Embedding Human-Centred Design in Recruitment & Onboarding
Client: One of Africa’s largest financial services groups, employing over 30,000 people and operating across multiple segments and markets
Industry: Financial Services
Focus: Learning Design; L&D Capability Building; Talent Advisory; Employee Experience; Design Thinking
What They Were Up Against
The client had made strong progress in developing an Employee Experience (EX) Framework and was shifting focus towards a global redesign of EX, with immediate priorities in recruitment and onboarding.
A critical gap soon emerged: there was limited understanding of design thinking and its application to employee experience. Leaders and HR practitioners often moved straight to designing solutions. such as onboarding programmes or performance conversations, without first understanding the experience from the perspective of employees. Recruitment and onboarding were misaligned with business strategy, risking candidate engagement, retention, and employer brand strength.
Without investing in human-centred design capability, EX initiatives risked remaining transactional, inconsistent, and disconnected from talent needs, leading to lost candidates, wasted investment, and weakened culture.
What was at stake if nothing changed?
- Misaligned experience: Employees risked feeling like “just another number,” driving attrition and disengagement.
- Innovation stagnation: EX teams risked defaulting to generic, template-driven onboarding, falling behind agile, tech-savvy competitors.
Where We Chose to Focus
We focused on empathy and defined the phases of the design thinking method to anchor the initiative in a human-centred approach. This meant deeply understanding the needs, challenges, and perspectives of candidates, new hires, and managers before co-defining the problems to be solved.
Key areas of emphasis included:
Mindset Shift
Moving from transactional problem-solving to human-centred, experience-led design
Practical Tools
Embedding methods such as storyboarding and journey mapping to translate abstract concepts into actionable insights
Repeatable Capability
Building design thinking skills that could be applied beyond onboarding to other critical EX moments
Strategic Alignment
Ensuring recruitment and onboarding design tied directly to business priorities, values, and culture
How We Partnered for Impact
The engagement was anchored in immersive, interactive learning, designed to shift behaviours and embed practical tools.
Key elements included:
Hands-on simulations to explore real-world scenarios
Gamified ideation to spark barrier-free creativity
Empathy mapping and storyboarding to visualise future-state experiences
Creative prototyping exercises to test solutions in a low-risk environment
A practical toolkit to support ongoing application beyond the session
Every element was tailored to the client’s EX methodology, frameworks, and culture, ensuring relevance and immediate adoption.
What Shifted
The intervention created tangible shifts in mindset, behaviour, and alignment:
Recruitment and onboarding were reimagined from the perspective of candidates and managers, surfacing friction points and emotional triggers
Teams built the capability to evolve experiences continuously as business needs and talent expectations changed.
Human-centred thinking became embedded as a way of working, fostering creativity, empathy, and collaboration.
Leaders and HR could test messaging and processes before scaling, reducing risk and cost.
EX initiatives became more closely aligned to business strategy, strengthening engagement and culture.
Success Enablers
Strong EX leadership sponsorship, ensuring early buy-in and credibility
Use of interactive formats and gamification, which enhanced engagement and retention
Alignment to existing frameworks, making the intervention practical and relevant
A pre-session dry run, ensuring facilitators refine content and delivery for maximum impact
