Rishi
Franchise Owner
- Recruitment was paperwork-heavy and manual
- Applicant tracking alone wouldn't justify switching
Applicant tracking alone would not be enough to justify switching.
BrightHR 2022
Recruitment
I designed BrightHR’s recruitment platform from zero to a high-frequency, embedded workflow used by 60K+ users across five international markets.
Events
Users
Events per user
Notes created
Tools
Figma, GA4, Pendo, Hotjar
Duration
6 months
Deliverables
Product Design, Quant/Qual Research
Current State
- BrightHR had no recruitment capability.
- Customers were managing hiring through spreadsheets and email.
- Competitors were launching recruitment features, creating both a product gap and a commercial risk.
Desired State
- A lightweight, structured recruitment workflow embedded within BrightHR that replaces spreadsheets and email.
- Close the competitive gap by delivering recruitment capability that meets market expectations.
- Enable SMEs to manage hiring with minimal complexity while maintaining structure and visibility.
- Seamless integration with existing BrightHR workflows, particularly onboarding.
Research
Research Synthesis
Ideate & Design
Design Evaluation
Final Design
Discovery & Research
I led discovery to understand how customers managed recruitment in practice. Where workflows break down, and what to prioritise for an MVP. I designed and launched an in-product survey targeting 700+ BrightHR admin users via Hotjar (UK) and Pendo (international markets).
Survey respondents
700+
Managed recruitment manually
60%
No dedicated ATS in use
92%
Hiring shared across roles
63%
Survey Insights
How do you currently manage recruitment? (Q2)
60%
Spreadsheets & email
- Emails & spreadsheets 60%
- Something else 17%
- Outsourced 15%
- Applicant tracking system 8%
The vast majority were managing hiring entirely through email and spreadsheets — no structured tooling in place.
What is your role in the recruitment process? (Q3)
37%
Other / varied role
- Other / mixed role 37%
- Part of HR department 32%
- Hiring Manager 31%
Recruitment responsibility was distributed — rarely owned by a single function, pointing toward a flexible, multi-role tool.
How could BrightHR help with your recruitment process? [Q4]
These are the most representative open ended comments from 346 responses.
"Applicant recruitment platform and tracking from advert to induction, and then a one-click move onto the employee database would be amazing!"
"Track receipt of application, CV, qualifications, met criteria, invite to interview, interview score, references — and then transfer successful candidate data directly into Bright HR."
"A platform applicants can use to apply, upload more than one document, and share with their network via social media."
"Structured process and templates for sifting, selection and grading."
"A tracker that generates reports and statistics, with a time limit on data retention."
"Generic job descriptions. A tracking tool for interview schedules, decline/accept. Somewhere to keep details for future opportunities, then a link to onboarding using those details."
"Generate a link on our website to collect applicants into BrightHR automatically. If they qualify, move them into the employees tab at the touch of a button."
"A dedicated Recruitment section managers can access too — basic details, interview invitation, candidate response, confirmation, and interview schedule."
Key Insights
What the data told me
- 60% managed recruitment through spreadsheets and email — no structured tooling existed
- Dedicated ATS adoption was negligible across the customer base
- Hiring responsibility was spread across HR, managers and business owners — no single owner
- Users could not clearly articulate what better looked like, suggesting they had never experienced it
- Even where job boards were used, the internal workflow remained entirely manual and fragmented
Artifacts
Qualitative User Interviews
To deepen understanding, I then ran qualitative user interview sessions, including with Rishi, a franchise owner managing a fast-scaling, high-turnover business. The interviews occured over two weeks with some of the Bright customer advocates.
Key Findings
Jane
HR Manager
- No structured tooling existed
- Significant time spent on - job descriptions - contracts and compliance - onboarding admin
- Tools like Indeed were used, but did not reduce internal admin burden
Priorities
With all that I'd learned up to this point, I ran a small remote prioritisation study in Feb 2022. There were 33 participants across key accounts, advocates and engaged users, this helped me ensure we were tackling the most important things first.
