Taking the talent team out of the equation.
The goal was to simplify job posting for recruiters, enable real-time candidate tracking, and reduce their dependency on the GrowthX talent team. I had 10 days to design it, end to end.
About GrowthX, and the process I walked into.
GrowthX is an eight-week cohort course helping professionals become better growth leaders. Companies come to hire from that alumni pool, and to do it they fill in a job posting form. On paper it was self-serve. In practice, a small internal talent team sat in the middle of every single posting.
A recruiter would fill the form, get something wrong or leave it vague, and the talent team would email them to clarify. Then the talent team would manually read through candidates, pick the ones who fit, and email those names back. Every job post consumed hours of a team that should have been free for strategic work. As cohorts grew, that model was going to break.
Understanding the current flow · the talent team appears in four of six steps
User interviews: two sides of the same problem.
I conducted user interviews with the GrowthX talent team, who oversee every aspect of recruitment, and with representatives from three recruiting companies, who write the postings. I deliberately spoke to both sides before drawing the flow, because the two sets of complaints only make sense together: what confused recruiters became the talent team's workload.
What recruiters said
- Ambiguity in form filling
- Recruiters were unsure what to write in specific sections, so they filled in whatever seemed plausible. The job requirement came out unclear, which is exactly the thing the form exists to capture.
- Overwhelm and complexity
- The extensive form asked for everything at once, so people rushed it and skipped the attributes that actually attract good candidates.
- Transparency gap
- Once a post went live it disappeared. No view of applicants, and no way to halt hiring when priorities changed inside their own company.
What the talent team said
- Clarification queries
- A steady stream of "what goes in this field?" questions, each one interrupting real work.
- Engaging with partner companies
- When a form came back wrong, someone had to reach out to the partner company and collect the missing information by hand.
- Manual candidate selection
- Every recommendation was a person reading candidates and writing an email. Cohorts were growing, and scalability was becoming a real concern.
"The real fix was not a better form. It was taking the talent team out of the equation, so they could focus on strategic work."
The reframe that set the directionThe posting form: from seven steps to four sections.
Since most recruiters fill the form on a laptop, in the middle of a working day, we decided to optimize for the desktop flow first, for both the posting form and the dashboard. My first attempt at the structure was wrong, and it taught me something.
Where I was wrong
In the first version, my objective was to give hiring managers complete transparency by revealing all seven steps from the get-go. I soon recognized this was overwhelming them instead: seven visible steps made a routine task feel like an onboarding flow, and it read as heavier than the form it replaced.
I aimed to divide the form into a few digestible sections, aligned to what a hiring manager already has in their mind. Rather than guess at the grouping, I initiated an open card sort with three members of the GrowthX recruitment team and let them cluster the questions themselves. Seven steps collapsed into four sections: basic details, budget and ESOPs, interview and role expectations, then everything else. This activity acted like a guiding light for the rest of the design process.
Open card sort · 3 participants from the recruitment team
Three additions that came from listening
V2 · four sections, save as draft, sample post always within reach
The dashboard: real-time tracking, deeper candidate insight.
The other pain point we had to address was the transparency gap: boosting recruiters' visibility with real-time job post tracking and deeper candidate insights. I mapped the states a job post moves through and gave recruiters three they can act on: active, inactive, and drafts. Inactive matters more than it sounds. It is how a recruiter halts hiring when priorities change inside their own company, without deleting the post or emailing anyone.
Dashboard flow · active, inactive and draft states with applicant tracking
One of the key aspects I wanted to understand was what a recruiter would like to see upfront. The job card went through several rounds, and through feedback from the product manager and the recruitment team we arrived at the optimal card: budget, function, and applicant count, because those three answer "is this working?" at a glance.
Job card iterations · converging on the three signals recruiters check first
In addition, we made the process more efficient by automating candidate recommendations, doing away with the manual emails entirely. That single change is what took the talent team out of the equation, and it removed the ceiling on how many cohorts the platform can serve.
The updated flow · no intervention from the talent team required
Insights from usability testing.
Keeping the time constraint in mind, I invited four team members to test the prototype and asked for their feedback on two tasks: post a job for a Head of Growth role at an early-stage startup, then read the resulting post back and share what you expected to see, and why.
Four internal team members, not real recruiters, tested the prototype, and most of what we collected is qualitative. That means the 62% is a directional prototype signal, not production data: the structure was clearly faster, but the exact magnitude may not hold. We anticipated validating it with task timings from real recruiters over a full posting cycle. I am stating the limitation because a number is only as good as the method behind it.
What this project taught me.
I truly enjoyed my time on this project, delving into the genuine challenges recruiters and the talent team face daily. Three learnings I carry forward.
Future scope
Based on recruiter feedback, two directions are planned for the current product: AI-powered form personalization, using a recruiter's past behavior to pre-fill sections like the 30-60-90 day plan for easy, personalized adjustment, and email-integrated candidate updates, so recommendations reach recruiters where they already work.