Case study

OS for Recruiters

A flexible recruiting workspace with AI inside the work

at SeekOut ↗

Choose your depth

The problem, my contribution, outcomes, and strongest screens.

My role

Product design · Product strategy · AI system design

Product focus

Reframing a linear recruiting product as a flexible, chat-first workspace built around requisitions and structured artifacts.

The Short Version

SPOT v1 proved that recruiters would use AI in a live search. It also exposed the limits of a product built as a sequence of stages. Requirements changed after intake, calibration happened once real profiles appeared, and hiring-manager feedback arrived while candidates were already moving. For v2, I helped rethink SPOT as a workspace. Each requisition has its own chat, context, and structured artifacts for intake, market analysis, sourcing, engagement, reports, and settings. Recruiters choose where to work. The AI can research, draft, score, and propose changes without turning its preferred sequence into the process.

The Mess

The hardest problem was trust. Recruiters reported false positives in scoring and rewrote outreach that missed their bar. Their approvals, rejections, and edits never reached the model, so the tenth search started with the same blind spots as the first. The interface added another cost: running an evaluation, changing a status, or finding one candidate often meant crossing several screens. People moved work into Claude, personal notes, and Excel because those tools were faster. That left SPOT with an incomplete record and gave its AI less context for the next decision.

My Part in This

Helped move SPOT from a prescribed stage flow to a chat-first workspace that can absorb changes during a search.
Defined the requisition as an isolated unit of work, with its own artifacts, conversation history, edits, and AI context.
Designed market research, talent-pool analysis, constraint testing, and calibration as one place to challenge a brief before sourcing at scale.

What Got Better

Defined a workspace model that lets recruiters change direction without losing the history or criteria behind a search.
Made artifacts the source of truth, giving chat a stable set of job details, strategies, candidates, messages, and reports to work from.
Set clear approval boundaries for AI research, drafting, scoring, outreach, and hiring-manager sharing.
Connected day-to-day candidate work with a cross-requisition task queue, recovery states, and an audit trail.

Impact

What Actually Moved

For the Business

Defined one requisition model for chat, artifacts, candidate work, reporting, and audit history, giving product teams a shared structure for SPOT v2.

For the Humans

Recruiters can change direction, inspect AI proposals, and return to the current state of a search without reconstructing it from chat or personal notes.

For the Spreadsheet

The product brief sets measurable targets, including outreach within two hours of intake, a 20% reply rate, and 80% recruiter approval of outreach-ready candidates.

Inside the workspace

One requisition, several ways to work

The screens below show how a recruiter moves through intake, sourcing, engagement, scheduling, and hiring-manager review while the requisition keeps the shared context.

Intake & Evaluate flow

Start with what the recruiter has

The intake area accepts a job description and prepares the material for the first hiring-manager conversation. A live call or an existing recording can then update the same requisition context, including the summary, questions, and follow-up.

Build an intake brief from the job description, company context, and known requirements.
Capture the conversation live or process a recording from a call that already happened.
Keep the recording, questions, summary, and follow-up together in the requisition.

Highlights

Prepare the intake in one place

The job description becomes working material for the intake meeting and remains part of the requisition afterward.

Intake & Evaluate · 01

The recruiter can paste, upload, or link the job description. SPOT shows the intake material it will prepare before generation starts.

Intake & Evaluate · 02

The generated prep separates the role summary, agenda, questions, market context, and illustrative profiles into sections a recruiter can review before the call.

Product story

Live call or existing recording

Both capture paths update the same intake record, so the rest of the search can use the resulting context.

Intake & Evaluate · 03

Live Capture follows the intake conversation and marks questions as they are answered, giving the recruiter a usable record of the call.

Intake & Evaluate · 04

A Zoom meeting ID or transcript brings an earlier call into the requisition for processing.

Intake & Evaluate · 05

The recording action becomes available once SPOT has a valid meeting source.

Deep dive

Show the work in progress

The recruiter can see what SPOT is doing and review the resulting intake material in the same area.

Intake & Evaluate · 06

Processing reports each step as SPOT downloads the recording, creates the transcript, writes the summary, and drafts the follow-up.

Intake & Evaluate · 07

The last processing step drafts the recap email from the captured conversation for the recruiter to review.

Intake & Evaluate · 08

The finished intake keeps the recording, summary, question log, profiles, and follow-up email together as working context for the search.

Intake & Evaluate flow

Start with what the recruiter has

Build an intake brief from the job description, company context, and known requirements.
Capture the conversation live or process a recording from a call that already happened.
Keep the recording, questions, summary, and follow-up together in the requisition.

Highlights

Prepare the intake in one place

The job description becomes working material for the intake meeting and remains part of the requisition afterward.

Intake & Evaluate · 01

The recruiter can paste, upload, or link the job description. SPOT shows the intake material it will prepare before generation starts.

Intake & Evaluate · 02

The generated prep separates the role summary, agenda, questions, market context, and illustrative profiles into sections a recruiter can review before the call.

Product story

Live call or existing recording

Both capture paths update the same intake record, so the rest of the search can use the resulting context.

Intake & Evaluate · 03

Live Capture follows the intake conversation and marks questions as they are answered, giving the recruiter a usable record of the call.

Intake & Evaluate · 04

A Zoom meeting ID or transcript brings an earlier call into the requisition for processing.

Intake & Evaluate · 05

The recording action becomes available once SPOT has a valid meeting source.

Deep dive

Show the work in progress

The recruiter can see what SPOT is doing and review the resulting intake material in the same area.

Intake & Evaluate · 06

Processing reports each step as SPOT downloads the recording, creates the transcript, writes the summary, and drafts the follow-up.

Intake & Evaluate · 07

The last processing step drafts the recap email from the captured conversation for the recruiter to review.

