Company
Team
VP of Product × 1
Product Manager × 1
Full-stack Engineer × 1
My Role
Responsibilities
Tools
Platforms
Year
Situation
50–70% of placed executives fail within 18 months, mostly from cultural misalignment. Alioth did far better, but its recruiters spent hours per candidate rewriting dry client job descriptions to win over executives who weren’t looking.
Task
Design the first piece of SearchDx, a full-lifecycle recruiting platform. It had to solve a real pain point without disrupting recruiters’ workflow, and be buildable by one developer.
Result
Feature built and in development when the company ran out of runway
Recruiters and leadership were enthusiastic about the design
Account system and design system laid the foundation for the broader platform
Strategy
Left what worked alone. LinkedIn Recruiter stayed in place for sourcing; I focused on the marketing pain point.
Kept it buildable: standard content sections with light visual customization, and branding pulled automatically from existing records.
My first WYSIWYG approach. Reviewing it with leadership showed it was overwhelming.
Design
Changed course after stakeholder review. WYSIWYG overwhelmed the VP and PM, so I switched to stepped authoring, one group of decisions at a time.
Adapted to a strategy shift. When the company explored spinning SearchDx out, I redesigned it for white-labeling.
Stepped authoring, a finished position profile, and the recruiter dashboard.
Learnings
Engineering capacity is a design constraint. Watching recruiters work showed me which tasks were chores and which were points of pride. Next time I would narrow focus even further to get market feedback sooner.
