All Work
LinkedIn·2019-2021·Product, SMB

Making Hiring Feel Human Again

Simplifying hiring for small and medium businesses, so recruiters connect with candidates faster.

The story

Redesigned hiring experiences for small and medium-sized businesses by simplifying complexity and helping recruiters build better connections with candidates.

My contributions
  • Led product design for the mobile Hiring experience across iOS and Android.
  • Shaped the north-star vision for what SMB hiring on LinkedIn could become.
  • Designed the rating, messaging, rejection, and job management flows shipped to millions of users.
  • Explored future concepts for Copilot and Apple Watch that fed the roadmap and executive reviews.
Role
Product Designer
Client
LinkedIn
Year
2019-2021
Discipline
Product, SMB
Scope
  • Product strategy
  • IA
  • Recruiter workflow
  • Mobile design
+185%
Response rate
+60%
Successful hires
30s
Candidate review
Chapter 01

The problem

SMB recruiters aren't recruiters. They're owners and operators who hire infrequently, wear ten hats, and rarely sit at a desk. The tools they inherited were built for the opposite: enterprise workflows, dense dashboards, and processes that assume a full recruiting team. Every extra step was a tax on someone already stretched thin.

Research board combining brainstorm sticky notes and quotes from SMB recruiter interviews, mapping the moments where confidence and clarity broke down.
Where SMB hiring broke down. Brainstorms and recruiter interviews mapped the moments where confidence and clarity fell apart.
Chapter 02

The insight

SMB hiring isn't enterprise hiring at a smaller scale, it's a fundamentally different job. I mapped three distinct journeys, SMB customer, SMB non-customer, and enterprise, and found that mobile wasn't a secondary surface, it was the primary one. Owners were reviewing candidates between meetings, from the shop floor, in the ten minutes they had. The redesign started there.

User flow comparing SMB customer, SMB non-customer, and enterprise non-customer hiring journeys on LinkedIn.
Three journeys, one product. Mapping SMB customer, SMB non-customer, and enterprise flows to find where SMBs needed a different path.
Chapter 03

Explorations and iterations

Sketches, mobile concepts, and the cards that didn't ship. I explored list layouts, swipeable cards, category-grouped applicants, and denser tab-based navigation before landing on the applicant card that eventually shipped. One component, many states, built to scale across the SMB and enterprise experiences.

01 · Sketch. List, big swipeable cards, and category-grouped layouts on the table.
02 · Mobile concepts. Applicant tracker and job management, rethought for a phone in hand.
03 · Card anatomy. One applicant card, many states, built to scale across surfaces.
04 · Discarded. Denser list, tab-based navigation, and a filter sheet we cut before shipping.

Built for the phone. Built for the pace.

The whole hiring job, in your pocket.

Owners hire between meetings, from the shop floor, in the ten minutes they have. Every screen was designed for that reality: fast to scan, easy to act on, forgiving of the interruption you know is coming.

Rate applicants in seconds, quick decisions that fit between everything else.

Filters that surface the right candidates without the enterprise overhead.

Messaging promoted to a first-class action, not buried in a settings page.

Rejections handled with care, templated, but never cold.

Manage the job and settings in one place, no hunting through menus.

Chapter 04

Desktop, rebuilt for SMB

Mobile led the redesign, but desktop shipped for MVP too, rebuilt around the same SMB principles. The same applicant cards, the same human messaging, the same job management, scaled up for the moments when recruiters did sit down at a laptop.

Desktop, same model, scaled up. The SMB-first experience adapted for the moments recruiters do sit at a laptop.
Chapter 05

A north star for what SMB hiring could be

Beyond MVP, I prototyped a north-star vision for an end-to-end SMB hiring experience, one continuous flow from posting through hire, with the human moments held together by tools that actually fit how small businesses work.

North star. A single, continuous hiring flow, from posting through hire.
Chapter 06

Future concepts

Two exploratory prototypes for what SMB hiring could feel like across new surfaces, an AI copilot that drafts outreach and summarizes candidates, and quick triage from the wrist for the moments between everything else.

AI copilot for hiring. Drafts outreach, summarizes candidates, and suggests the next best action.
Hiring on your wrist. Quick triage and replies from the wrist, for the moments between everything else.
Reflection

What I learned

Simplicity is trust

For an SMB owner, every extra step feels like a tax. The tools that earn trust are the ones that get out of the way so a real decision can happen in thirty seconds.

Mobile is a different job, not a smaller one

Designing for the phone meant designing for a different context entirely: shorter attention, sharper decisions, asynchronous communication. Not a shrunken desktop.

Constraints sharpen everyone's experience

Designing for the audience that hires least often forced clarity that eventually improved the enterprise product too.

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