign became a structural transformation. The findings indicated 8 root challenges, ranging from timing misalignment to redundant workflows. Using a prioritization matrix, we created a phased roadmap, focusing first on the changes with the biggest impact.
Key Learnings
01
Inconsistency Weakens Trust and Connection
Across emails, WhatsApp, and social media, shifting tone and voice diluted TFI’s mission and confused candidates. The lack of emotional coherence made the brand feel disjointed and eroded confidence in the process.
02
Disjointed Social Media Limits Impact
Spontaneous content and an inconsistent visual identity hurt engagement. Without a unified narrative, even strong posts lacked recall and failed to convert across audience segments.
03
Manual Tasks Strain Team Capacity
Repetitive communication, like reminders and follow-ups, led to fatigue and errors. Automating just 40% of these interactions could dramatically boost team productivity and focus.
04
Scattered Ownership Causes Confusion
No single owner of communication meant fragmented experiences and delays. Centralized guidelines and accountability improved clarity, consistency, and candidate experience.
Handoff & Workshop
Workshop
We conducted a Training Workshop with the entire team, equipping them with the tools to read and refine the service blueprint, adjust communication strategies as needed, and manage future challenges independently. The three activities revolved around this ownership.
Activity 1 – Service Blueprint Mapping
Solved a blueprint puzzle to understand the recruitment communication flow.
Activity 3 – Communication Collateral Design
Matched collaterals to the correct service stages to understand effective message timing.
Activity 2 – Professional Email Writing
Designing Email and WhatsApp invites for candidate recruitment using the provided templates.
By addressing both strategic and structural gaps, we not only enhanced the candidate experience but also added a scalable system that could grow with TFI’s evolving recruitment needs.
Challenges & Reflection
Challenges
Organizing scattered data
Bringing together hundreds of communication pieces across platforms into one coherent system was complex and time-intensive.
Balancing structure with empathy
Standardizing communication without losing its personal, human tone required constant refinement.
Collaborating across stakeholders
Aligning diverse teams and perspectives pushed me to communicate clearly and think systemically.
Reflections and Learnings
01
Structured Collaboration
I learned that large, complex projects move forward only when everyone feels heard and understood. Building shared ownership through workshops and visual tools like blueprints created alignment far faster than endless discussions could.
02
People Over Processes
This project showed that communication design is about how information feels, not just consistency. Understanding the candidate’s emotional journey made the design more empathetic and impactful.
03
Comfort in Uncertainty
Early stages were messy, with many directions, incomplete data, and shifting insights. Embracing that ambiguity taught me to stay open, experiment fast, and trust the iterative process.
By addressing both strategic and structural gaps, we not only enhanced the candidate experience but also added a scalable system that could grow with TFI’s evolving recruitment needs.
Let’s create something meaningful together.
rachitsinghi2001@gmail.com
Copy to clipboard
