Enhancing the onboarding experience with a centralized dashboard that simplifies candidate management.
ROLE
Product Design Intern
TEAM
3 Product Managers
1 Senior Product Designer
4 Product Designers
DURATION
May 2025 - August 2025
IMPACT
Reduced the time that onboarding specialists spend in tracking and managing candidates
Overview
Our onboarding tools are essential for enabling onboarding specialists to guide new hires seamlessly from contingent offer to their first day.
From the moment a contingent offer is extended, onboarding specialists manage critical steps, such as clearing background checks, issuing self-onboarding links, and confirming all requirements, so that each candidate is ready to start on day one.
As a Product Design Intern, I led the research and design of a centralized onboarding dashboard to reimagine the onboarding experience. I collaborated closely with Product Managers, a Senior Product Designer, and fellow design interns on the team throughout the process.
Our Goal
Streamline the new-hire experience by consolidating the various pre-employment systems that are utilized for candidate onboarding.
With the new centralized onboarding tool, our team aimed to deliver a seamless, intuitive, and organized user experience, while incorporating analytics to support data-driven decisions that enhance the onboarding process. Our primary goal was to break down silos across various pre-employment platforms to increase transparency into candidate progress, reducing reliance on third-party tools to manually track and manage candidates.
The Problem
Existing pre-employment tools are all managed on separate platforms, creating a segmented experience for the users.
Currently, the onboarding process is fragmented across multiple platforms, including the Applicant Tracking System, Enhanced Background Check, WOTC, and New Hire Queue, making it harder for specialists to manage candidates efficiently. To track a single candidate, specialists must jump between different systems, which complicates understanding and managing the overall onboarding journey.
User Research
How might we streamline candidate management during onboarding to give specialists full visibility into candidate progress across all stages?
After building context through meetings with Product Managers and understanding the broader pre-existing systems, our team reviewed 40+ pieces of user feedback to identify pain points in the current onboarding process. Using affinity mapping, I synthesized and summarized the key issues highlighted by users.
Complicated Workflow
The current process requires users to manually navigate to the appropriate pages while lacking fundamental functionalities for ease of use.
Lack of Clarity and Visibility
The inconsistent experience across pre-employment modules creates confusion and limits users’ ability to fully utilize the software.
Data Inconsistency
Applicant records are scattered across modules, creating inconsistencies and making them difficult to locate, which further hinders transparency.
We conducted 30–60 minute Zoom interviews with 10 internal users to uncover their experiences, needs, and pain points. Based on stakeholder input and our initial exploration of the product and problem space, we identified key user groups, including recruiters, HR pre-employment specialists, HR supervisors, and talent acquisition team leads. These conversations provided insights that further validated and clarified the key pain points.
Lack of an in-system tool that simplifies the every day tasks
“[I spend] at least an hour per candidate, and 70% of my time in my ledger.”
— Talent Acquisition Operations Specialist
“It’s very manual ... That’s why we call out that it would be really nice to [enhance the system] and not rely so much on a manual ledger.”
— Supervisor of Talent Acquisition
Difficulty in keeping track of candidate progress and bottlenecks
“It’s hard to keep track of where my candidates are at, and it’s also hard to see where they get stuck.”
— Collegiate Recruiter II
“We have to manually go into offered candidates [in ATS] like almost every hour ... I have to sift through [to see] where this person is in the process.”
— Talent Acquisition Operations Specialist
To complement our internal interviews, we conducted a survey targeting external users to capture diverse perspectives and broader onboarding experiences. We received 75 responses, all screened based on the respondents’ specific involvement and responsibilities in onboarding. This allowed us to understand general pain points in the onboarding process beyond our software and gather insights to inform a more universal, effective design solution.
36
primarily worry about candidate’s low sense of urgency for required actions
39
coordinate internal hand-offs through email with those involved
43
believe biggest challenge in internal coordination is due to multiple teams involved
In analyzing our user research, we developed three primary personas that represented the key needs, pain points, and goals of our target users.
Ideation
Brainstorming product goals and relevant features that address key user needs.
Moving onto the ideation phase, our team’s main objective was to clearly define a set of product goals that can be utilized to brainstorm features that directly address the user needs that were identified in our research.
After defining the preliminary features, I mapped them against business value and complexity to prioritize those offering high impact while still achievable. This helped the team focus on features that aligned with business goals, delivered meaningful user impact, and could be developed within the project timeline.
With the prioritized features defined, I created high-level user flows and low-fidelity mockups to visualize how users might interact with each feature. This process helped clarify functionality and identify the various screens users would encounter while completing their tasks.
Eloise: Identifying candidates who are having issues in the process
Oscar: Communicating candidate status with the recruiter
Sully: Getting an overview of the onboarding efforts
Data Visualization
Exploring how to incorporate data visualization to provide simple and effective insight into the onboarding efforts.
