COB

CONTEXT

Transforming the early talent hiring process by reducing friction and bias.

Levyl is a hiring platform designed to improve access to opportunities for early talent and marginalized groups. It makes the hiring process fairer, faster, and more inclusive by reducing bias and unnecessary friction helping employers and candidates connect more efficiently. With anonymized speed interviewing, candidates are judged on their skills and potential, not their background, helping employers find the right fit while creating more equitable opportunities for everyone.

My Role:

At Levyl, I led the end-to-end design of the platform, from 0 to 1 of the Levyl app, shaping its strategy and user experience from the ground up. I applied strategic frameworks, defined key user outcomes, and facilitated workshops to align the team. Through collaborative brainstorming and iteration, we refined ideas and delivered a polished user-centred design.

Outcomes:

37.5%
reduction in the number of process steps required for candidates to apply for jobs

85%

reduction in the average time to hire, cutting it from 33 to 49 days down to 5 to 14 days

Challenges:

Starting from Zero - I was the sole designer on the project, responsible for everything from branding to product design. With no logo, visual identity, or design system in place, I had to build the foundation from scratch while designing the platform.

A Crowded Market - Through competitive analysis, I identified at least three existing products with similar offerings. This insight pushed us to rethink the positioning and user experience to differentiate Levyl in a saturated space.

Dual User Journeys - Designing for both job seekers and hiring managers presented unique challenges. Each audience had distinct goals and behaviours, yet we needed to maintain a cohesive experience and reuse components where possible for scalability and consistency.

Clarifying the Problem Space

To better understand the challenges on both sides of the hiring process, I led interviews with over 10 early-career candidates and more than 10 hiring managers. The findings revealed deep frustrations that reinforced the need for a smarter, fairer solution.

For Hiring Managers:

Hiring great talent is slow, expensive, and inefficient, many reported needing to review 200+ resumes per role.
With processes that average 33–49 days, they often feel forced to choose between quality and speed.
Recruiters are costly, while job platforms deliver volume without much precision.
Many also struggle to build diverse pipelines due to limited networks and visibility into non-traditional candidates.

For Candidates:

Candidates face equally frustrating barriers: time-consuming application processes, repetitive resume uploads, and the demand for tailored cover letters.

Many never receive feedback or hear back at all. Those new to Canada, especially without local experience or networks, face additional hurdles, including unconscious bias that prevents them from even getting an interview.

These insights highlighted the urgency to redesign the hiring experience, one that works better for early talent and employers alike.

With these insights in hand, I facilitated a collaborative session with the team to create empathy maps for both hiring managers and early-career candidates. This helped us internalize their thoughts, feelings, and frustrations in a more human-centered way.

We then mapped out each audience’s journey, from job posting to hiring decision for managers, and from job search to (often absent) feedback for candidates. These tools aligned the team around user pain points and highlighted key moments of opportunity to improve the experience.

Both groups are struggling, employers with inefficient processes and access, and candidates with exhausting applications and structural bias. This reinforced our goal: to build a platform that makes early talent hiring smarter, faster, and fairer, for everyone.

As a team, we prioritized the most critical pain points and clearly defined the core problems we aimed to solve. With alignment on what mattered most, we moved into the ideation phase, brainstorming solutions that could directly address these user challenges.

The experience now adapts to each user’s role, surfacing only the tools, tasks, and notifications that matter to them. We also made it easier to open and manage multiple accounts. The entire flow was reimagined to guide users through their work with confidence — reducing friction, removing guesswork, and speeding up core tasks.

PROBLEM STATEMENTS

How might we help hiring managers efficiently identify qualified early talent without relying on costly recruiters or sifting through hundreds of resumes?

How might we create a fairer, more transparent application experience for early-career candidates, especially those without local experience or networks?

Levyl matches early talent with employers through 7-minute speed interviews and bias reduction capabilities.

Given that 52% of interviewers make decisions within the first 5–15 minutes of an interview (Workopolis), we streamlined the hiring process, reducing it from 8 steps to 5, and cutting the timeline from 33–49 days down to just 5–14 days.

We increased access to easier face-to-face interactions with employers as resumes are a lot of time ignored by hiring managers due to bias and time to go over each application.

Levyl lets candidates book interviews directly, bypassing the traditional application grind. By using an AI algorithm that matches skills and requirements, without relying on resumes or names, it helps remove bias from the process, giving early talent a fair chance to get a foot in the door.

One of the biggest challenges in hiring is unconscious bias that can unfairly influence decisions. To tackle this, we introduced anonymized evaluations where hiring managers only see candidate details the moment the interview starts. This levels the playing field and helps ensure candidates are judged purely on their skills and fit.

On top of that, we supercharged the hiring process. Thanks to Levyl’s AI-powered pre-screening, only the most promising candidates are presented, allowing hiring managers to interview up to six people in just one hour. This not only speeds up the selection process but also means better matches and less time wasted, creating a win-win for everyone involved.

One of the biggest challenges candidates face in interviews is the lack of “Canadian experience.” We helped to bridge that gap by giving candidates the chance to gain valuable feedback immediately after their interviews. To support this, we made mandatory for hiring managers to provide quick feedback. This will empower candidates to understand market expectations, improve their skills, and grow their careers.

Additionally, after a successful interview, both hiring managers and candidates will have access to each other’s information to facilitate future opportunities, messaging, and sharing of tips. This creates ongoing networking possibilities and strengthens connections for roles down the line.

With Levyl, we empowered hiring managers to take full control of the applicant pool and their skills, enabling them to tailor their candidate selection based on the number of applicants and the specific needs of each position. This flexibility helped managers balance quality and quantity more effectively.

To ensure a fairer and more transparent hiring process, we also provided guidance on average salaries and market standards. This way, candidates are treated fairly, and expectations are clear from the start, building trust on both sides of the hiring table.

CONSISTENCY ACROSS PLATFORMS

Delightful moments and micro-interactions were introduced to enhance clarity, provide feedback, and create engaging touchpoints throughout the experience.

I Revamped the stats dashboard for employers, offering better visibility into reach, engagement, and performance metrics

dan.hildebrandt