Akbank Career Recruitment Platform by Akbank Design Studio Staff Channel is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2026 Golden A' Design Award in Software Design Competition Category.
GoldSoftware· 2026
Akbank Career Recruitment Platform
by Akbank Design Studio Staff Channel
Client: Akbank T.a.Ş
Golden A' Design Award Winner in Software Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #181922The Design
About Akbank Career Recruitment Platform
The Akbank Career is an end to end recruitment platform that transforms hiring into a unified digital experience. By connecting candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers within a single ecosystem, it positions experience as a strategic asset. Informed by data driven research, the platform enhances transparency, accelerates processes, and improves decision making quality. As a scalable in house solution, it reduces reliance on external providers while supporting long term digital transformation.
The Recognition
About the Golden A' Design Award
Akbank Career Recruitment Platform is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. Akbank Career Recruitment Platform is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Akbank Career Recruitment Platform creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.
Interviews
Grand Interview
The Akbank Career Recruitment Platform achieved the remarkable feat of unifying candidate journeys, recruiter workflows, and hiring manager oversight within a single digital ecosystem, a structural ambition that many large-scale organizations attempt but rarely execute with such coherence. Of all the design and product decisions that shaped the Akbank Career Recruitment Platform into what it is today, which single achievement are you most proud of, and what was the story behind making that particular vision a reality?
What we are most proud of is transforming a complex recruitment journey into a more connected and transparent experience across multiple user groups. Rather than bringing everything into a single platform, the project was designed as a parallel ecosystem where candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers each interact through their own dedicated interfaces while remaining connected through the same hiring flow.The turning point came through research. We realized that although these workflows already existed, the connections between them were often fragmented and difficult to follow. This shaped our vision: not to rebuild recruitment from scratch, but to strengthen the relationship between these parallel experiences and make the overall process more understandable, consistent, and human-centered.
Transparency in hiring has become one of the most discussed challenges in the human resources technology space, with candidates increasingly demanding visibility into where they stand throughout the application process. How did the Akbank Career Recruitment Platform specifically redesign the candidate-facing communication experience to address this transparency gap, and what research insights most directly influenced those decisions?
Transparency emerged as one of the strongest themes throughout our research process. Candidates consistently emphasized the importance of clearly understanding where they were in the application journey, what the next step would be, and what to expect along the way.While many of these steps already existed in the recruitment process, the experience itself was not always easy to follow. To address this, we redesigned the communication and tracking flow to be more intuitive, informative, and user-friendly. By improving content clarity, progress visibility, and guidance at each stage, we made the process feel more transparent and easier to navigate.
Conducting mixed-method design research with over 400 participants, spanning interviews, workshops, usability tests, surveys, tree tests, and benchmarking, represents a substantial investment in understanding human behavior before writing a single line of code. How did the depth and scale of that research process fundamentally reshape the information architecture and navigational logic of the Akbank Career Recruitment Platform in ways that would not have been possible through a more conventional design approach?
The scale of our research fundamentally changed how we approached the platform. Rather than starting with assumptions, we conducted interviews, workshops, usability tests, surveys, tree tests, and benchmarking studies involving more than 400 participants.One of the most important findings was that different user groups entered the platform with very different goals. Students, recent graduates, and experienced professionals were looking for different opportunities, content, and levels of guidance. This led us to restructure the information architecture around user needs rather than internal organizational structures.Research also showed that candidates needed clearer access to relevant content, recruitment programs, and job opportunities. In response, we redesigned the navigation with more focused entry points, simplified content hierarchies, and clearer pathways between sections. These decisions helped create a more intuitive and guided experience, something that would have been difficult to achieve through a conventional, assumption-based design process.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Akbank Career is an end to end recruitment platform that combines candidate journeys and HR operations within a unified ecosystem. Beyond job listings, Explore and Blog sections transparently present company culture, working models, and development opportunities. Candidates can create personalized CVs for broader career use, track applications in real time, and message recruiters throughout the process. Recruiters and managers oversee all processes through a centralized, data informed dashboard.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- This enterprise recruitment platform unifies candidate journeys, HR operations, document management, and data driven reporting within a scalable digital ecosystem. Developed with an end to end experience approach and a design-system foundation, it runs on OpenShift based backend services with an Angular frontend architecture. The platform works adaptively across web, tablet, and mobile devices.
- Tags
- Career Website, Candidate Experience, User Experience, User Interface, Human Resources Technologies, Talent Management
- Production Technology
- The Akbank Career was developed through an iterative product development methodology grounded in user research. Adopting a user experience design approach, the experiences of candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers were addressed holistically, with prototypes and user testing conducted at every phase to validate design decisions. Built using an agile workflow, the platform is designed on a scalable and sustainable architecture integrated with internal systems.
- Design Challenge
- The core challenge was designing a large-scale career platform that could balance speed, technical constraints, and meaningful user experience. Within tight timelines and evolving technical boundaries, the team needed to translate research insights into practical, scalable design decisions. Coordinating multiple stakeholders across HR, IT, and business units required prioritization and alignment, while ensuring that usability, clarity, and candidate confidence were never compromised.
- Research
- This project included a mixed-method design research approach to redesign Akbank’s career website throughout the entire design cycle. The objective was to understand candidates’, employees’ and hiring managers’ expectations and remove friction in job discovery and application flows. We combined interviews, workshops, usability tests, surveys, tree tests and benchmarks with over 400 participants. Insights reshaped information architecture, content tone, filters and navigation, resulting in clearer job discovery, improved application experience and a more inclusive, transparent hiring journey.
- Inspiration
- The Akbank Career was shaped by the observed need for transparency, clarity, and visibility throughout the candidate journey, alongside opportunities to streamline and accelerate internal recruitment operations while eliminating dependency on external development partners.
- Project Duration
- The project started in October 2023 in Istanbul and finished in March, 2026 in Istanbul and was exhibited in Istanbul, 2026.
- Operation Flow
- Candidates explore job opportunities at Akbank, review the company’s culture and benefits, and apply to the roles that best match them. They can easily create and download their resumes to use on other platforms. Applicants track their application status through their profile and stay informed throughout the process. HR teams and managers view all candidates and positions in a single dashboard, enabling fast and secure hiring decisions.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Akbank T.A.Ş, 2026.
- Team Members
- Akbank Design Studio Staff Channel
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Illustrator, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
Image #2: Illustrator, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
Image #3: Illustrator, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
Image #4: Illustrator, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
Image #5: Illustrator, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
Video Credits: Videographer, Akbank Design Studio, 2026.
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