Redesigning Laskie, from every angle
Sole designer alongside four engineers. I worked across every side of Laskie’s tech-recruitment marketplace and let the deeper patterns surface from the work itself.
The Challenge
Laskie was a high-growth marketplace pairing engineering talent with tech companies — already live and shipping when I joined as sole designer. The brief was clear: take the priority work and keep the team shipping. The pace didn’t leave room for foundational research. The team had named the surface UI pains. The deeper patterns were still hidden in the day-to-day work.
The Approach
I worked the marketplace systematically — entry funnels, client side, candidate side, the internal recruiter platform — in tight cycles. Ship, listen, ship again. The deepest patterns only surfaced from doing the work, not before it.
- Systematic redesign across every side of the marketplace
- Eliminated the 30-minute “double input” tax recruiters paid per interview
- Earned the research that rebuilt the recruiter dashboard around real workflow
The Backlog
Taking the priority queue
Laskie connected three groups: clients hiring engineers, candidates looking for work, and the internal roles running the marketplace: Talent Partners and BizOps.
Redesigning the three entry funnels
Three doors, each shaped by who walks in: candidates applying, clients creating accounts, and job referrals from Laskie’s network. Each funnel asked only what was needed to get the right user to the right next step.
Rebuilding the client portal
The client portal handles the full hiring loop: setting up a company profile, building job postings, and managing the pipeline of candidates flowing through. Each candidate card carries the actions a hiring manager actually takes: invite to interview, ask a clarifying question, or pass with structured feedback that loops back to the candidate and to Laskie.
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Reworking the candidate's invitation flow
Candidates encounter Laskie as a stream of opportunities, one invitation at a time. The redesign anchored the moment of decision: a single editorial landing page that explains who’s asking, why, and what’s next. Once they accept, the next step is already booked — a clear handoff with the option to schedule interview prep with their Talent Partner.
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Redesigning the recruiter platform
Talent Partners and BizOps share one internal platform with role-aware access. BizOps sees everything Talent Partners do, plus an admin layer underneath for managing client accounts directly — two roles, one source of truth.
The Talent Partner’s core job is matching candidates to jobs: good fit now, park for later, or move them to the next available role. The flow had enough branching that screens couldn’t be the starting point. I drew the system first, then built.
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Output-optimized — built for scanning, not capturing.
Every candidate runs through this — Homing Pigeon sits inside it, with the AM as a mandatory second filter.
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Match or No Match — the per-job decision that calls the next step.
By the time I’d touched every side of the marketplace, a pattern was about to surface that none of these screens, by themselves, made obvious.
The Editor
Killing the double input.
While redesigning candidate Matching Data, a pattern surfaced. Talent Partners had been working around the platform for months — notes in Word during interviews, copy-pasted into Laskie afterward, section by section. The fix had been hiding inside the work I was already doing.
The pattern that was costing 30 minutes per call
The editor wasn’t built for the rhythm of a live interview, so Talent Partners ran a parallel system — and quality slipped every time fatigue did. The fix wasn’t a smarter form. It was a different premise: what if the editor served the call, not the database? I worked with engineering to restructure it for real-time note-taking, with a Notes section catching qualitative observations. The external tool walked out of the workflow.
Before
- 1Call with the candidate
- 2Notes typed in Word or Google Sheets
- 3Call ends
- 4Notes manually copied into Laskie, section by section
+30 min · every interview
After
- 1Call with the candidate
- 2Talent Partner types directly into Laskie
- 3Call ends — profile is ready
0 min extra
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Input-optimized — sectioned for the rhythm of a live call.
When the editor shipped, the three Talent Partners I re-interviewed post-launch confirmed the 30-minute tax was gone — the cleanest validation a designer can earn.
The Zoom-Out
What I couldn’t see while building.
With most of the marketplace redesigned, I stepped back: formal research with the people who used the platform every day. Not as the foundation of the project — as its zoom-out. The work had given me the context to ask the right questions.
The wider workflow
I ran 45-minute interviews with three Talent Partners and two BizOps employees. Three threads carried every conversation:
- Step-by-step activity mapping Documented their daily flow on the platform so the team had a shared reality.
- Pain point discovery Located friction at every step and stress-tested possible fixes against their real constraints.
- Feature feedback Pulled direct reactions to the redesigned editor and surfaced gaps the team hadn’t seen.
I turned those calls into a shared process map in FigJam — a blueprint of the operational landscape, candidate side and job side. For the first time the team could see, in one place, where the workflow leaked.
Each step in the flow is a place time can leak.
The funnel, finally legible
Talent Partners couldn’t see the shape of their day from any single screen — candidates were scattered across queues, statuses, and someone’s spreadsheet. The dashboard collapsed all of it into one view: every stage with a count, every status one click from drilling in. The funnel that used to live in a recruiter’s head finally belonged to the team that ran it.
Simpler navigation
Navigation had grown organically and now made daily tasks longer than they needed to be. Talent Partners were clicking through the wrong tabs, hunting for a Shortlisted view that didn’t have its own home, and re-doing context they’d just had. The research said it plainly: this was one of the two changes that would move the dial the most.
I rebuilt the navigation around the recruiter’s actual rhythm. Shortlisted got its own home. Candidate tabs aligned to the vetting stages they actually moved through (New, Shortlisted, Waiting on Vetting Request, Client Waiting on Me). Every path between two related screens got shorter by at least a click.
Beyond the platform — the brand layer
Alongside the platform work, I built the reusable components and visual assets that kept Laskie consistent in product and social — the brand layer that ships only when someone tends to it.
Takeaways
What this project proved
Key Takeaway
Engineers who complain about the same thing for months are doing research — they just call it venting. The fastest path to design wins, in this kind of team, was to ship across the marketplace before researching it, then research what shipping couldn’t see.
