Spire

Enterprise Talent Management

Sr. Director & Head of Design, Bangalore

Role: Product Designer, Design Manager

Team: Self + 3 Product Designer + 2 Product Manager.

Stakeholders: Engineering, CEO, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience

Time: 18 weeks.

Process: Customer Needs, App Architecture, Primary User research, Design Interactions

Spire Market Positioning

Traditional ATS platforms such as Oracle Taleo, IBM BrassRing, and SAP SuccessFactors primarily support applicant tracking, but leave significant gaps in the recruiter’s day-to-day workflow:

Manual screening & matching: Recruiters spend significant time reviewing resumes and matching candidates to roles.
Recruiter dependency: Hiring outcomes rely heavily on recruiter expertise, time, and individual judgment.
Potential for bias: Manual screening can introduce unconscious bias across factors such as gender, age, race, or background.
Missed talent: Recruiters may not have time to review every application, causing relevant candidates to be overlooked.
Longer hiring cycles: Manual processes can increase time-to-hire and the associated cost of recruitment.
Limited actionable insights: Recruiters often rely on spreadsheets and offline tools for operational reporting, with limited visibility into pipeline health and recruiter performance.

Company Offerings

Spire helps organizations identify and hire quality candidates with greater speed and consistency by reducing manual effort, improving matching, automating recruitment workflows, and providing actionable hiring analytics.

Its Contextual AI platform uses AI and ML to understand the meaning and context within unstructured content, enabling the technology to be applied across different domains and industries.

How It Works

Unstructured Data Comprehension: Reads, interprets, and derives contextual meaning from unstructured text.
Domain Intelligence: Learns business context to achieve high contextual accuracy within weeks of deployment.
Contextual Analysis: Uses contextual search and matching to connect demand with supply and generate actionable insights.

Product - Acura

Acqura is an operational analytics and talent-matching platform that connects candidates to job requisitions using contextual matching, skills, relationships, and business rules.

What It Does

Unified Talent Data: Aggregates resumes from ATS platforms, online applications, social sources, and other talent channels.
Contextual Matching: Stack-ranks candidates against job requirements based on skill density, context, relationships, and business rules.
Continuous Matching: Automatically maps open positions to existing candidates as requirements and talent pools evolve.

Business Benefits

Works with Existing Systems: Integrates with existing ATS and recruiting platforms rather than replacing them.
Data & Operations Layer: Unifies fragmented talent data and recruitment operations into a common intelligence layer.
Faster Decisions: Provides recruiters with actionable insights for capacity planning, skill-gap analysis, and talent matching.

Users

Primary: Recruiters and Recruiting Managers.
Secondary: Hiring Managers, Talent Acquisition Leaders, and CHROs.

Project Background

Business Challenges

Low product adoption increased dependency on change management, training, support, and account management.
Sales teams struggled to position and sell individual product offerings effectively.

Technical Challenges

The product was built like a content-heavy website using a tab-based architecture.
A monolithic codebase made it difficult to separate and evolve individual product offerings.

Design Challenges

Significant usability issues across navigation, consistency, messaging, and design scalability.
The visual experience felt dated and lacked a contemporary, cohesive product language.

User Challenges

Recruiters experienced friction with the existing experience, resulting in low confidence and trust in the product.

New Product Requirements

The platform needed new Analytics and Predictive Intelligence capabilities to support data-driven recruitment decisions.

Problem Statement

Redesign Acqura as a contemporary, self-serve platform that enables recruiters to use the product effectively with minimal training and support.

Modular Product: Enable individual product modules to be easily configured, packaged, and sold based on client needs and sales strategy.
Self-Serve Administration: Build user and access management capabilities to reduce dependency on account teams for day-to-day administration.
Actionable Insights: Design reporting, analytics, and insights that help clients understand recruitment performance and make better decisions.

Success Matrix

Success would be measured across user adoption, product experience, customer retention, and business growth, connecting design improvements to measurable business outcomes.

User Adoption: Increase active users, usage frequency, and adoption of key modules such as Candidate Matching, Analytics, Reporting, and Administration—indicating reduced dependency on training and support.
User Experience & Satisfaction: Improve NPS, customer satisfaction, and qualitative feedback, validating that the redesigned product is easier to learn, navigate, and use independently.
Customer Retention: Increase contract renewals and product expansion, demonstrating that improved usability, modularity, and actionable insights are contributing to sustained customer value.
New Customer Acquisition: Support new customer wins and sales conversion by making the product easier to demonstrate, configure, package, and sell as modular offerings.
Operational Efficiency: Reduce dependency on account teams for routine administration, training, and support, enabling customers to manage users, access, and configurations independently.

