Demystifying hiring for recruiters.
As Product Design Lead at Hired, I partnered with the team to reimagine a recruiting platform built for recruiters — helping them source, evaluate, and match talent with confidence.
The work spanned a North Star product vision, a full design-system audit and rebuild, and a refreshed brand language grounded in accuracy, access, and transparency.
Company
Hired
Timeline
Consultant · 2022 — 2024
Role
Product Design Lead
Focus
Product Vision, Design System & Brand
A maturing platform serving two sides, without a system to scale.
Hired connected employers with vetted talent, but the experience had grown organically across recruiter, employer, and candidate flows.
Inconsistent patterns and an undefined brand language made it hard to ship quickly or tell a cohesive story to the market.
Fragmented patterns
Inconsistent components across employer and talent flows
Slow talent matching
Recruiters lacked clear signals to evaluate fit fast
No design system
Aging components with no shared source of truth
Undefined brand
No cohesive voice or visual language to scale
Taking inventory before rebuilding.
I started by auditing the existing product — cataloging every asset, page, and component and scoring each for health and priority. This created a shared, data-driven view of what to keep, fix, or retire.
47
Assets inventoried
25
Pages reviewed
34
Component items
10
Shared patterns
A product vision recruiters could rally behind.
Recommended matches
Surfaced the strongest candidates first with clear, scannable signals for fit and experience
Powerful filtering
Role, skills, location, and preference filters that let recruiters narrow 1,900+ matches with ease
Dual onboarding
Streamlined account creation tuned for both employers and talent from the very first screen
Find Talent — filtering
Narrowing matches with saved searches and granular filters
Talent onboarding
Welcoming account creation for candidates
Employer onboarding
Capturing roles, locations, and hiring intent up front
Recruiter dashboard
Positions, custom searches, and recommended talent in one place
Exploring two directions, then committing to one.
I explored two brand territories — one economical and trustworthy, one premium and whimsical — and aligned the team on a future-facing direction built on anticipation and a sense of what's next.
Accuracy
Clear, honest signals that help recruiters make informed choices
Access
Opening opportunity to a broader, more diverse pool of talent
Transparency
Demystifying hiring and clearing the air for everyone involved
One system to scale the product and the brand.
The audit and brand work came together as "Highlight" — a design system with a defined palette, typography, iconography, and components, plus marketing patterns to keep product and brand in sync.
From scattered screens to a coherent system.
Brand & Design
- A defined visual language and voice rooted in accuracy, access, and transparency
- The Highlight design system with reusable components and patterns
- Aligned product and marketing surfaces under one identity
Product & Workflow
- A North Star vision for recruiter talent discovery and matching
- Clearer candidate signals and faster filtering across 1,900+ matches
- Streamlined dual onboarding for employers and talent
Demystify hiring.
Clear the air.
Helping recruiters make informed choices through accuracy, access, and transparency.
Lessons in systems and brand.
Audit before you build
A shared, scored inventory turned subjective debates into clear decisions about what to keep, fix, or retire.
Brand and product are one system
Designing the language and the interface together kept marketing and product reinforcing the same story.
Recruiters need signal, not noise
Surfacing the right matches with clear, honest signals made a complex marketplace feel effortless.
Toptal