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 for growth leaders. Companies hire from the alumni pool through a job posting form. On paper it was self-serve. In practice, a small talent team sat in the middle of every posting.
A recruiter filled the form, got something wrong, and the talent team emailed to clarify. Then they read candidates by hand and emailed names back. Every post consumed hours of a team that should have been doing strategic work.
Understanding the current flow · the talent team appears in four of six steps
User interviews: two sides of the same problem.
I interviewed the talent team and three recruiting companies. Deliberately 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.
Recruiters fill this form on a laptop, mid-workday, so I optimized desktop first. My first attempt at the structure was wrong, and it taught me something.
Where I was wrong
My first version showed all seven steps upfront for transparency. It overwhelmed people instead: a routine task started to feel like an onboarding flow, heavier than the form it replaced.
Rather than guess at the grouping, I ran an open card sort with three of the 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 the rest.
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 transparency gap needed real-time tracking. I mapped the states a job post moves through and gave recruiters three they can act on: active, inactive, and drafts. Inactive matters most: it halts hiring when priorities shift, without deleting the post or emailing anyone.
Dashboard flow · active, inactive and draft states with applicant tracking
The job card went through several rounds before converging on three signals: budget, function, and applicant count, because those answer "is this working?" at a glance.
Job card iterations · converging on the three signals recruiters check first
Automating candidate recommendations removed the manual emails entirely. That single change took the talent team out of the equation, and 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.
With ten days, I tested the prototype with four team members on two tasks: post a Head of Growth role, then read the post back and say what you expected to see.
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.