CASE STUDY

Looped — Designing a Shared Offer Workflow for Hiring Teams.

Designed core workflows and interaction patterns for Looped, a hiring operations platform that replaced fragmented offer coordination with a single, shared source of truth for recruiters and HR.

OVERVIEW

Looped was an early-stage startup founded by an HR practitioner who partnered with a technical co-founder to address breakdowns in the offer management process. Hiring teams were coordinating offers across email, documents, spreadsheets, and ATS tools, creating misalignment at a critical handoff between recruiters and HR. I joined Looped as a contract UX Designer to help shape and validate the core product experience.

MYROLE

I worked as a contract UX Designer, contributing from early discovery through execution. My focus was on workflow design, information architecture, and interaction patterns that reduced operational friction without adding unnecessary complexity.

In addition to UX design, I collaborated directly with the engineering team on front-end implementation, helping translate designs into production-ready UI and validating interaction behavior during build.

THEPROBLEM

Once candidates reached the offer stage, recruiters and HR lacked a shared source of truth. Status updates lived in inboxes, ownership was unclear, and offer letters were rebuilt manually for each candidate. As hiring volume increased, these gaps led to follow-ups, errors, and slowdowns during a time-sensitive and high-impact phase of the hiring process.

THEGOAL

Design a system that provides clear visibility into candidate and offer status while supporting faster, more consistent offer creation. The experience needed to reduce manual coordination and scale predictably during high-volume hiring. Clarity and reliability were prioritized over feature depth.

APPROACH

I grounded the work in understanding real workflows rather than idealized processes. By mapping handoffs and state changes, I focused the design on making ownership, status, and next steps explicit. Key decisions centered on predictability and error reduction rather than adding new features.

RESEARCH&INSIGHTS

I interviewed HR team members and external recruiters to observe how offers were created, reviewed, and sent in practice. These sessions revealed that most friction stemmed from duplicated work and unclear handoffs rather than missing functionality. This reframed the problem from building more tools to creating shared clarity.

KEYTRADEOFF

A central decision was whether to design separate experiences for HR and recruiters or a single shared system. Separate tools risked reinforcing silos, while a unified system risked oversimplifying role-specific needs. I supported a shared experience with role-appropriate actions so both sides could see the same candidate state while interacting with it differently.

UXDESIGN

I designed candidate-centric views that surfaced offer status, ownership, and progress at a glance. Communication was centralized around the candidate record, eliminating the need to search across inboxes and documents.

Close collaboration with engineering ensured state changes, ownership indicators, and edge cases were accurately represented in the front-end, reducing rework and design drift.

SYSTEMS&SCALE

To reduce errors and speed execution, the system enforced offer templates with controlled customization rather than free-form creation. This preserved flexibility while ensuring consistency and compliance. The experience was designed to support bulk actions during high-volume hiring periods.

IMPLEMENTATION&OUTCOME

Looped replaced ad hoc coordination with explicit state, ownership, and workflow structure. The product integrated with existing hiring tools while reducing reliance on email and spreadsheets.

While Looped later dissolved for reasons outside my visibility, the work demonstrated how workflow clarity and tight UX–engineering collaboration can materially improve hiring operations.

IMPACT

Recruiters and HR teams reported faster offer creation, fewer follow-ups, and increased confidence through real-time visibility. Although long-term quantitative metrics were not captured due to the company’s early shutdown, consistent qualitative feedback indicated reduced friction and clearer collaboration at the offer stage.

REFLECTION

This project highlighted how making shared state and next steps explicit can reduce coordination overhead without adding new features. It reinforced the value of close UX and front-end collaboration in early-stage products.

Nathan Gordon