Centralizing Recruiters Work

Overview

It's easy to focus on the client side of a staffing platform and forget that recruiters are users too. This project addressed the recruiter-facing side of Randstad's global digital transformation — centralizing fragmented workflows, reducing manual work, and building a standardized global process that could scale across regions and unlock downstream products like the c-one client portal.

The business goal was straightforward: get recruiters working from a single system, reduce double-entry and inefficiency, and create consistency across a historically fragmented global organization. What we discovered was that the goal itself needed to be challenged — and that our job was as much about setting realistic expectations as it was about designing the right tool.

My Role

I led discovery and evaluative research with recruiters across multiple markets, building a picture of how recruiting work actually gets done versus how the business assumed it got done. A big part of the role was using findings to shift product strategy, not just shape design decisions.

User Interviews Contextual Inquiry Usability Testing Stakeholder Workshops Synthesis & Reporting

Key Findings

01 Recruiters were avoiding their own database. Legacy talent search tools were so difficult to use that recruiters defaulted to posting new jobs instead — a more expensive path — simply because it was faster than searching existing candidates. Bad tooling wasn't just a usability problem; it was actively costing the business money and undermining the value of its own talent pool.

02 Standardization conflicted with how recruiting work actually operates. Recruiters adapt constantly — to different client types, contract structures, market conditions, and their own hard-won intuition about how to prioritize. The assumption that a single standardized workflow could serve all of these contexts was wrong. Flexibility wasn't a nice-to-have; it was what made recruiters effective.

03 Business goals were partly wishcasting. Some of what the business wanted from standardization wasn't grounded in how the work actually flowed. Recruiters had built personal brands and client relationships precisely because the systems left gaps. Taking those workarounds away without replacing the underlying need wasn't process improvement — it was just constraint. Research had to make that case clearly and help reframe what success looked like.

Impact & Outcomes

↑ Flexibility built into the tool where the business had originally mandated rigidity — backed by research that demonstrated why

↓ Recruiter reliance on workarounds reduced as core pain points in talent search and workflow navigation were addressed

What I Learned

In a poorly organized organization, relationships matter more than process. Finding the internal champions first — the people who already believe research has value — and expanding from there was far more effective than trying to win the room all at once. Trust compounds slowly and burns fast.

I also learned to calibrate how academic to be. Going deep on methodology works with UX-mature teams. With teams earlier in that journey, it can backfire — it feels removed from the problem. The rigor stays the same. The translation changes.

The hardest lesson: launching a bad product breaks trust in a way that takes a long time to repair. Users remember when something didn't work. You can't build back credibility just by fixing the bugs — you have to earn it again through the relationship. And you can't develop a product purely from business goals and expect users to meet you there. That's not strategy, it's wishcasting.

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Standardizing Recruiter Workflows in a Global Organization