As part of enhancing transparency and providing deeper insight into the onboarding process, the Analytics page was proposed by project stakeholders as a stretch goal. I had the opportunity to lead both the research and design efforts for this feature.
Starting with the predefined list of onboarding metrics in the project requirements, I organized and prioritized them to identify the most valuable and feasible options for the initial MVP release. This prioritization ensured the final analytics would be actionable for stakeholders while fitting within the project’s technical and timeline constraints.
After identifying the most feasible analytics, I analyzed each metric’s purpose and target audience to determine the most effective visualization types for the design.
Iteration & User Testing
Designing with the goal of creating a seamless candidate management experience.
As we moved into mid-fidelity wireframes, our team held design workshops to share and validate ideas, followed by 3 rounds of usability testing with 8 users. I took ownership of the candidate profile drawer, comments section, assign-to drawer, and analytics page, iterating on these designs extensively based on user feedback, mentor guidance, and insights from Product Managers.
Due to the NDA policy, the exact high-fidelity designs cannot be shared; the designs have been modified to comply with these guidelines.
Concisely displaying candidate information
The candidate profile drawer gives specialists a quick overview of relevant candidate information, including their current onboarding stage and step. It also highlights any warnings or issues that require attention.
Version 1
Concise view of all relevant candidate information
Action button is not positioned where users expect to take action
Expanded view clutters the drawer as candidate progress through all stages
Version 2
Concise view of all relevant candidate information
Action button is difficult to locate within the expanded view
Expanded view clutters the drawer as candidate progress through all stages
Final Version
Concise view of all relevant candidate information
Action button is followed by candidate information
Progressive view that keeps the drawer organized
Streamlining internal communication
Specialists can communicate with internal dashboard users through a commenting feature that allows tagging specific individuals and marking comments as read, signaling to the sender that their message was seen. This eliminates the need to switch to a third-party communication tool, enabling all tasks to be conveniently completed within the platform.
Version 1
Feels too much like a chat
No way to search or sort for a specific comment
Final Version
Aligns with user expectation for a comments section
Search bar and sort function
Simplifying candidate assignment
The Assign To feature allows specialists to easily edit or assign an assignee for each specific onboarding step. This ensures that candidates are matched with the correct assignees while providing clear visibility into who is responsible for each stage of the process.
Version 1
Modal appears outside the user’s primary focus, making it hard to notice
Final Version
Drawer ensures a consistent user experience
Providing insights for high-level onboarding overview
Having the Analytics page accessible gives supervisors instant access to onboarding metrics, eliminating the need to manually export, clean, and calculate data in Excel. This saves significant time and effort, even for a single metric.
Version 1
A trend does not provide actionable insight
Final Version
Total new hire and departmental overview
Final Product
A new tool to transform the onboarding experience.
Due to the NDA policy, the exact high-fidelity designs cannot be shared; the designs have been modified to comply with these guidelines.
Impact
Users found the dashboard intuitive and useful, highlighting that the design aligns with their primary tasks and needs.
In the final round of user testing, we gathered insights on the dashboard’s effectiveness from the internal users we initially interviewed.
“For me, the value of the dashboard comes in providing context. This is super valuable because it provides a snapshot of where everyone sits.”
— Collegiate Recruiter II
“It’s a one-stop-shop for us, instead of having so many other windows open. This will get us out of Excel ledger for sure.”
— Talent Acquisition Operations Specialist
“I think this dashboard would replace a lot of the data I have to manually translate that aren’t consistently set to where I can pull a report”
— Supervisor of Talent Acquisition
Final Thoughts
Understand the products that you are working with
Because the onboarding dashboard encompasses the pre-existing hiring products, it was essential to understand their functionalities and pain points before diving into the project. During the discovery phase, our team held many conversations with users and mapped out user workflows to identify where the dashboard could best integrate into the existing processes.
Seek feedback as much as possible, but be sure to advocate for your decisions
With many different stakeholders involved, there were a lot of suggestions and insights offered throughout the design process. Although these were valuable for guidance, it was also crucial to clearly communicate design decisions and project direction based on thoughtful and informed reasoning, while remaining open to new perspectives.
Design is far from being a linear process
Due to the ambiguity of the project scope and the need for extensive research, I had to frequently revisit prior design steps to validate new assumptions or conduct additional research. I learned to navigate a non-linear design process and became a more adaptable designer, making the most of the resources and constraints available.
Thank you!
Shout out to my amazing team for all the discussions, workshops, and hard work that brought our vision to life 🦭💖
+ our manager KP, mentor Pedro, and the Product Design Intern cohort for a fun and memorable summer!
