Hired

Data-driven candidate reports and landing page for a talent marketplace.

Data vizLandingReport

Hired connects software talent with companies that want them. The work covered both the data-driven candidate report and a marketing landing page that introduced it.

Year: 2019
Role: Product Designer
Company: Hired.com

hired.com

Problem

Hired had survey data on 170K interviews, 10K companies, and 98K seekers — a rare window into the tech labor market. What it didn't have was a compelling way to publish it. Annual State-of reports needed to read like editorial pieces, not data dumps, and each topic needed its own art direction without fragmenting the brand.

Approach

I worked across four reports in parallel — Software Developers, Wage Inequality, Salaries, and a system-level cover anthology — treating each as an editorial product with its own visual language, anchored to a shared methodology and typographic system.

Hired — process sketches exploring low-poly globe concepts — Early sketches exploring the low-poly globe motif that anchored the Salary Report.

Concepts moved from hand sketches to refined 3D forms before any pixels hit the page. Working in low-fidelity first kept the team focused on which metaphors actually carried the data — and which were just decoration.

Hired — methodology section with key stats and table of contents — Methodology and TOC — 170K interviews, 10K companies, 98K candidates underpinning every claim.

Every report opened with a transparent methodology page. Surfacing the sample size up front — 170K interviews, 10K companies, 98K seekers — earned the reader's trust before a single chart appeared.

State of Software Developers

Hired — Software Developers hero with rainbow sunburst — Dark hero with rainbow sunburst — signaling a developer-focused, technical read.

The developer report leaned into a dark, energetic palette with a rainbow sunburst hero. The visual language echoed terminal aesthetics and the gradient breadth of modern dev tooling.

Hired — world map and bar chart of programming languages — Geographic demand paired with language popularity — two patterns, one spread.

Data viz patterns repeated across the report: a world map for geographic demand, horizontal bars for language popularity, and consistent legend treatment so readers built fluency by page three.

State of Wage Inequality

Hired — dense wage gap dashboard with comparative breakdowns — Dense comparative views — gender, race, and role intersecting across markets.

The wage gap data was the densest of the set. The dashboard spread compressed multiple breakdowns into a single scannable grid, with red key findings doing the editorial pointing.

Hired — Wage Inequality editorial sections with portraits — Editorial layout with portraits — humanizing the numbers behind the gap.

Portraits and pull quotes broke up the statistical chapters. Putting faces against the figures kept the report from reading as an abstract spreadsheet — the people inside the data stayed visible.

State of Salaries

Hired — Salary Report light layout with low-poly globe — Light, optimistic layout — the low-poly globe carrying the geographic narrative.

The Salary Report flipped to a light, optimistic palette. The low-poly globe sketched earlier became the anchor visual — abstract enough to feel global, concrete enough to read as data.

Hired — city storytelling spreads with US salary map — City-by-city storytelling — salary deltas grounded in specific markets.

Per-city storytelling let national averages get specific. A reader in Austin or Toronto could find their market in two scrolls and compare their compensation against the regional benchmark.

Hired — responsive mobile views of report spreads — Mobile views — long-form data designed to hold up on a phone.

Most readers found the reports on social. The mobile experience treated long-form data as a vertical scroll, collapsing multi-column spreads into single-column reads without losing the editorial rhythm.

Outcome

Seen as a set, the four reports functioned as a system — each carrying its own art direction while sharing a methodology, typographic spine, and editorial cadence. The data-driven reports drove brand awareness for Hired as the authoritative voice on the state of tech hiring.

Next project

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