Impactpool
From job board to proactive recruitment
Impactpool helps Humanitarian Aid, NGOs, and global development organizations find specialized professionals worldwide.
Overview
Unlike traditional recruitment platforms, Impactpool’s clients seek highly specific profiles. For example, a sanitation expert with experience in conflict zones and the ability to deploy on short notice. Finding these candidates requires more than posting jobs; it requires building and maintaining talent pools.
The Impactpool Talent Suite combines traditional ATS features (job posts, career pages) with specialized tools such as virtual career fairs and webinars. But these tools largely relied on candidates taking action. Our goal was to make recruitment proactive, allowing organizations to search all Impactpool members and connect directly.
A special note about the target users: Most teams only have one person using the system frequently. You cannot count on infrequent users learning the intricacies of the system.
The Challenge
Impactpool already allowed organizations to search within their own Talent Pool, but not beyond it.
The new initiative was to let recruiters search and connect with all Impactpool members, expanding the reach of proactive recruitment.
The challenge was how to introduce this new layer of search without creating confusion. Adding a second “search bucket” (one inside and one outside your pool) would be easy technically, but problematic for usability.
Our task was to design a unified, seamless experience that merged both worlds while clearly indicating connection status and available actions.
Design Approach
Unified Search Experience
We created a single search that combined all profiles, using visual indicators and contextual actions (connect, message).
The interface was inspired by social networks , helping recruiters understand at a glance who they were connected to.
Proactive Recommendations
Recruiters received automatic candidate suggestions as they created job posts, surfacing relevant matches instantly and encouraging proactive outreach.
Simplified Onboarding for Candidates
We redesigned candidate onboarding to focus on profile completeness rather than job preferences.
Users could import their CV, skip legacy data fields, and manage a consistent profile view used across jobs, events, and applications.
What We Learned
The first implementation didn’t fully realize the unified vision. Due to technical limitations searches still appeared separate.
But once launched, user feedback revealed two important insights:
Credits discouraged exploration. Recruiters hesitated to spend them, reducing engagement.
Unified visibility is key. Even partial fragmentation increased confusion and reduced confidence.
This project showed how letting time constraints and technical limitations dictate the UX design can influence not just interface clarity, but an entire product’s business direction.
