Executive Summary
After Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo, Oracle faced an urgent strategic challenge: transforming a legacy, market-dominant recruiting system into a modern, cloud-native product line capable of competing with Workday and accelerating HCM Cloud revenue growth. This work required redefining candidate experience as a first-class system concern, not a surface-layer UI problem.
As Design Lead for Candidate Experience, I owned the end-to-end vision and execution of candidate-facing workflows within Fusion Recruiting Cloud, serving candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, and HR leaders.
The launch contributed to 224 net-new HCM Cloud customers, strong cloud revenue growth in FY16–17, and helped lay the groundwork for Oracle’s continued leadership in Recruiting Suites.
Problem Framing & Strategic Context
While Taleo had dominated enterprise recruiting for nearly two decades, its experience model reflected a process-first, system-driven era. After the acquisition, it became clear that these strengths alone were no longer sufficient.
The market had shifted: enterprises now compete on employer brand and storytelling, candidates expect frictionless, mobile-first experiences, application drop-off directly impacts recruiting ROI, and cloud adoption demands faster deployment with simpler mental models.
The challenge was not just modernizing screens, but redesigning the underlying experience model for enterprise recruiting at scale.
Shipped Product - Client Customized Live Site
Candidate Experience shipped as a core component of Oracle Recruiting Cloud (ORC), enabling enterprises to design branded, fully responsive career sites and support high-volume candidate search and application flows at global scale.
The system translated Taleo’s proven recruiting processes into a cloud-native, candidate-centered experience, balancing enterprise requirements—such as compliance, configurability, and downstream recruiter workflows—with reduced friction for candidates across desktop and mobile devices.
Candidate Experience was designed as a reusable platform layer within Oracle Recruiting Cloud, supporting diverse enterprise configurations while maintaining a consistent candidate journey.
The product launched with multiple global enterprise customers and was deployed across real-world recruiting scenarios spanning regions, roles, and traffic volumes.
Explore the live product (desktop demo):
Search and Apply flows from a client-customized career site
The demo site shows the desktop experience. The shipped product supports fully responsive desktop and mobile experiences.
Insights that informed key decisions
Candidates felt invisible and uncertain throughout the conversion process.
Friction early in the journey disproportionately impacted conversion rates.
Authentication and identity expectations were misaligned with candidate mental models.
Enterprise recruiting systems prioritized process control over candidate continuity.
Taleo CE primarily supported targeted, process-oriented candidates—creating clear opportunity areas for ORC.
Figure — Opportunities for Oracle Recruiting Cloud Candidate Experience
Taleo CE primarily supported targeted, process-oriented candidates, revealing opportunities for ORC to broaden exploration and self-expression across candidate types.
Figure — Candidates’ ideal mental model of the application journey
Candidates viewed applying as an ongoing process of discovery, fit, and self-expression—not a single, form-driven task.
Key Design Decisions
These decisions defined the experience architecture that allowed Candidate Experience to scale across regions, roles, and enterprise configurations.
Decision 1 — Passwordless Identity (No Login)
Decision
We eliminated mandatory account creation and enabled candidates to re-identify themselves via email-link-based URLs.
Why this mattered
Early research showed that login requirements introduced disproportionate friction at the top of the funnel and conflicted with candidates’ mental models of job search.
Trade-offs considered
This decision required rethinking authentication, identity persistence, compliance, and downstream recruiter workflows within an enterprise HCM system.
Impact
The passwordless approach reduced early abandonment and enabled continuity across sessions and devices without compromising enterprise controls.
Decision 2 — Designing for Continuity, Not Completion
Decision
We reframed the application flow from a single completion event to a continuous, resumable journey across devices.
Why this mattered
Candidates rarely complete applications in one sitting. Interruptions, device switching, and uncertainty were core behaviors—not edge cases.
Trade-offs considered
Supporting continuity increased system complexity and required alignment across search, apply, and status tracking experiences.
Impact
This approach aligned the system with real candidate behavior and supported higher completion rates at enterprise scale.
Decision 3 — Abstracting Enterprise Configuration from the Candidate Journey
Decision
We introduced an abstraction layer that decoupled candidate-facing flows from recruiter and HR configuration complexity, ensuring candidates experienced a consistent journey regardless of internal setup.
Why this mattered
In legacy recruiting systems, internal process variations—such as requisition rules, approvals, and regional compliance—often surfaced directly in candidate-facing flows, creating confusion and abandonment.
How this showed up in the product
Candidates encountered a consistent search and apply flow even when roles differed by region, requisition type, or approval logic
Conditional steps and compliance requirements were handled system-side without exposing internal decision trees
Error states and messaging were standardized to reflect candidate intent, not system constraints
Trade-offs considered
This abstraction required additional coordination with downstream recruiter workflows and limited certain edge-case customizations in early releases.
Impact
Candidates experienced a predictable, low-friction application flow, while enterprises retained the flexibility required to support global hiring at scale.
Measurement & Impact
To understand how Candidate Experience performed in real-world enterprise environments, we analyzed post-launch behavioral data using Oracle Infinity, focusing on global adoption and funnel conversion performance at scale.
Global Enterprise Adoption
As of June 2020, Candidate Experience was actively used across multiple regions, with significant candidate traffic from markets including India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. This confirmed the system’s ability to support global, high-volume recruiting scenarios across diverse enterprise configurations.
Figure — Global adoption of Candidate Experience (Oracle Infinity, June 3, 2020)
Candidate traffic across regions demonstrates real-world enterprise usage at scale, with strong adoption in India, the U.S., and the U.K.
Application Funnel Performance at Scale
Over a seven-day reporting window (May 27–June 2, 2020), enterprise career sites built on Candidate Experience generated approximately ~90k site visits, ~68k application starts, and ~32k completed applications, resulting in a 28.44% application conversion rate.
Rather than optimizing for isolated metrics, the design focused on reducing early-stage friction and maintaining continuity across devices, enabling consistent funnel performance across regions and high traffic volumes.
Figure — Application funnel performance over a 7-day window (Oracle Infinity)
A sustained 28.44% conversion rate across ~90k visits reflects the impact of reduced entry friction and a continuity-first application experience.
The consistency of performance across regions and traffic volumes validated the system-level decisions to prioritize entry friction reduction and continuity over local optimization.
Why This Project Matters
This work was not about modernizing a UI—it was about leading a legacy enterprise platform through a market transition.
It required reframing success beyond feature delivery, aligning stakeholders around candidate-centered outcomes, and making principled system-level trade-offs under real enterprise constraints. Design decisions had to work simultaneously for humans navigating uncertainty and systems enforcing scale, compliance, and control.
By redefining Candidate Experience as a first-class platform concern within Oracle Recruiting Cloud, this work established durable foundations that continued to shape product behavior, consistency, and scalability long after launch—supporting Oracle’s long-term leadership in Recruiting Suites, recognized by Gartner as a Leader in 2025.