CONTEXT
Levyl transforms 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..
www.levyl.app
MY ROLE
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 33–49 days down to 5–14 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.
APPROACH
To design a meaningful experience for both user groups, I conducted interviews with hiring managers and job seekers to uncover their goals, frustrations, and expectations. These insights shaped the foundation of the product. I then brought stakeholders into the design thinking process through collaborative workshops, enabling us to co-create solutions and make informed, user-centred decisions together.
HIRING PROCESS
The hiring process is broken, it's stressful, time-consuming, and often biased. This is especially true for early talent, the largest untapped labor pool, who are most affected by these flaws. In Canada, talent shortages are at a 15-year high, yet early-career candidates remain overlooked. Employers need a better way to identify, engage, and close this talent. Traditional hiring platforms are slow, and recruiters are costly, both impacting the quality of hires.
GOAL
My goal was to reimagine early talent hiring in a way that prioritized speed, fairness, and usability for both candidates and employers. I set out to design a platform that simplifies pipelining and screening without relying on costly recruiters or overwhelming job boards. By deeply understanding the needs of both sides, I aimed to create an experience that builds trust, reduces friction, and helps employers connect with qualified early talent more efficiently.
DISCOVERY
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.
What this told us?
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.
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.
As a team, we prioritized the most critical pain points through dot voting 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.
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?
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.
Increased Access – 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.
Fairer Opportunities – Reduced selection bias through anonymized evaluations.
Stronger Career Growth – Networking opportunities for future roles.
Accelerated Hiring – Faster screening and selection process as they can interview up to 6 candidates in one hour and Levyl already pre selected candidates with their IA pre-screening process.
IMPACT
At Levyl, I led the end-to-end redesign of the platform, from 0 to 1, crafting a seamless user experience while building product value for both early talent and employers.
Redesigned the onboarding journey to make sign-up faster, clearer, and more engaging
Created the marketing website to clearly communicate Levyl’s mission and value proposition
Revamped the stats dashboard for employers, offering better visibility into reach, engagement, and performance metrics
Improved core user flows including networking, messaging, and booking interviews, streamlining key actions and reducing friction
Built the visual identity from the ground up, including branding, logo, and a scalable UI system
Designed micro interactions to add clarity, feedback, and moments of delight throughout the experience
These improvements helped transform Levyl from an early-stage concept into a differentiated, human-centred hiring platform.
Let’s work together