I defined the product as:
- A lightweight, structured recruitment workflow
- Embedded within BrightHR
- Focused on replacing spreadsheets first
Urgent
Not Urgent
Important
Urgent & Important
- Move applicants into BrightHR without rekeying (one-click transfer to employees tab)
- Track candidates through hiring stages with notes and feedback
- Basic reporting: visibility into hiring activity, pipeline status
Not Urgent & Important
- Job description templates or generation (users noted manual drafting was time-heavy)
- Applicant self-service: upload multiple documents, share roles on social media
- Interview scheduling and tracking with candidate response workflow
Not Important
Urgent & Not Important
- Duplicate job capability for faster vacancy creation
- Markdown support for notes (UX refinement)
- Candidate quick view UI improvements
Not Urgent & Not Important
- Advanced recruiter integrations
- Job board auto-publishing integrations
- Contract generation automation
Designing the MVP
I was the sole designer working with a cross-functional team, I worked closely with front end and back end developers running in two-week delivery cycles. We moved fast. The MVP went from concept to launch in around two to three months, shipping in November 2022. Vacancy tracking let hiring managers create and manage roles, track who owned what and keep tabs on status. Applicant tracking captured candidate data, tracked progression through hiring stages, and gave managers a place to record notes and feedback.
Some features didn’t make the MVP due to gaps in enginneering, but I still designed them and wrote user stories in Jira for future releases.
Results
From November 2022 to February 2026, the numbers tell a clear story. Customers are actively using the recruitment feature.
Total events
Active managers
Events per manager
Applicant edits
Applicants added
Job detail views
Dashboard accesses
Notes created
When we launched, BrightHR had roughly 50,000 businesses and 500,000 users. Recruitment achieved broad adoption across that customer base, with high-frequency repeat usage that's been sustained over multiple years. The data shows ongoing pipeline management, real hiring activity, and deep engagement with individual roles.
The product did what it needed to do. It closed a competitive gap that was becoming increasingly problematic. It expanded BrightHR's value proposition in a meaningful way. It increased platform engagement and introduced a genuinely new, repeat-use workflow.
Reporting was basic but functional, giving visibility into hiring activity without overcomplicating things.
But more than any of that, it transformed recruitment from a fragmented, improvised manual process into something structured and embedded. That was the real achievement.
Signing off!
Key takeaways
After launch, the work didn't stop. I closely monitored feedback and raised this with the team based on what our customers were actually doing.
Team Instability Has a Design Cost
The team went through significant turnover during this project. Engineers changed, priorities shifted, and scope was cut back considerably as a result. That kind of churn is invisible in the final product but very visible in the process. Features that were designed and ready got deprioritised not because they weren't right, but because there wasn't the capacity to build them. It was a reminder that good design work doesn't guarantee delivery, the conditions around it matter just as much.
Customers will always Tell You What's Next
Post-launch interviews with the same customer advocates I'd spoken to during discovery made one thing clear: hiring to onboarding was the feature people wanted almost immediately. They'd adopted the recruitment flow quickly, and the friction of then manually re-entering the same candidate data into BrightHR was immediately obvious to them. I already suspected this would be the case — it came up in discovery — but hearing it confirmed so quickly, and so consistently, validated the sequencing. That connection became the next thing I pushed for.
I designed a flow to remove the need for duplicate data entry and connected recruitment straight into onboarding. Recruitment stopped being a standalone feature and became part of the platform itself.
Introducing AI
When recruitment first launched in 2022, AI tooling wasn't really viable yet. By 2025, that changed. The ecosystem had matured enough that real opportunities existed to make existing workflows genuinely better.
I designed and built a proof of concept for AI-assisted job description generation and integrated it directly into job creation. The goal wasn't to add AI for the sake of it. It was to augment something people were already doing frequently, and make it faster and better.
This became one of BrightHR's first AI-powered features. Within six months, it generated over 6,000 outputs and achieved roughly 50% adoption within job creation workflows.
What that proved was simple: AI can enhance speed and quality without adding complexity, as long as it's integrated thoughtfully into existing patterns.