Product & Business Impact: Establish a measurable connection between better UX → higher adoption → greater customer value → stronger retention and new business growth.

Study of existing product artchitecture

Product Analysis

User Persona

We conducted interviews with multiple customers to understand how Acqura fit into their recruitment workflows, how they used different capabilities, and where they experienced friction in their day-to-day work.

We also spoke extensively with recruiters and recruiting managers to understand their real-world challenges. To strengthen our domain understanding, we brought experienced recruiters into the organization as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and used their expertise to validate workflows and design decisions.

Key Research Findings

Disconnected Workflows: Recruitment activities were spread across different parts of the product, creating fragmented user journeys and unnecessary context switching.
Missing Contextual Information: Users often had to navigate between screens or applications to find information needed to make recruitment decisions.
Multiple Logins & Applications: Recruiters relied on multiple applications and credentials, creating friction and slowing down everyday tasks.
No User & Access Management: The product lacked built-in user and permission management, creating ongoing dependency on account teams for routine administration.
Recruiter Efficiency: These gaps increased the effort required to complete common tasks and contributed to frustration and lower confidence in the product.

User Groups

Primary Users

Recruiters: Search, evaluate, match, and manage candidates against open positions.

Recruiting Managers: Oversee recruiter activity, hiring pipelines, and team performance.

Secondary Users

Hiring Managers: Review candidates and participate in hiring decisions.

Talent Acquisition Leaders: Monitor recruitment operations, workforce needs, and organizational performance.

CHRO: Needs higher-level workforce and talent insights to support strategic decisions.

Empathy Map

User Stories

User Task Flow

Redesign Process

Business & Design Strategy

Business Perspective

Conducted competitive analysis of leading recruitment platforms to understand product offerings, feature differentiation, market segmentation, packaging, and sales strategies.
Used these insights to identify opportunities for Acqura to strengthen its market positioning and modular product strategy.

Design Perspective

Studied interaction patterns across leading enterprise web products and emerging single-page applications such as Slack to understand evolving navigation and interaction models.
Defined a scalable design strategy covering design principles, information architecture, design system, reusable components, interaction patterns, and product Voice & Tone to create a cohesive and contemporary experience.

Design Principles

Simplify Navigation: Reduce deep navigation and unnecessary steps, making information easier to find, navigate, and remember.
Use Familiar Patterns: Adopt established enterprise UX patterns and interaction conventions to minimize relearning and improve usability.
Design for Scalability: Build a modular design system with reusable components, enabling consistent experiences and faster development across product modules.
Optimize for Speed & Visibility: Prioritize information density and task efficiency, giving users control over views—for example, switching between compact and comfortable row layouts.
Create a Consistent Voice: Establish a clear and consistent product Voice & Tone across messages, notifications, guidance, and system feedback to build trust and clarity.

Design System & Information Architecture

Defined a three-zone product architecture to create a simple, scalable, and consistent enterprise experience:

Top Navigation: Persistent brand identity, global utilities, and user profile/access management.
Left Navigation: Product-level navigation with a clear menu structure, enabling users to switch between Acqura modules without navigating through multiple levels.
Central Workspace: Dedicated area for the primary task, data, dashboards, and workflows, keeping the user's focus on the current context.
Contextual Side Panels: Secondary actions, details, configurations, and supporting information open in side panels rather than taking users away from their current task.

This architecture reduced deep navigation to a single level, preserved context, and enabled users to move quickly between products and tasks without losing their place in the workflow.

Defining brand colors, messaging and widgets

New improved workflows

Navigation Redesign

The existing product used a tab-based architecture, which made navigation complex and difficult to configure as new product offerings were added. We redesigned it around a menu-based architecture, giving each product its own dedicated application space.

The product menu became configurable, allowing clients to select which products and modules appear in their navigation. Only the configured products load into the central workspace, creating a cleaner, more scalable experience while making product switching faster and more intuitive.

Old Designs

New Designs

Single-page app concept

Actions invoke slide out panel. Detail views are fullscreen modal pages

Slide out panel

Full screen lightbox

Feedback and Improvements

Continuous Design Iteration

Established a continuous feedback and design iteration process, combining qualitative user interviews with product analytics to understand both what users said and how they actually used the product.

Key improvements included:

List & Detail Views: Improved information hierarchy, readability, and navigation between overview and detailed information.
Search Experience: Redesigned search-result clustering, organization, and sorting to help recruiters find relevant candidates faster.
Access Management: Introduced user roles and permissions to support client-level administration and reduce dependency on account teams.
Client Configuration: Added customization and configuration capabilities to adapt the product to different client workflows and requirements.

Adaptive Card Design for Candidates

Through iterative design and user feedback, we found that a single card pattern could not satisfy the diverse needs of enterprise customers. Different customers wanted different levels of information and actions visible directly from the list view.

