VP, UX & Product Design · 2024 · Phenom Platform · India

Hiring as brand experience.

A high-scale, trust-led hiring experience designed and governed on a vendor-led platform for IDFC FIRST Bank — balancing employer branding with accessibility, compliance, and rapid hiring demands. As VP of UX, I held end-to-end accountability for the experience vision, governance model, and delivery outcomes — acting as the final authority on every experience decision.

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📈

40%

Faster Time-to-Hire

📊

35%

Increase in Applications

📱

65%

Mobile Completion Rate

💎

99.9%

Platform Reliability

Trusted by Leading Brands

World Bank GroupISGISLiferaySharePointCountry officesHQ

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01 — Project overview

Three constraints.
One coherent experience.

IDFC FIRST Bank needed a career site that scaled across hiring programs — built on a vendor platform — without sacrificing brand, compliance, or candidate experience quality.

01 — Context

Vendor-led platform delivery

The career site was built on Phenom — a third-party hiring platform — meaning UX could not directly control implementation. Design intent had to be codified as governance, not executed directly.

02 — Constraints

Brand + compliance + velocity

Banking regulatory requirements, strong employer-brand expression, and rapid hiring velocity had to coexist in a single experience system — without renegotiating fundamentals with each new program.

03 — Opportunity

Hiring as a product system

The opportunity was to shift the career site from a vendor implementation to a long-term product system — where brand, accessibility, compliance, and platform constraints shared one governance layer.

Business objectives

What the organization needed to achieve

Scale hiring across programs without renegotiating UX fundamentals each cycle
Preserve brand integrity across every candidate touchpoint on the Phenom platform
Meet banking regulatory and accessibility requirements without post-build remediation
Reduce vendor delivery rework through clear UX governance and sign-off standards
Establish executive UX ownership that survived team and program changes

UX & design goals

What the experience needed to do

Build a candidate experience built on clarity, relevance, and trust — not just brand presence
Establish a governance model that ran inside delivery workflows, not above them
Design a mobile-first apply flow that reduced friction at the highest drop-off point
Define patterns and templates reusable across hiring programs and campaigns
Create a usability-validated experience before launch, not after

02 — Research & discovery

Understanding who
we were designing for.

Research began with deep immersion into candidate behaviour, employer-brand perception, platform constraints, and competitive benchmarking across banking and fintech career sites.

Candidates evaluate an employer's brand, culture, and intent — not just the job listing. Research revealed three clusters of job-seeker behaviour: active candidates comparing IDFC FIRST Bank against peers on role clarity and growth signals; passive candidates making initial brand impressions from the homepage and content; and referrals already sold on the brand but needing frictionless apply flows to convert.

Platform research ran in parallel — mapping Phenom's architectural constraints, component flexibility, and governance hooks — distinguishing where UX could lead, where it needed to negotiate, and where it had to design within fixed rails.

◎

"I need to understand what growth looks like here — before I apply."

Active job-seeker · Competitor comparison phase

◈

"The apply button was easy to find but the form felt like it went on forever."

Mid-career applicant · Mobile apply flow

⬡

"I submitted but never heard anything. I assumed something went wrong."

Referred candidate · Post-application perception

User personas

Three distinct candidate types.

Arjun, 27

Active job-seeker · Digital banking

Actively comparing IDFC FIRST Bank against competitors. Needs role clarity, growth signals, and eligibility criteria above the fold. Applies on mobile during commute.

Mobile-first Growth-driven High intent

Priya, 34

Passive candidate · Risk & compliance

Not actively looking but open to compelling opportunities. Brand impression formed in the first 10 seconds. Needs culture signals and a credible employer narrative before considering an application.

Brand-led Content-sensitive Desktop

Kavita, 41

Referred candidate · Branch banking

Already sold on the brand via a referral. Needs a fast, predictable apply path with clear confirmation. Post-application communication defines whether they recommend others to apply.

Referral path Confirmation-led High trust

IDFC career site — candidate user personas

03 — Core problem

A vendor platform without UX governance is a brand risk at scale.

UX intent diverges during vendor implementation when the only ownership is downstream review.

Brand, compliance, and velocity appear to compete — revealing weak or absent governance structures.

Candidate trust erodes at every friction point in the apply journey — drop-off is a governance failure, not a design detail.

Post-application silence turns a completed hire into a negative brand moment — confirmation is strategy, not an afterthought.

04 — My role & execution

Executive UX ownership.
Not downstream review.

I held end-to-end accountability for the experience vision, governance model, vendor oversight, and delivery outcomes — acting as the final authority on every UX decision across the program lifecycle.

