James Hupp

Background

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in the wake of the financial crisis to to provide a single point of accountability for enforcing federal consumer financial laws and protecting consumers in the financial marketplace. In 2014, I was part of a new multidisciplinary design and development team redesigning the agency’s website, consumerfinance.gov.

We had done quite a bit of foundational research work. This let us develop early stage guardrails for iterative development. We had a rough idea of the sitemap and both the visual and content style. But as a financial regulator, the CFPB approached every type of publishing with an abundance of caution over how it might affect markets. So developing something production-ready, even in beta, was slow. We needed to show that our directions could be helpful somewhere that didn’t have this risk. As the team moved into redsigning the careers section of the site in 2015, we found an opportunity.

The problem

For a number of reasons, hiring at the new agency was a constant need. The agency couldn’t afford to see applications from good people rejected because they didn’t understand government hiring rules. From a regulatory perspective, however, talent acquisition was a far less fraught area to experiment with.

Federal hiring is complicated. Even for a single job in a single agency, there maybe different sets of standards for how to qualify. This makes it hard to provide clear and accurate information to the public, who generally aren’t familiar with the basics let alone the specifics. It’s not uncommon to be rejected as unqualified for a job that anyone can see you are, in fact, qualified for.

The CFPB’s work is all about making fine print understandable to ordinary consumers. As a matter of ethos, it was unacceptable to us to let the complexity of rules meant we couldn’t offer direct, useful advice. And as a practical matter, if we couldn’t offer good information about applying, hiring would always be a drag on the agency. How could we provide job applicants the clarity they needed?

The work

Initially, we wanted to describe the entire application process with all its caveats. As I worked through the issues with the Director of Talent Acquisition, it was clear this would be too much for something that wasn’t core to the agency’s mission. Instead, we tried to explain the parts of the process that confused applicants most often: the concept of “minimally qualified,” how terminology mismatches with the job announcement could sink an application, and the right way to ask questions about your own application.

To explain even these things longhand risked exploding other parts of the careers section: new job listings, special hiring programs, etc. People needed lightbulb moments about their own experience, not every detail. We also thought that this content could be useful to people in offices around the agency and across the government so we wanted something sharable. The most interesting solution seemed like a video. It could support the content around it, explore the more progressive (cartoony) parts of our visual style, and tell the necessary story, even if someone was applying at a federal agency other than the CFPB.

I wrote a script and worked with our visual designers to storyboard the video. We focused on demystification and approachability above all. We knew the process felt weird; we’d gone through it ourselves. We wanted applicants to understand why it felt weird.

Results

The first thing the video accomplished was to set down a marker for our new designs. It was released more than a year before the changeover from beta.consumerfinance.gov to consumerfinance.gov. It established that both the voice and visual direction we were trying could break through the complication of some material to help people connect with government information.

The impact on the CFPB’s hiring efforts was never well ascertained. The growing number of modern digital programs in the federal government, however, have used this video to encourage assertive recruitment by their own agencies. Agencies often give into their own worries that innovative people don’t apply, and the most effective thing to do sometimes is to arm people who are trying to change their minds with tools like this.

The video in this case study supports the CFPB’s introduction to the job application process.