Employer facing platform that connects recruiters with the university network

Link 1 was a manual, managed service. Built on legacy tech and shared codebases, it couldn’t hold UI consistency or support modern components, so internal admins ran the posting process on behalf of every client.

Link 2 is a ground up rebuild that turns the platform into a self serve product. Employers can now sign up, post, pay, and track data without a human safety net. This gives our enterprise clients the freedom to do more on their own. And when they would rather stay fully managed, our internal team now runs their accounts on the same platform, with better reporting and a much faster workflow behind the scenes.

I shadowed the admin teams to see why the process leaned so hard on people. They spent hours correcting typos and rewriting vague descriptions so universities wouldn’t reject them, and even a simple post took at least twenty minutes across a dozen open tabs.

Three problems had to be solved in the UI.

• Weak job descriptions. Users write incomplete descriptions that don’t pass university criteria, so the interface has to prevent weak posts, not fix them after the fact.
• University rejections. Universities reject posts that miss their criteria, and high rejection rates would damage the partnerships.
• No self serve reporting. Only enterprise clients got performance reports, and the internal team had to generate them by hand.

The Link 1 form dumped everything on one screen. The rebuild chunks it.

• Guided multi-step flow. One themed stage at a time, so the form feels lighter and builds momentum.
• Remembered data. Recurring details like benefits and office locations pre-fill, so users only touch what’s unique to the role.
• Paste a link or spec. Drop in a URL or raw job spec and watch the system extract and map it into the form in real time, a transparent interaction that builds trust in the automation.
• Live scoring. A floating sidebar scores quality as the role is built. At review the AI gives a final score and flags the exact sections to fix, rather than bouncing users back at payment or publish.

The form talks back as you go

Guidance sits beside each stage, and an AI assistant is on hand to answer questions the moment they come up, so no one has to guess or leave the flow to find help. It also nudges on the choices that quietly cost performance. Leave the salary off and it checks you are sure, since roles without one tend to perform worse. Put in a figure below minimum wage, or below the going rate for the role, and it flags that too, before the post ever reaches a university.

The payoff is not just a faster form.

A guided, well scored description is clearer and more complete, so it draws more applications and clears university criteria the first time, where a rushed post would stall or bounce back.

Every job posted still has to be approved by universities, and they reject anything that misses their criteria. If we let employers post directly, we risked burying the universities in bad posts.

So instead of making moderators work harder, I looked at the whole process and moved quality control to the start. By forcing better inputs while the employer writes the post, jobs arrive at the university already meeting their standards. Universities now do a quick check instead of a full rewrite, which protects the partnerships.

I designed the new reporting suite on a Bento Box layout built for high density information. High level metrics are glanceable, granular data one click away. Benchmarking charts place a user’s performance on an axis against their peers, giving instant context that used to take an account manager an hour to explain. The internal team now works from the same real time suite as clients, which did away with the spreadsheet trap.

Role statuses and application statuses live on the dashboard and in job details, with payment status and contextual tips alongside. A simple ruling system pairs every state with a clear next action, so recruiters and admins always know whether a role is live, in review, or needs something from them, without a support ticket.

I created the ruling as the design spec for engineering, mapping every combination of role, application and payment status to exactly what the interface should display. It covers every scenario, from an approved role hiding its status pill to a rejected role showing a cancelled payment. This logic was checked in refinement and built straight from the design with no back and forth.

Admins went from running every post to spot checking the few that still need it, and employers who used to wait on a person now sign up, post, pay and track a role themselves. Enterprise clients were not left behind. Those who prefer to stay fully managed get the same rebuilt platform run on their behalf, with better reporting than the spreadsheets it replaced, so both models now run on one system.

Because better inputs clear moderation the first time, fewer posts bounce back and more roles reach the university network, which is the whole point of Link. The roles that go out are stronger too, drawing more applications once they are live. Posting a role dropped from twenty minutes to six, self serve rejections fell by more than half, and revenue grew 365% in the first six months.