Designing a platform where kindness gets you hired
Not everyone can write a CV or bio — and it’s the designer’s job to help job-seekers shine nonetheless.
“An immigrant is someone who moves from one country to another, often permanently, in search of a better life.”
This definition doesn’t capture the hardships that drive many to leave — chaos, war, poverty, and suffering.
In 2022, Canada accepted a record 437,539 immigrants. As of July 2024, around 6 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered across Europe. Approximately 650,000 Russians have left their country permanently.
For many of these people, simply having a roof over their heads and permission to stay isn’t enough. They need jobs to sustain themselves. Many were forced to leave their careers behind and can’t imagine life without employment.
With an overall average employment rate of 56%, it takes refugees up to 20 years to have a similar employment rate as the native-born.
My struggles as a non-native speaker with severe dyslexia motivated me to challenge the bias against hiring people whose first language isn’t English. This story is about how it went.
The project
As a product owner, designer, and UX engineer, I wanted to help more people find jobs, and finding them is easier online. So, my team and I created a job platform for caregivers:
- nannies and babysitters,
- tutors,
- housekeepers,
- pet care providers,
- and other similar positions.
Based in Canada, our goal is to offer equal job opportunities to everyone — whether they are citizens or refugees, English native speakers or not.
It’s a complex process. If the person seeking a job is not yet in Canada, the parents or those needing care would have to:
- invite them and
- assist with their migration documents.
This is a big commitment, so finding the right fit was crucial. That’s why we developed a detailed set of criteria and AI-powered onboarding to help employers find the most suitable nanny for their needs. From desired salary and years of experience to location, we made sure parents could filter for exactly what they were looking for:
We included specific details like the age range of children the nanny is comfortable working with, whether they can swim, and even if they are okay working in homes with video surveillance:
Now, if that was just that, and everything had gone perfectly from day one, this wouldn’t be a design story — this would be some cheesy advertisement of the platform.
But as it turns out, things got much more complicated than that.
Despite the designed criteria, employers were still hesitant to hire caregivers, particularly non-native speakers and elderly persons, even when they matched the profiles perfectly.
What was the problem here?
Non-native speakers struggle to express themselves through text
Not everyone can write a CV or bio.
For many immigrants, language is a major obstacle. For older persons, poor vision and limited dexterity make navigating websites difficult. In a world of visual content, these groups had a disadvantage.
We initially thought a bio could be the perfect space for caregivers to express themselves. It seemed like the ideal solution — a chance to show their personality, passion, and warmth.
And the bio worked… But only for people who wielded English well:
For non-native speakers, it was clear that expressing themselves through text was challenging. Their bios often came across as dry, short, and riddled with mistakes:
It’s much harder to make your bio stand out and feel “competitive” when English isn’t your first language. We saw many bios that ended abruptly, leaving thoughts unfinished, almost like the author gave up:
Can we be truly accessible to everyone? You may have heard that designing for accessibility is not that hard. Just make sure the text can scale, use good contrast, and don’t rely on color alone to differentiate things.
Sounds easy, right? Well, it isn’t.
Accessibility isn’t just about checking off a list of rules. Making a product accessible shouldn’t just be about making it usable for everyone — it should also ensure fairness.
Everyone should have a real, equal chance to succeed in their intentions when using a product.
In our case, using text bios was unfair toward the non-native speakers. The quality of the bios of non-native speakers was clearly suffering.
Even though we knew these job-seekers were amazing people, their limited language skills prevented them from expressing their personality and abilities. No matter how qualified they were, the language barrier kept employers from seeing the potential behind their profiles.
As a non-native speaker myself, I could not leave it as is.
There is more to it than text
The answer came from the essence of the profession itself. A caregiver is a unique profession. It requires more than just experience; it demands special moral qualities like patience, resilience, and, most importantly, kindness.
But how do you show kindness through the cold screen?
In a world of visual content, there was only one way to overcome the bias: let the employers hear the job seekers’ voices.
Introducing audio fairy tales
One of the coolest things we’ve added to our platform is the option for caregivers, specifically nannies, and tutors, to record short fairy tales.
It gives caregivers, especially non-native speakers, a chance to show their personality in a way that text can’t. It’s also a way for employers to hear their voice, pronunciation, and storytelling style, which can be a huge plus when working with kids.
The caregiver can choose a fairy tale to record and start reading it out loud:
They then can save the story and permanently display it in their profile:
For those who don’t speak English at all, we’ve added the option to record fairy tales in their native language.
This is especially important because Canada is home to many migrant families who are also looking for babysitters, preferring someone from their own country who speaks their language.
In some cases, just hearing the intonation and warmth in the caregiver’s voice was enough to get them hired.
Then, we decided to focus even more on audio and adapting AI to help complete the non-native speakers’ profiles.
Using dictation and AI to create a better CV
For people with poor vision, we took extra steps. One of the key features we introduced is a dictation option when creating bios. This allows caregivers to simply talk about themselves, making the process easier on the eyes.
Additionally, we added an option for AI to automatically compile a bio based on the information provided during our detailed onboarding process. This way, users who might struggle with writing or typing can still have a bio that highlights their strengths and experience:
Inspired by the success of our platform, we also introduced an audio introduction feature. For many users, this option serves them much better than an AI-generated bio, which can sometimes sound awkward and overly formal:
Adding voice messages
I realized that voice holds power I didn’t know was there. The kindness was there, and the employers felt it.
We kept pursuing. Typing numerous messages to respond to potential employers can also be challenging for non-natives. So, the answer was, again — voice. We added voice messages:
Even if empathic design “doesn’t exist,” you shouldn’t stop trying to achieve it
Did you know that Don Norman doesn’t believe in empathic design? It’s the guy who wrote the Design of Everyday Things and co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group.
He says true empathy in design is impossible because we cannot get into the user’s head.
But here’s the thing: just because we can’t achieve perfect empathy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Design is about getting as close as we can, listening, observing, and adapting based on what we learn.
We’re not a perfect platform, but I couldn’t be happier with how far we’ve come. Real stories are coming out of this — people being hired for their kindness, not just citizenship, and folks moving to places like Canada, the UK, and Israel. Every year, more than 50,000 new job-seekers and, even more impressively, 80,000 employers join the platform. More than 300,000 families have found their trusted caregivers, helping many of them immigrate.
The unsolvable turned out to be solvable. It had been right in front of me the whole time — just beyond the visuals. The key wasn’t in the design alone; it was in voice and fairy tales. They brought human connection and kindness, making everything possible.
