Hiring.
Hiring for the people already running a business. A mobile experience shaped around short, interrupted moments.
Applicant review and outreach · iOS + Android
The problem
Small-business owners needed to hire between customers and meetings. Enterprise recruiting tools asked for time they did not have.
The solution
A mobile-first flow that keeps applicant review, ratings, and personal outreach close together, with an obvious next action.
The impact
+185%Reported improvement in response rate, alongside 60% more successful hires.
- My role
- I led product strategy, information architecture, applicant workflows, and mobile design across iOS and Android. My work spanned research, journey mapping, reusable components, and the desktop MVP.
- The central decision
- Design around interrupted attention. Keep applicant context, review, and outreach together so owners can pick the work back up.
- Project scope
- The mobile hiring experience and desktop MVP, with AI and wearable explorations presented separately as future concepts.
The decisions behind the experience
Watch the interaction. Follow the decision.
Applicant details, rating, and the next action stay together. The interaction supports a complete decision in the short moments between other responsibilities.
Move from reviewing an applicant to a personal conversation. Keeping outreach in the same flow reduces the context an owner has to rebuild.
Small-business owners already have a full-time job.
The people hiring for a small business are often its owners and operators. They hire infrequently, juggle many responsibilities, and rarely have the time or expertise assumed by enterprise recruiting tools.
Research and interviews mapped where confidence and clarity broke down. Each extra step took attention away from a decision and from the business the person was already trying to run.
Research and the hiring journey
01 / 02The phone was the primary workplace.
Mapping the three journeys changed the brief. This was not enterprise hiring at a smaller scale. Owners were reviewing people from the shop floor, between meetings, and in the few minutes they had available.
I centered the experience on a clear applicant view and a useful next action. Rating, messaging, and rejection needed to stay close to the candidate, while the product made it easy to return after an interruption.
One applicant card, considered across every state.
I explored compact lists, large swipeable cards, grouped candidates, and denser tab-based navigation. Comparing those alternatives helped identify the information an owner needed before acting and the complexity we could remove.
The applicant card became a reusable decision surface. A consistent structure could support different states across mobile and desktop, preserving the person’s mental model as the experience expanded.
The alternatives and the system
01 / 04“Michael is an MVP teammate that any company is lucky to have. He has the amazing ability to grasp complicated systems in a very short time, and is very thoughtful and generous with his feedback.”
A complete decision, without the enterprise overhead.
The final mobile experience brought applicant review, relevant filters, outreach, rejection, and job management into one clear flow. Messaging became a first-class action, and rejection patterns acknowledged the person on the other end.
Desktop followed the same principles for MVP. The same candidate model and communication patterns expanded to a larger surface for the moments an owner did sit down at a computer.
The hiring experience
01 / 08
Desktop, built around the same model
01 / 01
Continuity through interruption
Consistent candidate states and nearby actions make it easier to understand what has already happened and pick up the next decision. The constraint of limited attention sharpened the whole product.
A continuous hiring experience, and the surfaces that could come next.
Beyond the MVP, I prototyped an end-to-end north star: one connected path from posting a job through making a hire, with the human moments held together.
The later concepts explored new ways to support that work. An AI copilot could help draft outreach and summarize candidates; a wrist experience could make quick triage possible between tasks. These were explorations of the future, distinct from the shipped experience.
North star and future concepts
01 / 03
More conversations. More successful hires.
The original project reported a 185% improvement in response rate and 60% more successful hires, with a candidate review experience designed around thirty seconds. The SMB constraints also clarified patterns that could benefit the broader hiring product.
Reported outcomes relate to the original hiring experience. Thirty seconds is the candidate-review design target; AI and wearable concepts are separate explorations.
I treat mobile as a context, not a screen size. Short attention, interrupted work, and asynchronous communication became constraints that sharpened the whole product.
