Last month I built a recruitment portal from scratch learn the 20% of design thinking that actually works — request form, approval flow, candidate filtering with AI, the whole nine yards. Before I wrote a single line of code, I sat through fifteen hours of interviews with HR managers, hiring managers, and candidates who had just been rejected understand requirements the way stakeholders see them.
That is the part most articles about building products skip. They jump straight to the whiteboard sketch or the workshop exercise. Those are the easy parts. The hard part is being willing to throw away your first idea after you have heard the third interview say, “that is not actually how I do my job.”
This is the story of how I actually built that portal — the conversations I had before writing code, the assumptions I had to throw out, and the things that broke in the first week. The portal handles request forms, multi-level approval, job posting, candidate registration, AI-assisted filtering, interview scheduling, psychological tests, salary offers, MCU (medical check-up), and onboarding logistics. I will show what survived and what I deleted.
