Led design and drove product decisions for a 3-year vision for Amazon's global recruiting platform, used by 200,000+ recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers worldwide.
Role
I led design and drove product decisions through design. Delivered the platform through Phase 1. Stepped in to fill the PM gap when needed. Mentored two designers for execution.
Scope
3-year vision across 5 domains. Cross-team coordination with recruiting, interviewing, and hiring manager platform teams.
Outcome
The vision defined in 2023 is actively being built. Phases 1 and 2 are now complete, with Phase 3 underway.
Phase 1 eliminated 12,000+ hours of weekly manual workarounds.
The IA framework now guides feature decisions across three platform domains beyond recruiting.
A platform that grew without a plan
Amazon's internal recruiting platform had expanded over a decade without a coherent direction. Recruiters sit at the centre of the hiring process, so their efficiency was the highest leverage place to start. By the time I joined, the scale of manual workarounds made it clear the platform wasn't working.
Fragmented platform
The hiring pipeline was incomplete and inconsistent. Recruiters maintained their own trackers instead.
Manual tracking overhead
Recruiters maintained offline trackers to fill the gaps, consuming 12,000+ hours weekly in manual updates.
Candidates slipping through
Updates on candidate status were spread across multiple sources, making it easy to miss what needed attention.
A new feature was being proposed, and the question of where it belongs exposed a deeper problem: the platform had no coherent structure for deciding where new work goes. I proposed a short-term solution for the feature while conducting an IA audit across five domains.
I brought these findings to design leadership. Combined with a broader initiative to move off legacy technology, this became a funded initiative with a dedicated team.
Defining the vision
The vision: one platform where recruiting roles, interviewers, and hiring managers each have a coherent experience, with a shared framework that determines where every feature belongs as the platform grows.
I co-authored the vision with the PM, then facilitated design sprints with cross-functional stakeholders around three themes:
Simplify workflows: consolidate fragmented pages and reduce tool-switching
Predictable experience: users can focus on their work instead of learning how each part of the platform works
User control: customizable views within a coherent system
The audit and stakeholder conversations shaped how I restructured the platform. Information that served different purposes was tangled together, and new features had no obvious home. I organized the platform around five connected domains, each with a distinct purpose:
Simplified view of the restructured platform. What was scattered across disconnected pages with no clear ownership is organized into five domains.
The recruiter pipeline had the most pain and the widest reach, so it shipped first. Each phase established patterns the rest of the platform could build on:
Phased transformation
Phase 1
Complete
Brought separate applicant pages into the pipeline, surfacing candidate-funnel activity, filtering, and key metadata in one view
Gave recruiters clearer ways to prioritize what needed attention
Interviewer domain team built the initial Interviewer Excellence workspace
Phase 2
Complete
Added prospects to the pipeline, giving recruiters end-to-end tracking from initial lead to offer
Updated the Sourcing domain to reflect the full pipeline lifecycle
Retired overlapping pages
Phase 3
In progress
Expanding the Interviewer domain, including interviewer and bar raiser preferences
Scheduling automation with rule-based prioritization and AI-driven intelligence
AI-powered task prioritization and pipeline insights across the platform
The pipeline: where the vision started shipping
I scoped each phase with the PM, balancing what recruiters needed most against engineering feasibility and cross-team dependencies.
Card sorting with recruiters revealed that while the platform leaned toward cross-job views, recruiters mentally organize their work per job. That mismatch is why they maintained their own trackers alongside the platform.
Before: Disconnected pages per job, with overlapping pipeline information scattered across views
After: Candidate and pipeline information in one view, organized around how users actually work
I built concepts and validated them with recruiters. The biggest tension was between consolidation and team ownership. Some teams wanted to keep separate pages for candidates and applicants. Others wanted standalone detail pages instead of contextual views. I pushed for consolidated views with customizable columns and contextual detail panels, so the platform stays coherent while recruiters control what they see.
HOMEPAGE
Start each day knowing what needs attention
Job list view
Job detail view
Everyone considered for a role, from first contact to offer
PIPELINE view
sourcing view
Prospects before they enter the pipeline
DETAIL PANEL
One flexible structure for contextual tasks and profile details
Concepts validated the direction. Shipping meant consolidating live pages and migrating existing workflows without disrupting daily work. Phase 1 shipped the foundation. Here's what the consolidated pipeline and customizable views look like in production:
Candidates and applicants in one view. Behind it: dozens of data types, filter combinations, and workflow variations across roles
A vision that outlasted three planning cycles
When the PM left mid-initiative, I stepped in to keep the work moving. I ran cross-domain conversations, kept scoping on track, and maintained alignment until a new PM joined. This included pushing back when teams wanted standalone solutions that would re-fragment the platform.
The framework I'd established gave us a stable basis for those decisions even as the team changed. The vision defined in 2023 is still being executed across the platform.
Built by Fangru Wu 2026
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