Enterprise Recruitment CRM

01 — OVERVIEW

One product to run the whole recruitment day.

Fossaro places teachers in UK schools at scale. When I joined, the operation ran across a spreadsheet maze, a generic CRM, email threads and separate finance and messaging tools. Recruiters lived in tab-switching; nothing talked to anything else.

I was the sole product designer, working alongside four engineers. My mandate: design a single recruitment operating system — sourcing, compliance, communication, finance and AI — with one information architecture, one design system, and screens a new hire could learn in a day.

02 — PROBLEM

The work was scattered across ten tools.

Every placement touched multiple disconnected systems, so context was constantly lost and data was re-keyed by hand. The cost showed up everywhere:

• Recruiters averaged 7+ tools a day and re-entered the same candidate data repeatedly.
• Compliance status lived in a spreadsheet — easy to miss, expensive to get wrong.
• No shared source of truth meant managers couldn't see pipeline health in real time.
• Onboarding a new recruiter took weeks because the "system" only existed in people's heads.

03 — BUSINESS GOAL

Fewer tools, faster placements, safer compliance.

Leadership needed the platform to move three numbers: time-to-placement, recruiter capacity, and compliance accuracy — while staying lean enough for a four-person engineering team to build and maintain.

04 — RESEARCH

I embedded with the people doing the work.

I ran contextual interviews and shadowing sessions with recruiters, compliance officers and finance, mapped their real days, and audited every existing tool and spreadsheet to understand the data model already living in the business.