Dashboards and retention.

On OCC there was a static dashboard, and engagement depended entirely on a recruiter acting first. On Placeit, every session started from scratch: drafts, downloads, favorites, all scattered with nothing pulling them into one place.

At OCC, I built a Career Control Center that became the candidate's new homepage the moment they logged in: who had viewed their resume, which jobs they'd applied to and what stage each one was at, whether a recruiter had downloaded their resume, whether a job they cared about had since closed, and saved searches that kept surfacing fresh matches on their own. Every one of those events doubled as a notification trigger across push, email, and web, straight out of the Hook Model: trigger, action, reward, and something invested that pulls you back for the next round.

At Placeit, I used the same instinct from the other direction, building toward the same idea of a homepage that already knew what mattered to you. My Placeit brought five sections into one continuous workspace: Edited, Favorites, Recently Viewed, Downloads, and Folders. Folders ended up being the biggest of the five. Brand Kits came later, applying a brand's colours and look to any template in one click, and Account Connections, which connected social accounts through APIs to publish directly. Autosave rounded it out. Different users relied on different combinations depending on their use case. After cancelling, projects, files, folders, favorites and brands stayed saved; people could keep browsing, editing, branding templates and creating folders. What they couldn't do was download new files; anything downloaded before could be downloaded again. Different products, same principle: give people a reason to open the dashboard uninvited.

On OCC, candidates had a reason to open the app that had nothing to do with waiting on a recruiter, and the loop ran on its own. On Placeit, churn decreased by 7% across the set of retention improvements: accumulated work, an easy way back, and a reason to resubscribe to download new creations.