Every year, millions of people interview at Meta, and for most of them it's the highest-stakes moment of their career. Career Profile is the platform that carries candidates through all of it: scheduling interviews, studying prep material, reviewing offers, starting onboarding.
By the time I took on this work, Career Profile had grown into a patchwork of tools and content pages built by different teams over several years. Candidates couldn't tell where they were in the process or what to do next, at exactly the moments they were most anxious.
As Lead Product Designer, I owned the long-term design vision: turning that patchwork into a single guided path, personal to each candidate, that could scale across every role, region, and recruiting stage, and give the teams building on it one shared foundation.
The problem
The existing experience had several systemic issues:
- Navigation did not scale and was difficult to orient around
- Candidate experiences felt administrative and transactional
- Generic content was shown regardless of candidate context
- Recruiters and candidates relied on disconnected workflows
- Multiple teams contributed features without a unified framework
- Existing design systems were fragmented or unsuitable for external candidate experiences
At the same time, the recruiting organisation needed the platform to support multiple competing goals:
- Improve hiring quality
- Increase candidate preparedness
- Reduce recruiter operational overhead
- Scale globally across candidate types and workflows
My role
As Lead Product Designer, I drove the UX vision, systems thinking, information architecture, and interaction framework for the future-state platform experience.
My work included:
- Defining product and design principles
- Creating scalable UX frameworks
- Establishing content and interaction typologies
- Designing modular navigation and layout systems
- Exploring personalisation models
- Aligning candidate and recruiter workflows
- Evaluating design system strategies
- Creating end-to-end prototypes across the full candidate lifecycle
This was highly strategic platform work that sat between product design, design systems, content architecture, and organisational scalability.
Design principles
One of the first steps was establishing a set of product and experience principles that could guide future decisions across many teams and surfaces. Several themes emerged repeatedly:
- Design for modularity. Treat Career Profile as a platform rather than a collection of isolated features.
- Design for transparency and orientation. Candidates should always understand where they are, what comes next, and what actions matter most.
- Proactively address user needs. Surface contextual information before candidates need to search for it.
- Advocate for the candidate. Reduce ambiguity, stress, and unnecessary friction throughout the recruiting process.
- Build for scale and resiliency. Enable external teams to build consistently into the platform without degrading UX quality.
These principles became the foundation for the rest of the system architecture.
Key insight: mental models matter
A major breakthrough in the work was recognising that candidates interact with recruiting experiences through fundamentally different mental models depending on their goal.
I developed a typology framework that categorised experiences into three core modes:
Browse: “Help me understand where to go.”
Used for exploration, orientation, and discovery.
- Home
- Events
- Job search
- Meta Connections
Study: “Help me understand the material in front of me.”
Used for deep content consumption and learning.
- Interview prep
- Job details
- Offer education
- FAQ content
Work: “Help me solve a specific problem.”
Used for executional workflows.
- Scheduling
- Signing offers
- Completing onboarding tasks
- Messaging recruiters
This framework created a scalable foundation for page templates, layouts, content hierarchy, and future extensibility across the entire platform.
The timeline-centred experience
One of the core concepts I explored was shifting the platform around a dynamic recruiting timeline that acted as the primary anchor for the experience.
Instead of candidates navigating disconnected tools, the system adapted based on where they were in the recruiting lifecycle. The timeline became:
- A navigation system
- A status system
- A personalisation engine
- A contextual content framework
- A recruiter coordination mechanism
As candidates progressed, the platform dynamically surfaced:
- Upcoming interviews
- Relevant prep materials
- Recruiter actions
- Offer details
- Onboarding tasks
- Communication touchpoints
- Educational resources
The experience evolved from static information architecture into a living system centred around candidate progression.
Personalisation at scale
Another major focus was balancing personalisation with operational scalability. Rather than redesigning the platform for every user type, the strategy focused on:
- Shared structural foundations
- Modular content systems
- Adaptive information density
- Candidate-specific curation
For example:
- Leadership candidates received simplified navigation and higher-touch experiences
- IC candidates received richer self-serve tooling and preparation resources
- Interview timelines adapted to the candidate's stage and role
This allowed the platform to feel tailored without creating separate products for every audience.
Systems thinking beyond the UI
Much of the work extended beyond interface design.
Design system strategy
Evaluating multiple internal Meta design systems and their suitability for external candidate-facing products.
Platform governance
Defining how external recruiting teams could safely build into the platform while maintaining UX consistency.
Navigation and information architecture
Exploring logged-in vs logged-out content models, discoverability tradeoffs, and platform scalability.
Candidate lifecycle mapping
Designing for users across the full lifecycle:
- Prospect
- Active candidate
- Offer stage
- New hire onboarding
This work required balancing business constraints, recruiting operations, platform scalability, and user experience simultaneously.
What I learned
This project fundamentally changed how I think about platform design.
Large-scale systems are not primarily UI problems. They are coordination problems.
The challenge is not creating beautiful screens. The challenge is creating frameworks that allow hundreds of people and teams to build coherently over time.
I also learned that personalisation at enterprise scale cannot rely on bespoke experiences. It requires flexible systems, strong information architecture, modularity, and disciplined constraints.
Most importantly, I learned that candidate experience is not simply about efficiency. It is about trust. Recruiting is emotionally high stakes, and clarity, orientation, and transparency can meaningfully reduce anxiety during one of the most important transitions in someone's career.
Outcome
While this was long-term vision work, the project established foundational thinking around:
- Modular recruiting experiences
- Candidate-centered workflow architecture
- Personalised recruiting systems
- Scalable content frameworks
- Cross-team platform extensibility
- Timeline-driven interaction models
The concepts influenced future recruiting platform discussions and created a stronger strategic foundation for how candidate experiences could evolve at Meta.