Adway is a social recruitment marketing platform that helps companies attract passive candidates by advertising job openings across social media channels. The platform targets people who are not actively searching but might be the right fit, reaching them where they already spend their time. When a candidate clicks one of those ads, they need somewhere to land. That destination is Convert.
Convert is a standalone, branded application product that sits at the end of Adway's funnel. Recruiters configure their application setup directly within Adway: which steps to include, how to sequence them, and how the experience should look and feel for their brand. What candidates see is a mobile-friendly, fully customized flow that reflects the company they are applying to, not a generic form. Built-in automation handles nurturing: candidates who start but do not complete an application receive personalized reminders, giving recruiters a second chance to convert interest into a completed submission.
The design challenge was twofold. The configuration side had to be simple enough for non-technical recruiters to build and publish their own application setup without support. The candidate side had to be clear, fast, and frictionless, because passive candidates, reached through a social media ad, are far harder to hold than someone who actively sought out a job posting.
Designing a smooth, conversion-focused application experience for passive candidates surfaced challenges on both sides of the product:
01
Sign-up drop-off at the entry point. The first step candidates encountered was a sign-up form: full name, email, and phone number. For a passive candidate who clicked an ad on impulse, this was the highest-risk moment in the flow. Too much friction here and most would leave before the application even started. The challenge was making this step feel light and fast without removing the information recruiters needed.
02
Drop-off during the application flow. Even candidates who completed sign-up were at risk of abandoning before finishing. With multiple steps (CV upload, screening questions, and other recruiter-defined stages), the flow could feel demanding for someone who was not actively job hunting. Keeping candidates engaged through every step required careful decisions about sequence, progress feedback, and how much to ask at each point.
03
Recruiter configuration and data handling. On the recruiter side, each client could define their own application setup: which steps to include, in what order, and how to present them. Designing a configuration experience that was flexible without becoming complex, and handling the resulting variety of data structures that different setups would produce, was a challenge that ran across the product.
04
Mobile-first experience. Since candidates arrived via social media ads, the majority were on mobile. Every step of the flow, from sign-up through CV upload and application completion, had to work smoothly on a small screen, with minimal typing and no friction that would feel acceptable on desktop but punishing on mobile.
Convert approaches the drop-off problem by separating entry from completion. Rather than requiring candidates to finish the entire application in one sitting, the flow is structured so that signing up is the primary goal. Once a candidate submits their name, email, and phone number, they are in the talent pool. From that point, the remaining steps (CV upload, screening questions, and any other recruiter-defined stages) can be completed immediately or returned to later.
This distinction matters because passive candidates, reached through a social media ad, are in a different mindset than active job seekers. They may be interested but not ready to commit twenty minutes to a full application. By reducing the cost of the first action to almost nothing, Convert captures that moment of interest before it passes. The automation layer then handles the rest: candidates who sign up but do not complete their application receive personalized reminders that bring them back to where they left off, keeping engagement alive without requiring recruiter intervention.
The candidate experience is fully branded to the company they are applying to, configured by the recruiter in Adway before publishing. Every application is mobile-first by design, built around minimal typing and a clear sense of progress, so that completing the flow on a phone feels as natural as starting it.
01
Stakeholder interviews
The process started with structured interviews with stakeholders across Adway and its clients. Six question areas were explored, covering current pain points in the application process, user needs for mobile experience, client customisation requirements, success metrics, training needs, and security and compliance considerations. Answers were grouped into themes (user experience, integration and system requirements, and success metrics), giving a structured view of what both the business and its clients needed from the product before any design work began.
Stakeholder interview questions grouped by category — user experience, integration and system requirements, and success metrics.
02
User research and personas
To understand the candidate side, user research was conducted through interviews and surveys. Two distinct personas emerged. Sara is 22, a recent computer science graduate in Berlin, mobile-first, easily overwhelmed by complex processes, and wants to highlight her skills prominently. Alex is 35, based in Gothenburg, with ten years of marketing and sales experience, seeking a career change, and looking for a customisable process that reflects his breadth of experience. These two profiles captured the range of candidates Adway's clients would be trying to reach, and shaped every subsequent design decision.
Two candidate personas — Sara, a recent graduate seeking her first tech role, and Alex, an experienced professional navigating a career change.