My mandate was to shift UX from a review function to a governing force — not by controlling every pixel, but by authoring the standards, intake gates, and sign-off protocols that governed what vendors built and what teams shipped. Final authority sat with UX; daily execution sat with the partners closest to the platform.

Responsibility 01

Define experience strategy & UX direction

Authored the experience strategy and UX direction for the career site and candidate journeys
Set the principles that distinguished a hiring platform from a hiring website
Translated business intent into UX guardrails vendors could execute against
Signed-off principles document used as the contract for vendor work

Responsibility 02

Govern vendors

Governed vendors to ensure alignment with UX standards, accessibility, and banking compliance
Embedded UX guardrails directly into vendor delivery rather than reviewing after the fact
Reviewed every milestone artifact and held final sign-off on what shipped
Vendor delivery checkpoints aligned to UX intake gates

Responsibility 03

Establish UX intake & decision frameworks

Established UX intake and decision frameworks to reduce ambiguity and rework
Codified what counted as a UX-led decision vs a vendor-led implementation choice
Built a single intake path so requirements arrived with clear ownership and review gates
Intake template + decision matrix used across product and vendor teams

Responsibility 04

Enable cross-functional teams

Enabled business, product, and technology teams with clear UX processes and ownership
Coached internal product managers on UX trade-offs within platform constraints
Established shared vocabulary for vendor, product, and compliance reviews
UX process documentation paired with quarterly review & coaching cadence

IDFC career site — storyboarding the candidate journey

IDFC career site — application / information architecture map

05 — User journey map

Discover. Evaluate.
Apply. Be heard.

I owned the journey map as a working artifact — co-created with Talent Acquisition, Brand, and the vendor delivery team. Every wireframe traced back to a moment on this journey.

Every screen, template, and confirmation message was anchored to a mapped moment. Every sign-off verified that the moment had been designed for, not assumed. The journey map was the canonical reference through every design and vendor review.

Stage 01

Discover

Relevant roles surface fast regardless of audience. Search, filter, and smart sorting reduce time-to-fit.

Stage 02

Evaluate

Growth signals, eligibility, and role fit visible above the fold. Candidates assess before committing to the apply flow.

Stage 03

Apply

Frictionless flow aligned to context and device. Mobile-first, multi-step with clear progress indication.

Stage 04

Post-application

Post-application visibility and communication shape long-term employer perception. Confirmation is strategy, not a detail.

✓

Principle

"Trust in the brand."

Clarity, relevance, and trust drive candidate decisions — at every stage, on every device. The principle anchored every journey decision.

Drag to explore all stages

IDFC career site — candidate user journey map

06 — Storyboarding, app map & wireframing

From storyboards
to a working app map.

Storyboards isolated highest-impact candidate moments for stakeholder alignment. The app map translated those moments into an IA balancing simplicity, scalability, and usability.

Every wireframe was traceable to a journey moment, and every IA decision was signed off before vendor execution. Storyboards were leveraged to align business, brand, talent acquisition, compliance, and vendor teams on what each moment had to feel like — before any pixels were committed.

Job listing / Role detail / Apply flow — three load-bearing surfaces of the candidate experience

07 — Design system & UI

Modular components.
Governed at token level.

A design system that mapped to Phenom's component architecture — token-based, reusable across programs, and defensible against vendor drift without blocking delivery velocity.

Colour · Bank-neutral

Aligned to IDFC FIRST brand neutrals

Type · 2 families

Aa Aa

Display / Body pairing

Spacing · 8pt scale

8 / 16 / 24 / 32 / 48

Components · Modular

Reused across hiring journeys & programs

08 — UX governance model

Guardrails embedded
in delivery.

A centralized UX Governance Model ensured quality, consistency, and compliance across the hiring platform without slowing delivery — balancing enterprise accountability with team autonomy.

Core UX standards and risk controls were centrally maintained, while implementation remained flexible at the domain level. Governance was lightweight and embedded into delivery workflows, focusing on systemic risks — accessibility, regulatory compliance, brand integrity, apply-flow friction — rather than surface-level design. Continuous improvement was driven through analytics and shared learnings.

Pillar 01

⊞

Centralized standards

Core UX standards and risk controls maintained centrally — accessibility, brand expression, regulatory compliance. Reviewed and signed off by UX at executive level. The pen on every standard sat with the UX leader, not the vendor.

Pillar 02

◈

Domain autonomy

Implementation flexible at the domain level — vendors and product teams ship within shared guardrails, not on top of them. Faster, safer iteration. The guardrail defines the boundary; what lives inside it belongs to the delivery team.

Pillar 03

↺

Embedded into delivery

Lightweight governance running inside delivery workflows — focused on systemic risks, not surface design. Continuous improvement via analytics and shared learnings enabling the organization to scale while maintaining trust and consistency.

