Researching & designing An Applicant tracking system (ATS), designed to find the best software engineering talent

The TLDR

User Problem

Without dedicated recruitment agencies, HR professionals in Sri Lanka struggle to quickly identify qualified software engineering candidates from vast applicant pools.

Team

1 Product Design Lead (Moí)

4 UX Designers

2 front-end engineers

1 Product manager

1 Development team liason

The Process

Interviews.
Personas
User stories.
Product feature roadmap.
Information architecture map
Wireframing design and testing.
High-fidelity prototype design.
Usability testing.
Release v1

The Impact

Validated product features, and identified Product-Market Fit (PMF).

Implemented Agile RnD processes.
Deliver Kastane V1 demo within 8 months.
Designed training workshops

Competitive Landscape

There's no end-to-end solution for job applications, hiring, and talent management in Sri Lanka.

Candidates prefer to use job boards like:
Topjobs.lk , Careers 360 , Ikman , Jobpalm.lk
Companies use in-house solutions that cater to their specific hiring practices.
LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Greenhouse etc. are all unpopular.

User Problem:

Senior staff spend hours/days/weeks helping select applicants even after a recruiter filters candidates

Candidates with impressive resumes frequently fail basic technical assessments.
Technical leadership involvement in resume screening helps catch red flags, but diverts valuable attention from product work.
The high cost of hiring mistakes is painful in the competitive software engineering talent market

Solution

An Applicant Tracking System that verified, and filtered out 5-25% of unsuitable talent

Helps hiring managers quickly bulk filter out under-skilled candidates.
Auto-update candidates on their progress without needing an account.

We had 2 main goals:

Reduce friction for job applicants, while getting the "right" information.
Help hiring managers quickly bulk filter out candidates.

So we designed our final prototype features to cater to our two primary users: job creators, and job applicants.

Finding the User pain point

The Greatest Pain Point Was Around Bulk Talent Screening, and Screening Out the Most Unqualified Talent

In order to focus our MVP on achieving the strongest “Sean Ellis Test” score, our research goals focussed on identifying the most time/cost-consuming pain-points.

…which was revealed to be the bulk resume screening stage — which many users reported as being time-consuming, costly, and frustrating.

Internal Design Feedback Iterations

We took these new insights and updated the existing design deliverables

We tried to push how far we could improve the quality of applications coming through, while balancing the mental models that recruiters and applicants had collected over time.

Problem
We opted for a job creation wizard that would break the job creation process into its simplest pieces.
Feedback
We overshot simplicity, and discovered a need to stick to the mental models recruiters had gathered over years of sifting through job application tools.
Problem
Long job descriptions were the standard, but not a good one.

We explored limiting job criteria creation, encouraging the user to write more targeted job descriptions that attracted the exact talent they were looking for.
Feedback
This was a high-friction screen that made no sense to recruiters. We had to find another approach to bridge existing JD's, hiring practices, and a solution that could reliably analyze resumes.
Problem
Recruiters needed to quickly identify the relevant talent, but have some 'wiggle room' to identify long-shot talent.
Feedback
Giving fine control over filtering categories when no applications had come in yet was unrealistic.

This function would be better served with filters after applications had come through.
Problem
We had to give them the opportunity to review and correct errors before publishing.
Feedback
The high time-on-page for this screen taught us we had too many steps requiring lots of backtracking and editing.

Oversimplification

Experimented with a job posting wizard.
Over-simplification conflicted with recruiters' established mental models from existing tools.

Balancing novelty with familiarity

Initially restricted job criteria creation to encourage more targeted job descriptions.
Pivoted away from after recruiters found it cognitively burdensome, and non-transparent.

Grouping Similar functions

Initially offered detailed pre-filtering options for candidate selection
Shifted to letting recruiters apply filters after applications arrived to reduce cognitive burden.

Error Correction Affordances

Added a review step for error correction handling.

User-testing showed long time-on-page due to excessive backtracking and editing, indicating need for streamlining.