03
Synthesising the findings
With both sides of the research complete, five key directions emerged: strengthening data security and communicating it clearly to users, implementing customisation features that let candidates tailor their applications, prioritising mobile-friendly design across every step, optimising communication and feedback to reduce candidate anxiety, and integrating engagement features like reminders in a way that respects user preferences. These became the design priorities that the rest of the process was built around.
Key takeaways from user research, organised into five design priorities.
04
User flow
Based on the research findings, a user flow was mapped for the full candidate journey: from landing on Convert through sign-up, the initial application steps, and the return path for candidates who had not completed the full flow. The goal was to identify exactly where decisions needed to be made about what to ask upfront versus what could wait, and how the automation layer would re-engage candidates who dropped off.
User flow mapping the full candidate journey from sign-up through staged application completion and re-engagement.
05
Wireframes, prototype, and iteration
With the flow established, wireframes were created for each stage of the candidate experience and iterated based on testing. The prototype was used to validate the sequence of steps, the sign-up experience, and the overall sense of progress through the application. Feedback from testing shaped the final design.
Early wireframes of the candidate application flow, used for testing and iteration.
01
Talent pool entry via sign-up
Candidates enter the talent pool the moment they complete the sign-up step: name, email, and phone number. This is the primary conversion goal of the flow. Once in the pool, they are visible to recruiters regardless of whether they have completed the rest of their application, removing the pressure to finish everything in one go.
Convert candidate experience — sign-up, application steps, and branded flow across mobile screens.
02
Staged application completion
After signing up, candidates can complete the remaining application steps at their own pace. CV upload, screening questions, and any other recruiter-defined stages can be returned to later, so a candidate who had only a moment to click an ad can pick up exactly where they left off when they have more time.
03
Reminders and opportunity notifications
Candidates who have not completed their application receive automated, personalized reminders to bring them back to the flow. Beyond that, they are notified about other relevant opportunities that match their profile, turning a single application into an ongoing connection with the recruiter's talent pipeline.
04
Customizable application flow
Recruiters configure the entire application setup within Adway: which steps to include, in what order, and how the experience should be branded to their company. The result is a Convert flow that looks and feels like it belongs to that company, with no generic template visible to the candidate.
05
Candidate management and filtering
On the recruiter side, incoming candidates can be organised, reviewed, and narrowed down based on their application progress and responses. Recruiters get a clear view of who is in their talent pool, who has completed the full application, and who still needs follow-up.
Recruiter-side interface for reviewing, organising, and filtering incoming candidates.
Convert landed well on both sides of the product. Recruiters responded strongly to the customisation capability. The ability to shape the application flow to their brand and process gave them a sense of ownership that off-the-shelf tools had never offered. The candidate management side was equally well received, giving recruiters a structured way to scan, filter, and prioritise incoming applications rather than managing everything manually.
For candidates, particularly passive ones, the combination of a frictionless entry point and a staged completion model changed the dynamic of applying. Getting into the talent pool with minimal effort meant more candidates made it past the first step, and the mobile-first experience made the process feel native to where they had discovered the opportunity in the first place. Recruiters gained reach into a candidate pool that would previously have dropped off before ever submitting.
L1
Meet users where they already are
Social media is not just a distribution channel for job ads. It is a context. Passive candidates scrolling through their feed are in a completely different mindset from someone actively searching a job board. Understanding that context shaped every decision in Convert: the mobile-first approach, the minimal sign-up, the staged completion model. The product had to earn attention that was never guaranteed. Designing for where users actually are, rather than where you wish they were, is what makes the difference between a flow that converts and one that gets scrolled past.
L2
Autonomy drives completion more than obligation
Forcing users through a mandatory linear flow creates resistance, especially when they did not go looking for the product in the first place. The shift to a staged model, where sign-up was the goal and everything else could follow at the candidate's pace, was the most important design decision in the product. Users who feel in control of a process are far more likely to return and complete it than users who feel pushed through it. Removing pressure from the experience did not reduce completion. It increased the chances of it.
L3
Designing for two users means holding two very different needs at once
Convert served two audiences with opposing priorities. Recruiters wanted control, structure, and the ability to customise everything. Candidates wanted simplicity, speed, and as little friction as possible. Every design decision had to be tested against both. The configuration that gave recruiters flexibility could not be allowed to produce a candidate experience that felt complicated. Keeping those two needs in balance, rather than optimising for one at the expense of the other, was the central design challenge of the project.