Intake & Evaluate · 08

The finished intake keeps the recording, summary, question log, profiles, and follow-up email together as working context for the search.

Sourcing flow

Turn the brief into a search strategy

A sourcing strategy describes the candidate profile, five-point rubric, sourcing angles, search indexes, and calibration history for one lane of a requisition. Search results keep the strategy and qualification reasoning attached.

Create one or more sourcing lanes from the role requirements and market findings.
Review the rubric, angles, boolean queries, and indexes while the strategy is still a draft.
Calibrate on profiles and record the preferences that emerge from each decision.
Run the search, inspect the reasons behind each score, and clone the locked strategy when the brief changes.

01 / Set the search in motion

Make generation visible

The recruiter starts the work deliberately and can see which parts of the search are being created.

Sourcing · 01

The sourcing area starts from the current requisition context and gives the recruiter one place to generate the scorecard, strategies, and candidate set.

Sourcing · 02

Progress is split across scorecard, strategy, and candidate evaluation so the recruiter can see what is complete and what is still running.

02 / Inspect the strategy

Inspect the search logic

Strategy details make the assumptions and market shape available for review before the recruiter acts on the results.

Sourcing · 03

Each strategy opens into the market it produced, including candidate volume, seniority, locations, skills, and titles.

Sourcing · 04

The scorecard sits beside the resume and links each requirement to the evidence used in the assessment.

03 / Tune the evaluation

Choose the evaluation scope

Evaluation depth remains an explicit recruiter choice, with the size and consequence shown before the run begins.

Sourcing · 05

The recruiter chooses how many candidates to evaluate for each strategy and reviews SPOT's recommendation before finalizing the version.

Sourcing · 06

The candidate table keeps required criteria, preferred signals, screening status, and team tags visible during comparison.

04 / Prepare the handoff

Prepare the candidate view

Column choices and shared tags give the next reviewer the same vocabulary the sourcing team used.

Sourcing · 07

Recruiters choose which rubric criteria appear as columns, tailoring the comparison to the current hiring team.

Sourcing · 08

Shared tag definitions keep labels such as Hot lead and Previously contacted consistent across the team.

Market & Views flow

Research the market and build the briefing

Market Analysis keeps talent-pool evidence and company research inside the requisition. Views turns current workspace data into reports a recruiter can review, present, and selectively share with hiring managers.

Use filters and rubric columns to prepare the candidate set for review.
Generate reports from live requisition data and revise individual sections through chat.
Research the talent market, compensation, company, and hiring context before sharing a view.

Market & Views · 01

The candidate list can be filtered by owner, strategy, pipeline stage, contact state, screening state, presentation status, and team tags.

Market & Views · 02

Rubric controls let the recruiter choose which required and preferred criteria appear in the comparison table.

Market & Views · 03

Views collects intake material, weekly updates, and timeline reports that can be opened, revised, presented, or shared through the hiring-manager portal.

Market & Views · 04

Market Analysis combines a talent-pool estimate with location data, calibration profiles, and compensation research for the role.

Market & Views · 05

The company report collects business information, relevant news, hiring-manager context, team calibration, and compensation findings for the intake conversation.

Inbox & Calendar flow

Manage the relationship in Engage

Engage combines the candidate list, email threads, calendar, and pipeline metrics over the same data. Recruiters can move from a reply to a screening without losing the candidate, requisition, or outreach context.

Review candidate threads with their pipeline stage, sequence, engagement, and labels in view.
Draft individual or bulk outreach from configured identity, sequence, and sending preferences.
Use Outlook availability for booking links or create a screening invite from the calendar.

Inbox & Calendar · 01

A replied thread keeps the candidate's role, location, sequence, reply status, labels, and full message history in one drawer.

Inbox & Calendar · 02

An active sequence is shown in the thread so the recruiter can see when scheduled outreach affects the next available action.

Inbox & Calendar · 03

Inbox filters combine contact status, pipeline stage, labels, and candidate search to find the threads that need attention.

Inbox & Calendar · 04

The monthly calendar shows candidate screenings, intake meetings, and connected Outlook events with a clear event legend.

Inbox & Calendar · 05

The invite form uses the selected day and lets the recruiter choose a candidate, available time, duration, meeting type, and link.

Presentation flow

Give the hiring manager a focused review surface

The hiring-manager portal starts with open requisitions and the decisions waiting on each one. Shared views provide supporting context, while candidate pages hold the profile, recruiter rationale, and available screening evidence.

Find open roles by their unreviewed, approved, and rejected candidate counts.
Open a requisition to review candidates and the views the recruiter has chosen to share.
Read the candidate evidence and recruiter rationale before recording a decision and notes.

Presentation · 01

The portal home lists open requisitions with submitted-candidate counts and review activity so hiring managers can see where a decision is waiting.

Presentation · 02

The requisition page brings candidate groups, review status, the role brief, and recent activity into one focused view.

Presentation · 03

The candidate review combines the intake recording, timestamped topics, profile signals, and scorecard before a decision is recorded.

Presentation · 04

AI Screening organizes the conversation by question, with the recording, summary, transcript, and scorecard evidence available together.

Presentation · 05

The GitHub view adds contribution history, languages, and repositories as supporting material beside the role scorecard.

The Short Version

The Mess

My Part in This

What Got Better

For the Business

For the Humans

For the Spreadsheet

Start with what the recruiter has

Intake & Evaluate flow

Start with what the recruiter has

Sourcing flow

Turn the brief into a search strategy

Market & Views flow

Research the market and build the briefing

Inbox & Calendar flow

Manage the relationship in Engage

Presentation flow

Give the hiring manager a focused review surface

There Is More. Naturally.