Hiring, Rebuilt
Internal tools are where design ambition goes to die. Nobody ships for them. Nobody writes for them. Nobody fights for them. I spent two years rebuilding Avito's hiring platform — from a maze of spreadsheets, emails, and tribal knowledge into one product. No researcher. No copywriter. Just enough conviction to treat 10,000 internal users like they deserved the same craft as any consumer.
BUILD THE ROOMS
Before I joined, Avito's internal product was three things: a news portal, a performance review tool, and a vacation request form. Nothing else had a home. I built the rooms: cabinets for managers, recruiters, compensation specialists — each one designed for completely different work modes. Now we've had a place to continue.
FILE A REQUEST
Every new hire used to start the same way: A manager opens a form, 26 mandatory fields. Every time. From scratch. Managers, cluster leads, directors — people whose hour costs the company serious money. Forty minutes to file a hiring request. I made it one. I ran my own discovery — no UX researcher. Interviewed users, built hypotheses, ran tests. Brought the form down to 2 fields. Now — click "Reuse" — managers press one button — the last request flows in, done. Piloted with 220 users across all roles — 7.5/10 average service rating. Rolled out company-wide.
SIGN AN OFFER
Every offer at Avito used to travel through a chain of approvers, and all of it lived in emails, spreadsheets, and 15 other tools. Errors. Delays. Dependency on whoever happened to be online. I designed an interface for every role in the chain — recruiters build offers in three steps, compensation specialists work with two, approvers chat & sign with context. After — for smooth transition shipped an Excel auto-upload that unblocked company-wide rollout. No need to use Excel anymore. 4K manager-hours saved every year across 1,050 users. Within a month of launch, 51% of all Avito offers went through the platform. Now — 100%. And the interface? Picked apart as reference by designers inside Avito and beyond. Closed corporate systems don't share on their own — I got Alfa, Raiffeisen, Tele2 talking to us and each other. And they still do.
RAISE THE BAR
The redesign of Avito People ran in parallel — I led it with an art director. Four key pages of the platform, rebuilt for the new design system in one quarter while doing regular product stuff. Out of that sprint came things that outlived it. A functional navigation bar now used as the base across every tool. A minimal pattern called "Pulse" that shows only what's active right now — teams reached for it on their own. Plain-language copy on every screen, and one standard for product, engineering, and design alike. The bar stayed up.