We therefore designed configurable card patterns—including Full Cards and Collapsible Cards—allowing customers to surface more data and primary actions based on their workflow. This enabled users to review information and make decisions directly from the list view, reducing the need to repeatedly open detail pages while keeping the interface flexible and scalable.

Innovations in Search

New — Guided Boolean Search

The existing parametric search required recruiters to manually construct Boolean queries, but provided little guidance—leading to syntax errors, failed searches, and zero-result outcomes.

We redesigned the experience around guided, interactive Boolean search, suggesting relevant operators as users typed and converting them into selectable, editable controls rather than requiring users to remember syntax.

This transformed a complex, error-prone search mechanism into a discoverable, learn-as-you-search interaction, reducing dependency on help documentation while giving recruiters greater control over how search logic is constructed.

Design iterations

Final designs

User Access Management — 0→1 Design

Led the product and UX design from 0→1 for Acqura’s User Access Management capability, building the framework from scratch to support enterprise customers and reduce dependency on account teams.

Industry Benchmarking: Studied access-management patterns from AWS, Oracle, and leading SaaS products to understand established approaches to roles, permissions, policies, and administration.
Customer & Business Alignment: Worked closely with Sales and Account Management teams to understand customer requirements and determine the appropriate level of access granularity without creating unnecessary complexity.
Access Model: Defined a scalable permission architecture based on Features → Policies → Roles → User Groups → Users, allowing organizations to control access at multiple levels.
Scalable Administration: Designed workflows for creating, assigning, modifying, and managing permissions while keeping the experience intuitive for administrators.
Design Goal: Balance enterprise-grade control with simplicity, enabling clients to independently manage access while maintaining consistency with modern SaaS administration patterns.

65b. User Management (Features - Product

65e. User Management (Create Policy - as

Analytics & Predictive Intelligence — 0→1

Real-Time Operational Intelligence: Designed beyond quantitative reporting to provide real-time, quality-based visibility into complex recruitment operations.
Unlock Candidate Supply: Identified opportunities to maximize the potential of existing candidate pools and improve fulfillment against demand.
Proactive Risk Mitigation: Used demand simulation and predictive insights to identify potential skill gaps and enable proactive talent sourcing.
Context-Aware Triggers: Designed trainable insight algorithms that detect situations and trends and trigger timely, actionable recommendations.
Recruiter Usage & Efficiency: Designed analytics to track recruiter behavior, feature adoption, and product usage, helping enterprise teams understand how the platform delivers value.
ROI Visibility for CHROs: Translated usage and efficiency data into actionable insights that helped CHRO and Talent Acquisition teams evaluate product adoption and demonstrate ROI.

Candidate Insights Analytics

End-to-End Funnel: Designed analytics to visualize the candidate journey from application and sourcing through screening, interviews, selection, and final offer.
Stage Visibility: Structured the funnel into clear hiring stages so recruiters could understand candidate movement and pipeline health.
Candidate Drop-off: Identified where candidates were eliminated, rejected, withdrawn, or dropped between each stage.
Conversion Analysis: Enabled recruiters to compare candidate volumes and conversion rates across successive hiring stages.
Bottleneck Detection: Highlighted stages with unusually high drop-offs to identify potential process or sourcing issues.
Source Effectiveness: Enabled analysis of candidate progression by sourcing channel to understand which sources delivered candidates further into the funnel.
Requisition-Level Insights: Allowed hiring teams to analyze funnel performance for individual roles, departments, or requisitions.
Recruiter Performance: Provided visibility into recruiter activity, candidate progression, and funnel efficiency.
Decision Support: Transformed raw candidate activity into actionable insights for improving sourcing, screening, and hiring processes.
Executive Reporting: Created a clear view of the overall hiring funnel for Talent Acquisition leaders and CHROs to monitor hiring health and make data-driven decisions.

Mobile App design

Business Impact & Success

The redesign delivered measurable improvements across customer satisfaction, retention, sales flexibility, and account growth:

Customer Retention: Successfully strengthened the product experience and helped retain strategic enterprise customers, including Accenture, during a period of significant product transformation. Accenture’s recruitment transformation with Spire has also been publicly documented.
NPS Improvement: Customer NPS improved from negative scores to +75, demonstrating a significant shift in customer perception and satisfaction following the redesign.
Modular Sales Strategy: The redesigned modular architecture enabled the Sales team to package, configure, and customize product offerings based on individual customer requirements.
Account Renewals: Improved product adoption and customer value contributed to an 80% increase in account renewals.
Overall Impact: The transformation connected better UX and usability → higher adoption → stronger customer satisfaction → improved retention and business growth.