GoHeadHunt  /  Recruitment marketplace  /  Two portals

Employers hire on fit. Candidates get found.

A candidate-led recruitment marketplace. People build one rich profile, employers hire on what they can see of the person, and no recruiter sits in the middle charging a margin. I redesigned the existing product across both portals and designed the capabilities built on top of it.

Client
GoHeadHunt
Role
Lead product / UX designer
Scope
Redesign & new capability
Surfaces
Candidate & employer portals
Platform
Web app, responsive
Completion
40% to 80%+
Across signup, profile and job posting
Time to finish
15 to under 5 min
To post a job or complete a profile
Video interviews
3,000
Candidates recorded one, across 20,000+ on the platform
01
The problem

Recruitment runs backwards, and everyone pays for it.

Candidates apply into a void. Employers judge look-alike résumés and pay a recruiter margin for the privilege of guessing. The poor-fit hires that follow burn out, and the cycle restarts.

Candidate side
Applications disappear into a queue that never replies, so good people stay invisible.
Employer side
Résumés hide personality, so every shortlist is a guess.
The middle
A recruiter markup on every placement.

And the product itself was working against them.

A platform already existed. The problem was that finishing anything on it took too long, so most people never did: fewer than half of the users who started signing up, building a profile or posting a job reached the end. Three screens accounted for most of that.

Before  /  The existing product
Screens
Employer dashboard
The previous employer dashboard
Finding a candidate meant choosing between two competing search forms on the same screen, a short one and an "advanced" one, with nothing to indicate which would actually return results. Shortlists, vacancies and users sat in cards to the side rather than in the flow of the task.
Candidate dashboard
The previous candidate dashboard
One continuous page carrying profile building, job matches, video, work history, skills and future-role preferences, with no sense of what to do first or how much was left. Self-rated skill sliders asked for a judgement the candidate had no basis to make.
Future role form
The previous future role form
A four-step wizard sitting on top of a dense form of dropdowns, day and shift checkboxes and salary fields. Setting preferences was treated as a project rather than a couple of decisions.
02
The solution

Two portals, one direction of travel.

Candidates build one profile that does the chasing. Employers watch a recorded interview and hire from a free applicant tracker. Both portals run on the same component library, so a change lands on both sides at once.

Candidate portal
Your profile does the chasing.
A profile and eResume builder a candidate finishes in minutes.
A record-once virtual interview, sent to every employer.
Culture fit, skills and availability, which a CV has nowhere to put.
Visibility of who viewed and shortlisted you.
Employer portal
One workspace for the whole hire.
Smart Match ranks candidates against a job description and shows what the ranking is based on.
Recorded interviews sit inside the full profile.
Shortlists, notes, references and pipeline stages, free.
Headhunting and volume hiring as paid tiers above that.
03
What I
designed

Four surfaces that make the marketplace work.

The redesign fixed what already existed. These four are the capabilities built on top of it, and the reason a candidate now gets found.

01
Get-discovered profiles
A story-led profile and eResume, built in sections a candidate can finish in one sitting.
02
Record-once virtual interview
Three guided questions with a two-minute limit, recorded once and seen by every employer. Three thousand candidates have recorded one.
03
Smart Match
Paste a job description and candidates come back ranked by fit, each row carrying its match score and the skills that earned it.
04
Free ATS and pipeline
Shortlists, notes, references and pipeline stages, so an employer can run a hire end to end without paying for a tracker.
After  /  The redesigned product
Screens
Smart Match
Employer
Candidates ranked against a job description, each with a match score and the skills it matched on, so an employer can check the ranking instead of trusting it.
Candidate profile
Employer
Every profile leads with the recorded interview, then the structured record underneath: overview, education, experience, licences, languages and skills. Shortlisting starts with a face and a voice.
Search candidates
Employer
A single search replacing the two competing forms. Category, role, location, experience and work type in one filter set, with results and shortlist state on the same screen.
Get discovered
Candidate
The profile builder as named sections, each with a state and a completion figure, replacing the single endless page.
Virtual interview
Candidate
Three guided questions and a two-minute limit, recorded once. The timer and question list show the size of the commitment before the candidate starts.
04
Outcome

A live two-sided product on one system.

Both portals ship from one shared design system: 20,000 candidates, 400 employers and five enterprise clients on it. Completion across the core funnel roughly doubled and the time to get through it fell by about two thirds.

01
Two connected portals, candidate and employer, taken from the existing product to a shippable one.
02
A shared UI kit and component library holding both sides together, which makes a new surface cheap to add.
03
Recorded interviews and rich profiles, so a shortlist starts with a person on screen.
On the figures

Supplied by the founder. The redesign shipped alongside significant new capability while the platform was growing, so the improvement reflects both the design work and the expanded product rather than the redesign alone.