Candidate Experience Designer

Candidate experience at Talent Kernel Labs has been left to whoever had time between reqs, and an exit survey this spring described the company's own recruiting product more accurately than its marketing did. That uncomfortable moment is why this senior contract role now owns researching and redesigning the candidate-facing moments nobody else has time for.

You conduct user research directly with recent candidates, hired and rejected, to understand where communication felt unclear or a status update arrived too late to matter. From that research you build journey maps tracing a candidate's path from application through decision, pinpointing where trust is won or lost rather than describing the process in the abstract. Using a service design lens, you propose concrete changes to messaging, timing and interface a product team can implement.

Required: five to eight years of service design or UX research experience, with real skill at journey mapping and a portfolio that includes qualitative research synthesized into a shipped design change rather than a slide deck. Recruiting-specific background is a plus, not a prerequisite, since the research skill transfers and the domain gets picked up quickly. You do not need prior in-house recruiting experience to do this work well.

The engagement is a flexible contract open to candidates based in Toronto or remote across North America, structured around specific milestones rather than fixed weekly hours. There is no set office schedule to keep. The contract runs through recruiting operations, which reviews deliverables at each milestone.