Insight Global
2022
Five recruiting tools into one CRM, 45% faster
One CRM replacing five disconnected tools, with 45% faster tasks and 28% fewer data entry errors.
Overview
One requisition, five systems
Recruiters and account managers ran their entire day across five disconnected tools. Acquiring requisitions, managing applicants, managing accounts, filling and closing roles: each lived somewhere different, and moving one requisition through its lifecycle meant re-entering the same information repeatedly and losing the thread between steps.
We designed a single CRM covering the full requisition lifecycle, built around the workflows employees already had rather than feature parity with the tools it replaced.
Problem
Coordination living in message threads
The cost wasn't only time. Recruiters and account managers work the same requisitions from different angles, but because their tools didn't overlap, coordination happened over messages rather than in a shared system. Status was always slightly out of date and the same questions got asked repeatedly.
People were also frequently out at client sites, so desktop-bound work waited until they were back.
Research
Mapping the work as it actually happened
We mapped the real path a requisition takes from intake to close across all five tools. Alongside that I ran twice-weekly design reviews with the client's product owner, UX designer, two subject-matter experts, and their COO. Those sessions worked as ongoing research as much as approval gates, since the people reviewing the work were the people who'd live in it.
The five systems were each coherent on their own, but nobody's job matched the boundaries between them. Every tool switch meant rebuilding context around where a requisition stood and what the account manager had promised the client. People weren't slow because the tools were slow. Nothing carried the thread from one step to the next.
Design
Collapsing five workflows into one
I worked alongside a principal designer who went on maternity leave partway through, and carried the work to completion from there. Each feature started from the current-state workflow: I'd map what a task looked like across the existing tools, then design the version that collapsed it into one. Twice-weekly reviews walked stakeholders through both the flow they knew and the flow replacing it, which made the case for each change concrete instead of abstract.
Role-based permissions let recruiters and account managers work the same records with different capabilities, so handoffs live in the product instead of message threads. Every view is responsive, built for someone checking a pipeline from a client's lobby.
The design system carries their brand into the product. They use bright colors and confetti as part of their identity, and applying that to a tool people sit in all day keeps it feeling like theirs. I also trained the client's UX team on the system so they could extend it after we rolled off.
Outcomes
Key outcomes
Reflection
Earning the switch
The hardest part wasn't designing the tool, it was earning the switch. Consolidating five tools means asking people to give up workarounds they've spent years perfecting, and a better system on paper loses to a familiar one in practice. Showing stakeholders their current flow next to the new one in every review did more for buy-in than any polished prototype would have.
Taking the project over partway through taught me something too. Continuity mattered more than authorship. The value was in preserving the reasoning behind decisions already made rather than re-deciding them.
