Apply to Education. Hiring flows, management, and a new Performance Improvement Plan product.
Shipped a WCAG AA design system adopted across product teams and redesigned 10 core end-to-end hiring workflows. K to 12 hiring platform serving North American school boards, where I led product design across candidate hiring flows, administrator hiring management, and a new Performance Improvement Plan product designed from scratch.
Shipped a WCAG AA design system and redesigned 10 core K to 12 hiring workflows, plus a new Performance Improvement Plan product built from scratch.
Legacy flows could not carry the new standard.
The old hiring flows could not do three things the platform now needed: work properly on phones, let district administrators manage hiring across many schools at once, and support a brand-new Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) product: the formal process a school board uses when an employee's performance has to be documented, improved, or acted on. School boards needed WCAG AA accessibility, clearer multi-stakeholder approvals, and flows that work on phones without dropping candidates mid-application.
Why it mattered
Public-sector procurement expects accessibility as infrastructure, not a retrofit project. The flows had to meet WCAG AA and hold up at district scale, not pass a one-time review.
Who was affected
Educator candidates applying from phones between shifts, district administrators running hiring management at a different altitude, and HR and principal decision paths that are union-aware.
The stakes
Ambiguous progress creates abandoned applications at district scale. On the PIP side, accidental escalation is a legal and labor relations failure mode, so the product had to make HR decisions auditable and defensible.
Understand union-aware hiring before designing it.
The double diamond process fit this work: understand the messy reality of school-board hiring first, then design for it. A K to 12 hiring platform for North American school boards, with high-volume hiring, union-aware HR paths, and mobile-first candidates applying between shifts. Research informed the work directly, including outreach automated to scale across a large user base.
Employer project. K to 12 hiring platform for North American school boards. High-volume hiring, union-aware HR paths, and mobile-first candidates applying between shifts.
Automated user research recruitment in Python to scale outreach to 1,000+ users. Research operations at volume, not sample size, so the flows were tested against real candidate behavior rather than a handful of sessions.
Make accessibility and auditability the defaults.
Every significant decision is documented as a mechanic, the operational reason behind it, and the tradeoff it accepts. Clear step-by-step progress, a deliberate split between Notify and Revert, and accessibility (WCAG AA) built into every reusable component from the start make the suite reviewable and defensible across candidate, administrator, and HR surfaces.
Product Designer leading direction and final polish. Worked with product and engineering on a developer team of 5 to 10. Recruited, interviewed, and hired designers to handle fine-touch execution while I held direction, system decisions, and the final polish pass.
| Mechanic | Operational why | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Explicit step progress on mobile applications | Educator candidates apply from phones between shifts. Ambiguous progress creates abandoned applications at district scale. | More UI chrome per screen. Repaid in completion and support load. |
| Separate Notify and Revert on PIP surfaces | HR and principal decisions are union-aware. Accidental escalation is a legal and labor relations failure mode. | Extra confirmation steps. Buys auditable, defensible HR operations. |
| WCAG AA tokens at the component level | Public-sector procurement expects accessibility as infrastructure, not a retrofit project. | Slower initial system build. Repaid across ten flows and the new PIP product. |
Three surfaces, one accessible system.
Candidate hiring flows, administrator hiring management, and a new Performance Improvement Plan product, all built against a WCAG AA design system adopted across product teams. The management surface lets a district admin operate the same hiring pipeline at a different altitude than a candidate sees.
- Redesigned multiple core hiring flows on the candidate side: account creation, profile, position application, posting discovery, status tracking, and the mobile application journey. Ten flows across educator, candidate, and district administrator personas.
- Redesigned the administrator side of hiring flow management: posting authoring, applicant review, decision states, multi-stakeholder approvals, and audit history. The management surface lets a district admin operate the same hiring pipeline at a different altitude than a candidate sees.
- Designed a new Performance Improvement Plan product for school boards. New product, not a flow inside an existing surface. Covers stage and threshold definitions, policy attachment, notify users, entry and exit dates, revert-to-previous-stage operations, and an auditable notes timeline. Built for HR, principal, and union-aware decision paths.
- Re-architected information hierarchy, interaction patterns, and workflow logic across the suite.
- Built and shipped a WCAG AA design system adopted across product teams. Reusable components, accessibility tokens, and engineering-ready handoff.
- Automated user research recruitment in Python to scale outreach to 1,000+ users.
A new standard in production at public-sector scale.
The new applicant flow is live and becoming the standard path for every school board candidate on the platform. Each outcome below is sourced from internal case material and sized to evidence.
- Lead product design across candidate, administrator, and brand-new HR product surfaces.
- Public-sector scale: flows in production across a 2.5M+ application platform.
- Design system and accessibility at procurement altitude.
- Research operations at volume, not sample size.
Apply to Education has been operating since 2002 as the K to 12 hiring platform for North American school boards, with 5,500+ schools, 1M+ users, and 2.5M+ job applications on the platform to date.
2002 to 2026.
Job applications processed on the platform.
Applications per year on the lifetime average. Recent years run higher.
Candidates on the platform from October 2023 through May 2026 on the conservative baseline rate. Every one of them moves through the new applicant flow.
Math: lifetime applications 2,500,000 / 24 years = approx 104,166 per year. Oct 2023 to May 2026 is 2.6 years. 2.6 x 104,166 = approx 270,000 candidates encountering the new applicant flow at the conservative baseline. Actual figure trends higher because volume is back-weighted into recent years.
