This is the project where I found UX.
I came into this work solving a recruiting operations problem. I left it knowing I wanted to design for a living.
The moment it clicked
I was on the fourth iteration of the leader view of the dashboard. It was late on a Wednesday. I'd been pushing the team aggregate card around the canvas for an hour, trying to figure out why it still didn't feel right — and I realised the problem wasn't visual at all. It was that the card was answering the wrong question. A leader doesn't open a dashboard to see a number; they open it to know where to look. So I rewrote the whole hierarchy: hotspots first, score second, trend third.
That night I went home and noticed two things. First, I'd forgotten to eat dinner. Second, that I'd been looking forward to doing exactly that kind of work every morning for months — the small, infuriating, generative loop of "this doesn't feel right yet, let me try again." The microsites I had been building before were the seed. That Wednesday was when I stopped calling design a side interest and started calling it my craft.
My role, over time
How my contribution evolved across the lifecycle of the program.
Operations & analytics partner
Started by partnering with Recruiting Ops to make sense of the survey data — mapping questions to stages, finding the correlation patterns, understanding the anonymity rules.
Information designer & microsite builder
Took on the microsite end-to-end — IA, page design, content strategy, curation model. Began co-designing the cascading dashboard with Ops.
Co-architect of the recognition program
Helped design the nomination criteria, the cadence, the public-recognition mechanics. Brought in candidate validation for the prep material.
Loop-closer across all four pillars
The role that emerged: connecting analytics signal back to program decisions, keeping the system coherent as it scaled across APAC.
Constraints we designed around
Anonymity was the sharpest, but it wasn't the only one.
Anonymity
Every view, drill-down, and recognition mechanic tested against the rule: candidate identity must never be back-solvable.
APAC scale & locale
Multiple regions, multiple languages, multiple work cultures. Templates and timelines had to flex without breaking the shared standard.
Policy on feedback
What recruiters can and cannot share with non-offered candidates is bounded by policy. The system had to support kind closure within those bounds.
Stakeholder consensus
Recruiting Ops, Legal, Recruiting Leadership, and individual hiring teams all had a vote. Every design moved through that consensus.
What I'd do differently
I would have pushed harder on panel accountability.
The candidate experience score is shaped enormously by the interview panel — interviewer quality, calibration, on-time starts, tone in the room. We treated the panel as outside the recruiter's control and therefore outside the system we built. In hindsight, that was the wrong call.
A meaningful chunk of candidate sentiment was being driven by an inconsistent panel experience, and we built no surface for it. Done again, I would have proposed a parallel feedback loop for panels — anonymous, cascading, with its own diagnostic prompts — and made the case that "candidate experience" isn't really one thing the recruiter owns; it's a shared craft between the recruiter and the panel.
The system we shipped lifted the recruiter side of the score. The panel side stayed essentially untouched. That's the unfinished business.
What I personally owned
We were a team of four. I want to be honest about scope:
- Analytics end-to-end: data partnership with Ops, scoring breakdowns, cascading dashboard design, anonymity model validation.
- Microsite end-to-end: information architecture, content strategy, page design, ongoing curation.
- Co-designed the recognition program: nomination criteria, cadence, public-recognition mechanics.
- Contributed to candidate-facing prep: particularly the candidate validation step.
- Closed the loop across all four pillars — connecting analytics signal back to program decisions.