Anchor Experts (2026)
An end-to-end B2B talent marketplace connecting global companies with vetted African engineers — a recruiter-grade web dashboard for discovery, shortlisting, and hiring, paired with a mobile companion for quick decisions between sessions.
Client
Anchor Experts
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
12 weeks
Platform
Web Dashboard · Mobile App (iOS & Android)
The Challenge
What needed solving.
Companies already knew they wanted African tech talent — the cost-to-quality ratio was the draw, with savings of up to 46% compared to equivalent Western hires. What stopped most from following through was confidence. There was no well-designed, authoritative platform where a hiring manager could search by role, timezone, and experience level; read a candidate's bio and tech stack; check their vetting status; and make an offer — all without leaving one interface. The existing process was email chains, LinkedIn DMs, and spreadsheets. It worked at low volume. At scale, it collapsed.
The Approach
How we solved it.
We designed Anchor Experts as one product across two surfaces: a web dashboard built for sustained, exploratory hiring — filtering across four talent categories (Backend, Frontend, DevOps, CRM), managing shortlists, drilling into full candidate profiles with bios, tech stacks, resumes and technical videos — and a mobile companion that keeps decisions moving between sessions, mirroring the five highest-frequency actions in a one-thumb, one-level-deep UI. The vetting system sits at the centre of both: every profile carries a clear 'Fully Vetted — identity, background & skills verified' signal, because a candidate pool is only as valuable as the trust it earns.
Key Insights
What the research told us.
01 — Finding
Vetted status is the first thing eyes go to
In usability sessions, hiring managers scanned for the 'Vetted' indicator before reading role, location, or seniority — yet most competing platforms buried or omitted any explanation of what vetting actually covered, leaving clients to infer.
What we did about it
We made the vetting signal explicit everywhere it appears. Every candidate card, every table row, and every detail page carries the same 'Fully Vetted' chip with a one-line definition underneath — 'Identity, background & skills verified.' The language is consistent so a client scanning 30 results at speed never has to wonder what a green badge means or whether it applies to that specific person.
02 — Finding
Timezone fit is a dealbreaker, not a detail
Clients hiring for collaborative or client-facing roles ranked GMT compatibility above seniority and stack in early research sessions — yet every competing platform buried timezone information at the bottom of a profile, forcing clients to open each one just to check.
What we did about it
We surfaced GMT offset as a primary column in the talent table from day one, giving it equal visual weight with Role and Experience Level — and mirrored it as a prominent tag on every mobile candidate card. A client can now filter and scan timezone fit without opening a single profile, which meaningfully reduced the number of profiles clients needed to review before building a credible shortlist.
03 — Finding
Shortlisting has to feel reversible
Clients were hesitant to add candidates early in browsing because they assumed shortlisting either notified the candidate or triggered an internal approval workflow. The hesitation wasn't about the candidates — it was about what 'saving' meant.
What we did about it
We introduced a clear two-tier commit model: 'Save to shortlist' is low-commitment, silent, and represented by a heart icon the user can undo at any time; 'Hire Candidate' is the weighted CTA that initiates the placement process. Distinct visual treatment, distinct language, distinct position on screen. Once the non-commitment of saving was made legible, clients started building shortlists earlier and more broadly — arriving at the hiring step with a richer comparison pool.
Process
How the work got done.
01
Mapping the full placement pipeline
Spent the first two weeks with Anchor's operations team tracing every step of a real placement — how roles were sourced, how candidates were surfaced and communicated, how shortlists were shared, how hire decisions happened. Every handoff was happening in email. The product brief wrote itself: replace each of those handoffs with a designed moment inside the platform.
02
Role-based architecture
The platform serves two fundamentally different mental models: a client browsing and hiring talent, and an Anchor admin managing placements and monitoring platform health. We designed these as separate navigation trees within one shared visual shell — a sidebar that adapts to your role on sign-in, rather than a single monolithic structure trying to serve both at once.
03
Dashboard and candidate detail design
Built the Talent Portal around a dual-view pattern: aggregate stats across all four categories to communicate pool depth before the first search, then a dense, sortable table for real filtering by role, location, GMT, experience, and vetted status. The Candidate Details page was designed to answer four questions in one scroll: Is this person qualified? Where and when can they work? What do they sound like in their own words? And have they been verified? Every element earns its position against one of those four questions — everything else was cut.
04
Mobile companion design
Mirrored the five highest-frequency actions — browse talent, review a profile, manage shortlist, check analytics, manage clients — as purpose-built mobile screens, each designed for single-thumb use with no navigation deeper than one level. The mobile app was never meant to replace the dashboard; it was designed to keep decisions moving in the gaps between desktop sessions, so a hiring manager can review a shortlisted candidate during a commute and come to the next meeting ready to act.
Selected Screens
A closer look.
Mobile Companion
The app, up close.
Outcomes
The work moved the numbers.
180
active clients at launch
30
placements, first quarter
46%
average client cost saving
500+
vetted candidates on platform
Anchor Experts launched with 180 active clients, 500 vetted candidates, and 30 confirmed placements in its first quarter. Hiring managers consistently named vetting transparency and timezone visibility as the two signals that gave them the confidence to move faster than they'd ever moved through any other channel — bringing time from first login to hire decision down from weeks of email to a matter of days on the platform. The 46% average cost saving compared to an equivalent Western hire remained the platform's most-cited growth driver in early sales conversations.
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