From Overwhelmed to Always On: How We Designed an AI Teammate for Talent Marketers

Scope

This project encompassed the full conversational AI product design lifecycle—starting with user research into recruiting workflows, through natural language interaction design, voice interface prototyping, and iterative testing to validate the agent's tone, capability, and trustworthiness.

Project overview

I led the design of Cleo, an agentic talent nurture system that works continuously in the background to build candidate relationships. The goal was to create an AI teammate that feels collaborative rather than automated—one that handles repetitive outreach while keeping Talent Marketers in control of strategic decisions and high-touch conversations.

Approach & collaboration

This project is grounded in research, user interviews and journey mapping with industry experts, PMs, and practisioners. These insights defined user personas and user stories, which directly informed the design of UI patterns and UX interactions.

To validate early decisions, I created a fully functional application that enabled real-world testing of core workflows with users, pillar accounts, and practitioners.

Outcomes & impact

Cleo became a true teammate for Talent Marketers, enabling one person to maintain authentic connections across their whole talent pool. Instead of blasting campaigns to segments, users could engage candidates around individual career events—transforming nurture into genuine relationship-building at scale.

The success of this agentic approach positioned the company to close keystone accounts, and expand into other recruiting workflows where AI partnership—not just automation—could deliver outsized value.