Streamlining Recruitment: Unifying Legacy Systems on a Single Platform
Date: 2024
My Role: Lead UX Designer (solo contributor on design, working with sales and leadership teams)
A mid-sized recruitment agency was drowning in operational inefficiencies. Their workflow relied on disjointed spreadsheets and fragmented legacy systems, forcing recruiters to manually re-enter data multiple times a day. This not only slowed down the placement process but led to frequent human errors and frustrated staff. They needed a unified platform to centralize their operations and eliminate double-entry.
Discovery & Research
Due to time constraints with the prospective client, I synthesized available data to construct three distinct user personas: the Busy Recruiter, the Service Team Member, and the Executive,. This helped us identify that the primary friction point wasn’t just the UI, but the lack of communication between the CRM and the financial reporting tools.
Service Team Member Sarah
Busy Recruiter Ben
Michelle the Executive
Information Architecture
I restructured the system's flow to prioritize task completion. The goal was to minimize clicks while ensuring all important tasks were easy to locate. I developed a sitemap that separated “Onboarding” from “Accounting” (AR & AP), ensuring that employees weren’t overwhelmed by administrative clutter.
Design & Iteration
I started with low-fidelity wireframes in Figma to validate the user flows, specifically focusing on the Login and Dashboard experiences.
The Pivot
After initial reviews, I moved to mid-fidelity. I introduced a calming light-blue palette to evoke trust and professionalism—key traits for a recruitment agency—and to reduce eye strain for users spending hours on the platform.
I also designed a collapsible, interactive side navigation bar in Figma to maximize screen real estate for data-heavy tables.
The Solution: Views on Every Role
To address the conflicting needs of different stakeholders, I designed two distinct views: Executive and Employee.
In the end, I opted for a clean white background to create a professional look that’s also easy on the eyes I incorporated teal blue accents complementing the brand’s existing red theme (in the logo).
Executive View
Focused on high-level metrics. I created a view that gave leadership a bird's-eye view of financials and team performance without needing to dive into the weeds. The "Settings" panel was designed to show sync status with third-party platforms, giving admins confidence that the data pipeline was working.
Employee View Mockups
Focused on efficiency and speed.
Internal Communication
I added a native comment feature allowing employees to tag clients directly within the platform. This eliminated the "email tag" that often delayed client onboarding.
The “Stepper” Nnboarding
The old system required users to scroll through a massive form. I redesigned this using a "Stepper" pattern (breaking the form into steps) and multi-column input fields. This significantly reduced scrolling and cognitive load, ensuring that the complex data entry process felt manageable and less prone to error.
Outcome
The high-fidelity prototype and interactive presentation successfully demonstrated the system's value to the client. The design provided a clear visualization of how their daily operations would be streamlined, giving them the confidence to greenlight the development phase.
Key Takeaways
This project sharpened my ability to design for complex, data-heavy environments. I learned how to balance aesthetic polish with strict functional requirements and how to effectively sell design solutions to stakeholders by focusing on business ROI (time saved and errors reduced).
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