Redesigning Hire Genius: Scaling a Recruitment Platform with a Strategic Design System
Hire Genius is a modern recruitment platform built to fix common ATS and CRM frustrations with a simple, intuitive, outcome-focused experience and a clean, user-friendly UI.
My role
Full platform redesign and end-to-end experience design for the full Hire Genius product portfolio. Create and maintain a new Design System and component library.
Design strategy
Concept design
User interviews/testing
Create and maintain new Design System
Create and maintain component library
Refine and enhance existing user journeys
Design outcome based feature enhancements
Discovery & Research
I began by interviewing multiple users of the existing platform to understand their workflows—what supported or hindered them. These insights helped identify real-world pain points and unmet needs.
System audit
Next, I conducted a full audit of the current system to pinpoint usability issues, inconsistencies, and functional gaps across key user journeys.
Dual-Track Design Approach
To move quickly while planning for long-term improvements, I took a dual approach:
Short-term: Implemented quick fixes and refinements to improve key user journeys.
Long-term: Initiated/created new design system to support scalable, consistent UI and UX.
Design System Creation
Leading a team of two designers, I developed a new design system from the ground up:
Started with design tokens and atomic elements
Progressed to reusable components
Used these components to rebuild layouts and enhance existing user journeys
Component Library
With the design system foundations in place, I built a comprehensive library of over 100 components with thousands of variants. Ensuring visual quality, functional consistency, and thorough testing at this scale was a significant challenge.
Consistent Product experience
The design system and component library ensure a consistent experience across our product. By standardising visual elements, interaction patterns, and behaviours, I created a cohesive and intuitive interface. This consistency enhances both the aesthetic appeal and usability, making navigation and interaction seamless and familiar for users.
Phased Rollout Strategy
We adopted a phased rollout:
Identify key product areas
Mapped all related flows and components
Released updates behind feature flags to selected customers for testing and feedback
Repeated this process until design system was fully integrated
Current business
Users wanted a clear snapshot of their jobs and candidates in one place. To manage the information load, I introduced tabs to separate the two, making the view cleaner and easier to scan at a glance.
User Profile
Users reviewed hundreds of candidate profiles daily and needed to find key details quickly. The challenge was designing a clean, intuitive UI with strong visual hierarchy to surface the most important information.
Job Creation and Recommended Candidates
I created a streamlined flow where, after posting a job, relevant candidates are automatically suggested based on key criteria. Recruiters can instantly review and add these candidates to the job’s Kanban board, enabling a fast, seamless transition from job creation to candidate engagement.
Consistent communication suite
Building and maintaining relationships is central to a recruiter’s role, so a seamless, consistent communication experience across desktop and mobile was essential to the Hire Genius platform.
Integration with new features
All new features were built exclusively using the new design system and also released via feature flags, ensuring consistency and enabling controlled rollouts to selected user groups.
Results
Engagement has increased, support tickets are down, and the new design system has sped up feature development. Customers now find the platform more consistent, intuitive, and efficient for daily tasks.
Current Status
The design system is now in maintenance mode. The business is focused on refinement and delivering new outcome-driven features using the established design foundation.