Work.ua’s HRM system let employers manage candidates — but only those found within the platform. Adding someone from LinkedIn, OLX, or a competitor meant opening a separate form, manually filling in contact details, and constantly switching tabs. We decided to solve this with a browser plugin that parses external pages and adds candidates in one click.

I joined as the lead designer on the strategic product team. My responsibilities spanned the full arc: research and prototyping at the start, supporting developers and reviewing implementation in the middle, and analyzing results at the end.

Constraints

The first version was Chrome-only and supported only three external sources. Both decisions were deliberate — 80% of our users were Chrome users, and the three selected sources covered 80% of where recruiters were actually finding candidates. Building parsers is expensive, so we focused on maximum coverage with minimal cost.

Concept

We analyzed 10 competitor plugins to identify what worked and what didn’t. The main problems we focused on:

• Parsing quality and accuracy.
• Handling sensitive data (phone numbers, emails) that can’t always be parsed.
• Keeping data if the plugin window was closed unexpectedly.
• Reducing the number of clicks to save a candidate.

Design

The form needed to handle a lot of candidate data. We auto-filled as much as possible from the page, and offered manual input only when parsing wasn’t feasible.

Timeline

The project took 4 weeks. The backend team started building parsers independently while design moved from prototype to final concept in the first week, then refined through the rest.

Results

The plugin worked well in terms of UX — candidate creation conversion improved over the manual flow. The harder problem was adoption. Most companies on Work.ua are small businesses that don’t need automation yet, and large companies with high candidate volume are few.

We ended up with 1,000 active users — recruiters from mid-to-large companies who needed automation but didn’t want to pay for enterprise solutions. That’s exactly the audience we were targeting.

Takeaway

The plugin is part of a longer strategy: build tools that are useful at every stage of company growth. Small companies aren’t the audience today, but they will be. And when they grow to the point where manual candidate collection becomes a bottleneck, the plugin is already there.