Designing How People Join a Company: A Values-Driven Talent Experience

Service Design

Experience Design

Process Design

Context

Recruitment meets Service Design: From Candidate to Integrated Team Member

This case shows how Service Design can support recruitment challenges and shape how candidates perceive a company.

A growing tech company needed to scale the team without losing cultural alignment. As a B Corp certified organization working 100% remotely, it was essential to attract and select candidates not only for their skills but also for shared values. At the same time, onboarding needed to become efficient and scalable to integrate multiple hires simultaneously.

I helped design a candidate and employee experience that connected talent attraction, selection, and onboarding into a single journey.

My role

Service & Experience Design

Content Strategy

Process Design

Co-creation

Facilitation

Goals

Business:

Attract qualified, culturally aligned candidates
Reduce time-to-productivity through repeatable processes and templates
Enable onboarding of multiple hires simultaneously

Candidates & New Hires:

Provide a clear and transparent experience from application to integration
Create a supportive, values-driven, and memorable journey
Reduce uncertainty during recruitment and the first weeks

User Research & Key Insights

I conducted interviews with candidates, recent hires, team members, and managers to understand the experience before joining and during the first weeks.

Candidate & employee insights:

In fully remote environments, a sense of belonging strongly impacts long-term motivation.
Candidates often experienced uncertainty during recruitment due to unclear steps, lack of transparency, and limited feedback, weakening trust before joining.
New employees frequently felt overwhelmed by unclear responsibilities and difficulty understanding team structures.

Business insights:

Hiring technically strong but culturally misaligned candidates created long-term risks.
Onboarding relied heavily on senior team members, creating operational pressure.
Reducing integration time was critical for team stability and growth.

These insights reframed recruitment not as an HR process, but as an experience design challenge.

Talent Attraction & Selection Experience: Aligning Company Culture and Talent

The first step was redefining recruitment as a transparent experience where candidates could understand the company before joining.

Working collaboratively with the technical team, we defined the structure of the selection process and evaluation criteria. My responsibility focused on designing the candidate experience across all touchpoints, ensuring culture was visible throughout the entire journey.

Actions I led:

Designed the narrative framework centered on values and transparency.
Created and structured the Talent section on the company website, communicating culture, expectations, and ways of working.
Defined tone of voice, e-mail templates, and messaging guidelines across recruitment communications.
Designed a step-by-step interview experience and structured question templates.
Introduced personalized feedback for all candidates to reduce uncertainty.

This phase resulted in 98 applications and 5 successful hires.

Onboarding Process Design: From Joining to Belonging

After hiring, the challenge shifted from selection to integration.

We designed the onboarding system not only to support new hires, but to reduce dependency on senior team members and enable multiple employees to join simultaneously.

Actions I led:

Interviews with team members to understand their experience during the first weeks
Designed the Onboarding Service Blueprint, defining stages, responsibilities, and experience flow.
Created non-technical onboarding content in Outline, including company culture, communication and remote collaboration guidelines.
Created replicable onboarding task templates in Odoo (internal ERP system), assigning responsibilities across roles such as mentor, technical buddy, onboarding buddy, and manager.
Created step-by-step templates to guide progress during the first days.

Technical onboarding, skill progression, and operational practices were led by the engineering team.

A coordinated experience allowed five new employees to onboard simultaneously without loss of clarity or support.

Outcomes & Impact

98 applications and 5 successful hires
Onboarding system enabling multiple hires simultaneously
Stronger perception of company culture from first contact
Reduced uncertainty for candidates and new hires
Strong cultural alignment among new employees
Reduced onboarding-related errors and overloading senior staff
Content and workflows scalable for future hires

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