Designing a Career Portal that
Surfaces Overlooked Technical Talent
Project Summary
Designed a first-party career portal that enables non-traditional technical candidates to discover roles, apply flexibly, and track progress — reducing friction caused by traditional ATS systems.
Company: Onramp
Role: Lead UX Designer
Duration: 1 Month
Impact After Launch:
• Platform usage grew from 300 → 50,000+ users
• Application clarity rated 4.9/5 by candidates
• Increased application completion and candidate diversity
Context
Onramp relied on third-party applicant tracking systems that unintentionally filter out non-traditional candidates.
These systems prioritize resume keywords and rigid application formats, limiting applicant diversity and increasing drop-off for time-constrained users.
🔎 The Problem
Onramp relied on third-party job platforms that unintentionally filter out non-traditional candidates (self-taught developers, bootcamp grads, career switchers).
These systems prioritize employer keyword filtering over applicant experience, creating:
High application drop off
Resume based filtering bias
Friction for users with limited time
Intimidation around “not meeting 100% of requirements”
Onramp’s business model depended on discovering strong but overlooked talent.
The application system was working against that goal.
💻 My Role
I led the end-to-end UX strategy and design of a first-party career portal, including:
Stakeholder interviews with founders
Synthesis of customer success feedback
User journey mapping
Information architecture
Mobile + desktop flows
High-fidelity UI design
Structured data system for reusable profiles
Collaborated with: Founders, Customer Success, Engineering
🤝 Key Insights
Through stakeholder interviews and customer success insights, three behavioral patterns emerged:
High-skill, low-confidence applicants
who self-filtered out if they didn’t meet every listed requirement.Time-constrained career switchers
needing flexible, savable progress.Candidates filtered out by ATS systems
due to resume structure, not ability.
The core issue: applications are optimized for employer efficiency instead of applicant equity.
🎯Strategic Decisions
Shift from resume filtering to skill based discovery
Instead of prioritizing job titles, I designed role discovery around skill clusters.
This allowed candidates to discover roles aligned with strengths even if titles didn’t match their background.
Why it mattered:
Reduced self-elimination and increased perceived relevance.
1
Break the application Into flexible, savable modules
Applications were redesigned into independent, progress-savable sections:
Profile information, skillset selection, essay, technical assessment, and more
Users could leave and return at any time.
Why it mattered:
Accommodated non-traditional users working multiple jobs or with caregiving responsibilities.
2
Create a structured, reusable candidate profile
User data was structured and auto loaded into future applications.
From their profile page, users could update or change this information at any time.
Why it mattered:
Reduced repetition and cognitive load, increasing completion likelihood.
3
Design job pages that reduce applicant intimidation
Instead of dense requirement lists, roles were presented with:
Clear skill expectations
Visual hierarchy
Encouraging microcopy
Emphasis on growth potential
Why it mattered:
Reduced cognitive load & ambiguity and improved user confidence.
4
📝Process visuals
I translated insights into design solutions through early sketches and a cross-platform user flow.
These artifacts helped align stakeholders and guided high-fidelity design decisions.
Early exploration of the candidate journey
A low-fidelity sketch of the user flow mapping role discovery, application, and profile to identify friction points and experiment with layout.
Cross-Platform Interaction & Modular Application Flow
Visualized key decision points, progress-saving features, and skill-based filtering to ensure clarity for stakeholders and development handoff.
✨ Project Outcomes - Post Launch
★ Platform grew from 300 → 50K+ users
★ Application completion and applicant diversity increased
★ Application experience rated 4.9/5 for clarity and usability
★ Improved internal ability to evaluate candidate skills
★ Modular application steps revealed real time drop off points
💡What I Learned
Designing for inclusion requires more than visual polish, it requires restructuring systems that subtly disadvantage users.
This project strengthened my ability to:
Balance business goals with equity driven design
Translate behavioral insights into product decisions
Design scalable systems across platforms