Key Features

A Job Portal and Applicant Tracking System that Filtered Out 5-25% of the Underqualified Talent Pool

Creating & post a Job to all platforms
Upload existing Job Descriptions or using a template
Parse resumes for exact & fuzzy skills
Applicants can apply using their email — no multiple accounts needed
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or row view
Accessibly designed — low contrast, keyboard navigable, with multiple error correction opportunities before and after publishing a job posting

Creating & posting a Job opening to all platforms
"How is this job posting performing?” task completion time reduced = 45.5 sec → 12 sec.
Upload existing Job Descriptions or use one of our templates
Including pre-made templates and 'Upload a PDF' features reduced “Create and publish a job posting” task completion time by 15.25 mins.
Setup how you want to Parse & test resumes for skills
1. Autopopulating keywords from previous steps resulted in strong positive user reaction.
2. Revised cards increased Saccade Efficiency by +42% ave.
Applicants can apply using their email — no account needed!
'Save progress' increased total task completion time by:
1. Reduced time-on-page by 4 mins.
2. Increased 'technical questions' grade ave. by 2.5 points.
3. Reduced application abandonment rate by -25%
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Choose from a library of premade tests for hundreds of different roles
'Select an assessment that compliments the job' task completion time reduced from 5 → 1.5 mins after:
1. Revising side-menu filtering behavior.
2. Assessment card content
Accessibly designed — low contrast, keyboard navigable, with multiple error diagnosis & correction opportunities
1. Resolved 163 unique accessibility issues (WAVE)
2. Error correction time reduced from 13.5–9.25 mins ave.
Creating & posting a Job opening to all platforms
"How is this job posting performing?” task completion time reduced = 45.5 sec → 12 sec.
Upload existing Job Descriptions or use one of our templates
Including pre-made templates and 'Upload a PDF' features reduced “Create and publish a job posting” task completion time by 15.25 mins.
Setup how you want to Parse & test resumes for skills
1. Autopopulating keywords from previous steps resulted in strong positive user reaction.
2. Revised cards increased Saccade Efficiency by +42% ave.
Applicants can apply using their email — no account needed!
'Save progress' increased total task completion time by:
1. Reduced time-on-page by 4 mins.
2. Increased 'technical questions' grade ave. by 2.5 points.
3. Reduced application abandonment rate by -25%
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Choose from a library of premade tests for hundreds of different roles
'Select an assessment that compliments the job' task completion time reduced from 5 → 1.5 mins after:
1. Revising side-menu filtering behavior.
2. Assessment card content
Accessibly designed — low contrast, keyboard navigable, with multiple error diagnosis & correction opportunities
1. Resolved 163 unique accessibility issues (WAVE)
2. Error correction time reduced from 13.5–9.25 mins ave.
Creating & posting a Job opening to all platforms
"How is this job posting performing?” task completion time reduced = 45.5 sec → 12 sec.
Upload existing Job Descriptions or use one of our templates
Including pre-made templates and 'Upload a PDF' features reduced “Create and publish a job posting” task completion time by 15.25 mins.
Setup how you want to Parse & test resumes for skills
1. Autopopulating keywords from previous steps resulted in strong positive user reaction.
2. Revised cards increased Saccade Efficiency by +42% ave.
Applicants can apply using their email — no account needed!
'Save progress' increased total task completion time by:
1. Reduced time-on-page by 4 mins.
2. Increased 'technical questions' grade ave. by 2.5 points.
3. Reduced application abandonment rate by -25%
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Choose from a library of premade tests for hundreds of different roles
'Select an assessment that compliments the job' task completion time reduced from 5 → 1.5 mins after:
1. Revising side-menu filtering behavior.
2. Assessment card content
Accessibly designed — low contrast, keyboard navigable, with multiple error diagnosis & correction opportunities
1. Resolved 163 unique accessibility issues (WAVE)
2. Error correction time reduced from 13.5–9.25 mins ave.
Creating & posting a Job opening to all platforms
"How is this job posting performing?” task completion time reduced = 45.5 sec → 12 sec.
Upload existing Job Descriptions or use one of our templates
Including pre-made templates and 'Upload a PDF' features reduced “Create and publish a job posting” task completion time by 15.25 mins.
Setup how you want to Parse & test resumes for skills
1. Autopopulating keywords from previous steps resulted in strong positive user reaction.
2. Revised cards increased Saccade Efficiency by +42% ave.
Applicants can apply using their email — no account needed!
'Save progress' increased total task completion time by:
1. Reduced time-on-page by 4 mins.
2. Increased 'technical questions' grade ave. by 2.5 points.
3. Reduced application abandonment rate by -25%
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Filter & shortlist candidates in card or list view
'Shortlist qualified candidates' task completion time reduced from 25 mins → 11.5 mins ave.
Choose from a library of premade tests for hundreds of different roles
'Select an assessment that compliments the job' task completion time reduced from 5 → 1.5 mins after:
1. Revising side-menu filtering behavior.
2. Assessment card content
Accessibly designed — low contrast, keyboard navigable, with multiple error diagnosis & correction opportunities
1. Resolved 163 unique accessibility issues (WAVE)
2. Error correction time reduced from 13.5–9.25 mins ave.