Enterprise sourcing was built for recruiters. Most small businesses don't have one.

For a small business, hiring is not a job. It is an interruption.

Resdex assumes a recruiter at a desk: search strings, saved queries, a setup that rewards someone whose whole day is sourcing. A small business does not have that person. The owner or the office manager hires when a resignation forces them to, on a phone, between a supplier call and a delivery. Our own instrumentation showed exactly where that person gave up: heavy, multi-page data collection before any value appeared.

And Naukri had a strategic reason to care. Most of India's businesses are small, and most sit outside the big metro cities, beyond where an enterprise sales team can profitably call on them one by one. Reaching them needed a product that sells itself and serves itself. Resdex Lite was that bet, and design was how the intent became something a person could actually use.

So the brief was never to simplify Resdex. Simplifying an expert tool insults the expert and still loses the novice.

We went to the market. Literally.

We did not wander into the field. The company had already mapped which kinds of small businesses were worth serving first, and the research followed that map. I structured it with a core product manager and a design researcher, and went myself: physical business clusters, contextual conversations inside working offices, and strict screening so we were learning from actual small-business operators, not convenient stand-ins. On top of that, we sat with fifteen-plus paying customers of the existing platform and documented their workarounds, their script sheets, and the exact points where the interface fought them.

Three kinds of people kept showing up. A consultancy reposting the same role every Monday because fresh applications dry up. An office manager running hiring from a spreadsheet, next to payroll and appraisals. And a consultant paying for database access and counting every closure against what it cost.

The interviews kept returning to the same shape. For these operators, hiring is one continuous workflow, understand the need, search, filter, contact, track, reuse, and everywhere a tool broke that chain, a workaround appeared: a spreadsheet of resume links, a WhatsApp thread, the same role posted again on Monday. “Right now I’m doing it all manually. It’s hard to keep track of these people,” one HR generalist told us. The product did not just have to make search easier. It had to serve the workflow around it.

Prove it in two cities before betting the brand.

Small business is not one market. A consultancy, a factory and a five-person office hire differently, and what works in one city can miss in the next. So with the field evidence in hand, I worked with marketing on a launch built to minimise risk rather than maximise noise: start in two cities where a mistake stays small, watch who searches, who buys and who comes back, keep the rules that repeated, then grow from there. A national brand and a national database are not things you experiment on casually.

Design ran inside the squads, not ahead of them.

I embedded senior designers into the delivery squads with explicit ownership: the core product flow, the mobile checkout, the marketing surfaces. Walkthroughs and acceptance testing happened continuously rather than as a gate at the end, and the working rhythm ran alongside the product owners, engineering leads and data science partners, not upstream of them.

The final acceptance review with senior leadership cleared the product. The engineering release came after my time, so what Naukri sells today is the team's story to tell.