Pickle Recruitment Platform
Industry: HealthcareRecruitment; Country: USA; Project length: 3 months; Team: Design Lead, UX/UI Specialist, Branding Expert; Services: Branding, Art-direction, Web Design, Product Design
About the Business
Pickle operates within the healthcare recruitment sector, connecting clinics and medical institutions with qualified candidates. Their platform served its purpose but was outdated and no longer aligned with their growing business needs, particularly in targeting the younger, Gen Z workforce. The client needed a partner to build a strong brand and user experience to improve platform functionality and future scalability.
Our expertise in web design and branding, along with a proven track record of building a strong B2C brand for another healthcare startup, made us an ideal choice for this project.
Project Challenges
Pickle’s existing platform faced several challenges:
- Brand Identity: As an early-stage startup, the brand struggled with professionalism and recognition. The client aimed to create a memorable brand that would encourage users to share it within their networks, which they successfully achieved—often in a humorous or playful way, like a “meme” or joke about Pickle.
- Platform Design: The platform was a bootstrap MVP developed by the team, necessitating a fresh design and enhanced user experience as they prepared for a market launch.
- Limited Scalability: The platform was unable to effectively support the company’s growing business objectives or facilitate the upcoming launch.
Key Project Goals
To address the challenges faced by Pickle and position them in the market, we focused on three core objectives:
- Establish a distinctive, shareable brand identity that appeals to Gen Z professionals.
- Redesign the UI/UX of the website and web app for a seamless user experience, in line with the new branding.
- Develop a scalable design system to support future growth and feature expansion.
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Branding Approach
Phase 1: Discovery
This phase uncovers key insights about the market, competitors, and the brand, providing the foundation needed to shape a strong and differentiated brand strategy.
- Competitor & Industry Research – We analyzed the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of current competitors to shape the brand’s own differentiation tactics, moving away from the cold blue/green tones associated with hospitals to a vibrant, warm color palette that fostered a more engaging and approachable emotional tone.
- Brand Checkup – We explored the mission, challenges, and brand personality based on:
- The Brand Archetypes framework, based on Carl Jung’s archetypes, helped us define Pickle’s brand characters, Everyman and Outlaw, to foster a strong emotional connection with the audience.
- Brand Principles define the core of the brand. We captured Pickle’s personality in four words: personal, liberating, optimistic, and transparent.
Phase 2: Brand Strategy
This is where we define the key elements that guide the brand’s look, feel, and communication across all channels. It resulted in:
- Visual Strategy – The visual strategy centered around a warm 3-4 color palette, with a focus on visuals over text. It incorporated branded graphics, custom emojis, and organic forms to highlight authenticity. Grotesque fonts and creative photography, like collages, helped reinforce the brand’s friendly and modern vibe.
- Tone of Voice – We crafted a friendly and modern communication style across social media, the website, and the product, helping Pickle connect with diverse audiences while remaining professional and resonating with Generation Z.
Phase 3: Ideation
This phase is where we generate creative concepts and narratives to shape the brand’s unique identity and storytelling.
- Brand Concepts & Storytelling – We developed four distinct brand concepts, each exploring different symbolic narratives. To make Pickle stand out and appeal to younger professionals, we selected a bold, bright color palette that felt fresh, modern, and inviting.
- Iterative Concept Integration – Through an iterative process, we combined the preferred elements from the brand concepts and integrated them into one.
Phase 4: Brand Identity
The Brand Identity phase is where the brand’s visual and communicative elements come to life, ensuring consistency and coherence across all touchpoints. It resulted in:
- Design Assets Creation – We developed all visual elements outlined in the client’s brief, from marketing materials to a Google Slides template, ensuring the brand direction was consistently applied across all platforms.
- Logo Design – A minimalist logo was selected to convey reliability and innovation, using simple shapes and avoiding outdated medical symbols to maintain a modern look.
- Art Direction – We curated a collection of lifestyle images featuring young people in casual settings, moving away from traditional “doctors in scrubs” stock photos. The image repository simplifies work and saves time for the marketing team in the future.
Phase 5: Delivery
The Delivery phase ensures that all brand assets and guidelines are finalized and ready for consistent implementation across all platforms.
- Brand Guidelines – A detailed set of instructions for maintaining brand consistency, covering grids, color usage, combinations, and best practices for various purposes.
- Media Kit – A comprehensive document containing essential brand materials, such as logos, guidelines, press releases, images, and social media links. This serves as a centralized resource for media or stakeholders to accurately represent the brand.
Website Design
The website extended the brand by incorporating key elements from the chosen concept. This project focused on designing two essential pages, setting the tone and guidelines for the remaining pages, which would be handled internally by the Pickle team.
- Home Page: We redesigned the Home page to reflect the new brand, with a stronger focus on user registration and a seamless navigation experience. The page is optimized to drive conversions, shifting from collecting waitlist sign-ups to encouraging immediate user registration.
- Company Page (Hire With Us): The company page was restructured to attract healthcare organizations. We made it easy for companies to understand the platform’s value in hiring Gen Z healthcare professionals, showcasing a seamless hiring process.
Product Design
We focused on creating a user-friendly, intuitive interface to make the platform accessible to all users, regardless of technical background. After analyzing competitors, we simplified navigation to improve the overall experience, especially for Generation Z, who value speed and ease of use. The project’s scope, as defined by the client, was limited to designing two key pages.
- Search Jobs: Improved search with advanced filters helps users quickly find jobs matching their background and career goals.
- Job Posting Feed & Recommendations: A mobile-first feed with personalized job recommendations simplifies and enhances job discovery, catering to Gen Z’s need for speed and ease.
- Design System: Delivering a robust design system not only met the expectations of Pickle’s CTO but also ensured the product’s continuity and scalability. Although our web and product design scope was limited, the comprehensive design system enabled Pickle’s team to create and refine pages independently, without needing further involvement from Habitat.
Results
- Increased Investor Interest: With its refreshed, professional, and approachable brand identity, Pickle became more “investable” and received several serious inquiries.
- Positive Market Reception & Increased Engagement: The modernized platform attracted over 3,500 new candidates within the first few months of launch, signaling strong adoption and generating positive feedback from users on social media.
- 30% Increase in Website Traffic: The redesign of the website resulted in a substantial rise in both the number of visitors and the duration of user sessions, without any changes to the content.
- Improved Platform Scalability: The scalable design system enabled the internal Pickle technical team to seamlessly add new features and support continuous growth, increasing operational efficiency without external assistance.
Conclusion
The collaboration with Pickle resulted in a modern, scalable platform that met both immediate business needs and laid a strong foundation for future growth. By addressing branding, user experience, and scalability, we helped Pickle transform into a competitive and engaging recruitment platform for the healthcare industry.