Placecom: one platform, four stakeholders, five products
A campus placement and AI hiring platform serving applicants, campuses, companies and channel partners. I was the sole design owner — problem framing through to shipped product.
- Role
- Lead UI/UX & Product Designer
- Duration
- Mar 2022 — Nov 2024
- Design team
- Just me
- Status
- Live — placecom.co
The problem
Campus placement is a four-sided problem that most tools solve one side at a time. Applicants want to become hireable and don't know how. Placement officers are running a logistics operation on spreadsheets. Recruiters want qualified candidates without reading a thousand identical resumes. And channel partners — the people who bring campuses and companies onto the platform in the first place — need their own view of all of it.
Placecom set out to serve all four inside a single product. That's the hard part: four groups with different goals, different levels of software fluency, and different definitions of success — but overlapping data and workflows, so they can't simply be four separate apps.
Four stakeholders, one system
Applicants
Students and recent graduates. Mobile-first, low patience, high anxiety — and the only group using the product at 11pm the night before an interview.
Campus
Placement officers and institutions. Running drives, eligibility and scheduling. They need bulk actions and an audit trail, not a friendly dashboard.
Companies
Recruiters hiring at volume. They optimise for time-to-shortlist, so every screen they touch is judged on how fast it removes candidates.
Channel partners
The people bringing campuses and companies onto the platform. Their view is commercial — pipeline, attribution and status — not academic.
What I designed
PrepEdge — interview preparation
Personalised prep with targeted question sets, instant feedback and confidence coaching, adapted to each student's profile and target role.
ResumeEdge — AI-assisted resume builder
ATS-optimised resume generation that works from a student's real profile data rather than dropping them into a generic template.
MockInterview — interview simulation
Full simulated interviews with real-time AI feedback on content, tone, structure and body language.
Campus Placements — institutional tooling
Placement workflow tooling for institutions and placement cells: drives, eligibility, scheduling and tracking.
Placecom for Recruiters
Scalable, AI-driven hiring and assessment for enterprise recruiters working at volume.
What the work involved
- Designing for four very different stakeholders inside one coherent product — applicants, placement officers, recruiters and channel partners, each with their own mental model of what the platform is for, and each convinced the product is mainly about them.
- UX for AI-driven features — setting expectations before the output arrives, handling low-confidence results honestly, and making automated feedback feel actionable rather than arbitrary. Getting this wrong doesn't just annoy a student; it makes them distrust the advice.
- A shared design system and component library so five products stayed consistent as they shipped, instead of diverging the moment they were built by different squads.
- The full craft cycle — user flows, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, usability testing and dev-ready specs.
- Working directly with founders, PMs and engineering to scope, prioritise and ship — including the unglamorous negotiation about what comes out of a release.
Users served
- Students
- Placement officers & institutions
- Enterprise recruiters
Focus areas
- Four-sided product design
- AI feature UX
- Design systems
- Usability testing
- Information architecture