Redesigning the Beating Heart of the ATS
How I redesigned Workable’s candidate and pipeline experience — delivering 3× faster uploads, 40% quicker workflows, and higher recruiter satisfaction across a platform used by 27,000+ companies.
DOMAIN
HR Tech – Recruiting SaaS Platform
TIMELINE
2019 – 2021
MY ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
6 Developers, 2 VPs of Engineering, 2 PMs
CONTEXT
Workable is a global B2B SaaS platform that powers hiring for over 27,000 companies. At its core lies the candidate profile and pipeline view — the beating heart of the ATS where recruiters review resumes, manage candidates across stages, communicate with teams, and make critical hiring decisions.
After years of incremental changes, this view could no longer keep up with user expectations or performance standards. I led its redesign — from research to delivery — modernizing recruiter workflows, improving speed and accessibility, and aligning the UI with a scalable design system that served 10+ product teams.
PROBLEM
Recruiters Struggled to Hire Efficiently
Fragmented & Unstructured Profiles
Too many sections and clicks to review candidates.
Inefficient Bulk Actions & Search
Manual work slowed recruiters down.
Performance Bottlenecks
Slow uploads disrupted high-volume hiring.
SOLUTION
The Unified Hiring Experience
Candidate Database
Find and re-engage past applicants instantly.
Candidate Profile & Card
Key details and actions in one focused view.
Hiring Pipeline
Manage stages and communication without leaving the flow.
OUTCOMES & METRICS
Boosting Speed, Efficiency, and User Satisfaction Across Recruiter Workflows
The redesigned candidate profile and pipeline experience delivered measurable improvements across critical recruiter tasks. By streamlining uploads, simplifying evaluations, and modernizing collaboration, we significantly improved efficiency, adoption, and satisfaction among high-volume hiring teams.
3× Faster Uploads
Resume uploads became three times quicker, removing a major bottleneck.
30–40% Faster Workflows
Core recruiter actions (emailing, evaluating, moving candidates) were completed significantly faster.
High User Satisfaction
600+ recruiter surveys showed overwhelmingly positive feedback on usability and speed.
USER NEEDS
Research Insights: Uncovering Recruiter Frustrations
Through interviews, usability sessions, and daily shadowing of recruiters, we uncovered recurring pain points that shaped the redesign.
Recruiters described this constant context switching as exhausting and disruptive to their workflow.
Many stressed the need for clarity and a cleaner information structure to speed up decisions.
Recruiters wanted reliable performance and confidence that the platform could handle their workload.
INSIGHTS & PROJECT ALIGNMENT
Translating Needs into Targeted Solutions
We aligned early on with business leadership and engineering around the principle of: “Faster decisions, fewer clicks, less switching.”
👩💼
Recruiters
Managing multiple open roles, they needed to act quickly without leaving the candidate view — fewer clicks, less context switching.
👨💻
Hiring Managers
Focused on quick overviews and clear evaluation signals to support faster decision-making in interviews and offers.
🏢
Agencies & Enterprise Clients
Handling high-volume hiring across multiple jobs, they demanded advanced search, reliable bulk actions, and scalable performance.
⚡
Design Sprint
We kicked off with a 5-day design sprint, bringing together PMs, engineers, and designers. By the final day, we tested concepts with 5 recruiters — validating early assumptions and grounding the redesign in real user feedback.
💡
Business Alignment
We aligned with leadership around one principle: “Faster decisions, fewer clicks, less switching.” This north star guided prioritization — focusing on high-friction workflows that directly impacted customer adoption and retention.
EXPLORATION
Defining the Foundation
After the design sprint, I moved quickly from mid- to high-fidelity wireframes to validate assumptions and refine flows. Leveraging Workable’s evolving design system allowed us to iterate rapidly, run A/B tests, and align UI patterns across teams.
The Goal
Reduce recruiter friction by surfacing the most actionable data upfront, minimizing clicks, and cutting down on context switching.
KEY UX DECISIONS
Arriving at a Faster, Context-Rich Candidate View
New Candidate Overview
Restructured profiles to surface the essentials first — status, activity, and resume — with secondary content tucked into collapsible panels.
Unified Overview Panel
Introduced a persistent right-side panel showing candidate status, notes, and activity timeline — enabling quick actions without losing context.
Action Without Leaving
Enabled recruiters to compose emails, leave evaluations, and edit data in-line, removing the need to jump between screens.
Advanced Search Engine
Built Boolean and dynamic filters to let power users search across all candidate fields, scaling efficiency for high-volume hiring.
FINAL DESIGN
The Candidate View: Streamlined, Scalable, and Built for Focus
After multiple iterations and recruiter feedback sessions, Workable’s core hiring experience evolved into three cohesive views — the Candidate Database, Hiring Pipeline, and Candidate Profile — creating a continuous, high-performance workflow that reduced friction and improved recruiter efficiency across the platform.
Candidate Database
A redesigned internal talent pool where recruiters can instantly search, filter, and re-engage past applicants across all jobs and departments. No more waiting for new candidates — every qualified profile is just a search away.
Candidate Profile
A redesigned profile consolidates all relevant information — from resumes and feedback to communication history — in one continuous view.
Hiring Pipeline
A consolidated workspace that merges evaluation, communication, and stage management into one persistent view, enabling faster, more confident hiring decisions.
Here’s what that looks like
A clickable prototype validated end-to-end flows with recruiters, confirming that the new design reduced cognitive load and cut task completion times by up to 40%.
OUTCOMES & METRICS
Boosting Speed, Efficiency, and User Satisfaction Across Recruiter Workflows
The redesigned candidate profile and pipeline experience delivered measurable improvements across critical recruiter tasks. By streamlining uploads, simplifying evaluations, and modernizing collaboration, we significantly improved efficiency, adoption, and satisfaction among high-volume hiring teams.
3× Faster Uploads
Resume uploads became three times quicker, removing a major bottleneck.
30–40% Faster Workflows
Core recruiter actions (emailing, evaluating, moving candidates) were completed significantly faster.
High User Satisfaction
600+ recruiter surveys showed overwhelmingly positive feedback on usability and speed.
