Redesigning the core workspace for enterprise recruiters — reducing time-to-action, building a layout system, and closing a competitive gap with HubSpot.
Recruiterflow started as a tool for small agencies, and the candidate profile reflected that — one long column, everything stacked, scroll to find what you need. It worked, for a while.
As the product moved upmarket, the recruiters changed: high-volume professionals managing dozens of roles, on back-to-back calls. They weren't browsing the profile — they were working inside it, live, under pressure. The layout hadn't changed since day one. The product around it had.
On a live call, a recruiter needed the resume, a note, the call log, and contact details — without leaving the page. Instead, the resume took multiple clicks, notes lived on a separate tab, and contact info was buried below sections nobody used. Every core action meant stopping, switching, losing context, and finding the way back.
“I need to click files to open the CV. It's a pain that I can't see it straight away.”
— A RECRUITER, ONE OF YEARS OF ACCUMULATED SIGNALSThis wasn't a one-off complaint. Interviews, support tickets, surveys — a consistent signal that something structural was broken. The profile needed to be rethought, not reskinned.
Ninety days of Amplitude data, read alongside a structured user survey. Both pointed at the same things — which made the design direction less a matter of opinion and more a matter of reading the evidence clearly.
A competitive audit of HubSpot, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Salesforce showed every serious player had made deliberate choices about layout customisation. Recruiterflow had none of it — everything fixed, and fixed badly. The audit set the ambition: not a better layout, but a layout system — the right information, in the right order, for the right person.
We started with two columns, and it broke on a fundamental problem: jobs. A candidate can belong to many jobs simultaneously, and jobs are primary context — not peripheral detail. No two-column arrangement could give them prominence without burying something that mattered equally.
Three columns solved it: candidate metadata on the left, high-frequency actions — notes, calls, resume — in the centre, supporting context on the right. Each column with one clear job, nothing competing for space.
The collapsible right panel wasn't in the original design. It emerged when we saw how much the centre column was being asked to hold. Density became a choice, not a constraint.
The CEO's first reaction: it looks too dense.
A fair instinct — for consumer software. But enterprise recruiters work in Salesforce, Bullhorn and HubSpot all day. Density, for this user, isn't a problem to solve; it's an expectation to meet. The competitive audit had prepared us for exactly this objection. We pushed back in the moment, and the research spoke for itself.
Left column: identity, quick actions, contact, properties, experience. Centre: the primary workspace — Overview, Resume, Intelligence and Activities, with a scannable, filterable feed. Right: intent-specific context — jobs with pipeline stage, sequences, tasks. And every card in every column is draggable: the layout adapts to the workflow rather than imposing one.
In the old design, every action — a note, a logged call, an email — meant navigating to a separate tab. In the new one, actions live as buttons on the left card and open a floating composer over the current view. The feed stays visible behind it. Reading and writing happen in the same moment, on the same screen.
The problem wasn't that taking a note was hard. It was that taking a note required leaving.
The revamp is in beta, with a toggle between old and new layouts — a deliberate choice that gives users agency and gives us a clean signal of genuine adoption. The most specific requests coming in are power-user asks, not broken-basics complaints. That's a different category of feedback than “I can't find things.”
The first sign a redesign is working isn't that users stop complaining. It's that they start asking for more.
This is a live project. The numbers will follow.