09 — Usability studies

Persona-driven.
Insight-led.

Unmoderated usability research validated real-world behaviours against the defined job-seeker persona — generating 30+ insights synthesized into 4 themes that directly informed pre-launch refinements.

Participants matching persona

Critical tasks tested

30+

Qualitative insights generated

Themes for refinement

Persona needs → design actions

Candidate needQuickly understand if a role is relevant to their skills and experience.

Design actionPersona-based usability testing to validate role clarity; restructured role pages with growth signals above the fold.

Candidate needFind suitable jobs without excessive scrolling or filter friction.

Design actionAnalyzed navigation paths and search behaviour; refined filters and sorting logic to match real candidate criteria.

Candidate needConfidence before starting an application — know what to expect.

Design actionImproved content hierarchy and CTAs; streamlined apply flow to reduce friction at the highest drop-off point.

Candidate needReassurance that submission was received and is being processed.

Design actionValidated confirmation messaging and post-application communication — redesigning as an employer-brand touchpoint, not a utility screen.

Candidate needFast, predictable apply flow on mobile under real conditions.

Design actionAudited and streamlined the apply flow; validated across primary device types matching the persona's usage context.

Clarity of roles

Role pages restructured so candidates established relevance within seconds. Headline, signal-bearing tags, and growth indicators surfaced before scroll.

Navigation efficiency

Filters and sorting logic refined to align with the criteria candidates actually used — not the criteria the platform exposed by default.

Application confidence

Content hierarchy and CTAs improved so candidates entered the apply flow knowing what to expect. Confirmation messaging validated to reassure on submit.

Pre-launch readiness

Insights translated into refinements before launch — reducing rework during vendor implementation and surfacing systemic issues that would have appeared only post-release.

10 — Outcomes

A hiring platform governed
as a long-term product system.

Final designs reviewed and approved against defined UX guardrails — ensuring consistency across vendor execution, regulatory compliance, and brand expression.

A vendor-led platform implementation became a governed hiring product — design moved from review-after-the-fact to guardrails-built-in.

Outcome 01

↑

Vendor execution governed — UX intent stopped diverging during implementation. Every milestone reviewed and signed off centrally before shipping.

Outcome 02

↑

Brand integrity preserved — every candidate touchpoint reflected the same employer narrative. Brand treated as guardrail, not wrapper.

Outcome 03

↑

Compliance by design — banking and regulatory requirements built into patterns and templates, not added as downstream review. Fewer re-cuts before launch.

Outcome 04

↑

Faster, safer iteration — executive UX ownership reduced operational dependency, enabling teams to evolve experiences within constraints without slowing momentum.

↑

Outcome 05

A single scalable system across all hiring programs.

The career site shifted from a vendor implementation to a long-term product system. Brand, compliance, accessibility, and platform constraints shared one governance layer. New hiring programs and campaigns were absorbed without renegotiating the foundations. UX held the pen on the principles that kept the experience coherent at scale.

Vendor execution governed UX guardrails enforced Compliance by design Brand integrity preserved Single scalable system Mobile-first hiring WCAG-aligned accessibility Phenom platform constraints respected

11 — Reflection

What I'd carry forward.

The career site was as much a governance shift as a product launch. These are the lessons I'd carry into any future vendor-led, brand-and-compliance-bound UX engagement.

The hardest part wasn't the design.

It was shifting the model from vendor implementation to governed product system.

Vendor-led platforms need executive UX ownership — not just review.

UX intent diverges during vendor implementation when the only ownership is downstream review. Holding the pen on standards, intake, and sign-off — not on every screen — is what kept the experience coherent without slowing delivery. Final authority sits with UX; daily execution sits with the partners closest to the platform.

Brand, compliance, and speed don't compete — they reveal weak governance.

Whenever brand integrity, regulatory compliance, and hiring velocity appeared to trade against each other, the real issue was a missing guardrail. With the right standards authored upfront, all three became inputs the platform respected — not obstacles teams had to negotiate around mid-flight.

Hiring is brand experience — candidate trust compounds.

Every interaction during the application journey is a brand event. Clarity of roles, navigation efficiency, mobile-first apply flows, and confirmation messaging all read as signals about how the organization treats people. Designing them as such shifted the platform from a hiring funnel to an employer-brand surface.

Guardrails embedded in delivery beat reviews after the fact.

Reviews catch problems; guardrails prevent them. Embedding UX, accessibility, brand, and compliance standards directly into vendor delivery workflows reduced rework, improved iteration speed, and made every shipped experience defensible by default. The hiring platform became a long-term product system because governance ran inside the work, not on top of it.