Redesigning candidate management at MightyRecruiter

Making recruiter workflows easier to scan, prioritize, and act on without losing context between candidates

UX Designer at Bold working on MightyRecruiter, an HR tech SaaS for sourcing and hiring. Over 14 months I led redesigns across candidate management, screening, and the main dashboard. The work started when rising cancellations traced back to a workflow that forced recruiters out of context every time they needed to read or act on a candidate. The redesign cut time-on-task 33%, dropped subscription cancellations 7%, and landed an 87% excellent or good satisfaction rating in post-launch research.

Two views, no connection

Candidate list Original candidate list with flat visual hierarchy
Every row had equal visual weight. No quick read on who was worth opening.
Candidate detail Original candidate detail page, separate from the list
Full-page navigation to see resume and context. Actions only available here, not from the list.

To act on a candidate, you had to leave them

Every advance, reject, or stage change meant navigating away from the list, losing place, and navigating back. The design question wasn't what to add. It was how to eliminate the exit entirely.

How we got there

01
Research confirmed the cause

Customer conversations, SME surveys, and churn tickets all pointed to the same thing: not missing features, but too much time spent inside the workflow.

02
Innovation workshop aligned the team before design started

10 people across leadership, research, engineering, and analytics mapped the hiring journey to agree on where to focus.

03
User flow mapping surfaced the loop

Diagramming the full recruiter workflow made the exit-and-return pattern impossible to miss.

04
Competitive review validated the split-panel as the direction

ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, and Indeed all handled high-volume list-detail interactions. The split-panel pattern was already the emerging standard.

Cross-functional innovation workshop in progress
10 team members across leadership, design, research, engineering, and analytics: mapping the hiring journey to align on where the product was losing users
Recruiter user workflow map
Mapping the recruiter workflow end-to-end surfaced the exit-and-return loop as the primary source of lost time

Competitive reference

ZipRecruiter ZipRecruiter candidate management
Glassdoor Glassdoor employer candidate list
Indeed Indeed employer job dashboard

Two directions

Option A

Candidate Lightbox

A focused modal per candidate, navigated with previous and next arrows. Keeps attention on one candidate at a time, but breaks the list context entirely on each open.

Lightbox exploration sketch
Risk

More clicks per candidate when processing large pipelines. Rapid feedback from internal recruiters flagged loss of list context as a real problem for high-volume work.

Shipped ↗

Split-Panel View

A persistent candidate list on the left, with a detail panel on the right. Select a candidate to see their resume, notes, and stage controls without navigating away from the list.

Split-panel exploration sketch, shipped
Why this

Eliminated the exit-and-return loop entirely. Recruiters can read, rate, message, and advance candidates in a single continuous session. The list stays in view the whole time.

Before and after

Before and after: candidate management redesign
Left: original full-page navigation, exit to act. Right: split-panel with persistent list and all candidate actions in a single view

Mobile

The same hierarchy decisions in a single-column format, status surfaced immediately, stage controls one tap away, resume accessible without a separate page load.

33% faster

Three internal recruiters. Same end-to-end task on baseline and new design.

Participant
New design
Baseline
Participant 1
3:21
4:04
Participant 2
4:03
6:15
Participant 3
2:39
4:47
Average
3:21
5:02

Companion projects

Screening questions final design
Screening Questions Improved candidate quality upstream by making pre-screening easy to configure at the job level. Fewer unqualified applicants entering the pipeline.
Hiring dashboard final design
Hiring Dashboard Gave hiring managers a single view of job performance: applicant volume, pipeline stages, and source breakdown at a glance.

Impact

33% reduction in average time on task across three core candidate actions
7% decrease in subscription cancellations post-launch
87% of survey respondents rated the product Excellent or Good after launch
31 post-launch survey participants across customer segments

Overall, how would you rate MightyRecruiter?

31 participants surveyed after candidate management shipped

Excellent
25.8%
Good
61.3%
No opinion
9.7%
Poor
3.2%