Personality-driven talent platform

The way most companies hire is broken on both ends. A candidate writes a resume, sells the version of themselves they think the employer wants. The employer reads ten resumes that look interchangeable, picks on instinct, then finds out three months in that the new hire and the manager grate against each other in ways nobody could have predicted from a CV.

The client had spent two decades building serious personality and aptitude assessment products for HR. The brief was to take that signal and put it where hiring actually happens: inside the resume itself, inside the job description, inside the matching layer. Not a separate report nobody reads.

Designed the platform so the assessment isn't a PDF stapled to an application. It's a structured layer the resume builder, job board and matching system all read from natively. Candidates take the assessment once, the platform learns how they work and that signal travels with every application they send. Roles get described in the same shape, so matching happens on working style, communication preferences and team fit, not just keywords.

Engineering lead on a four-person team distributed across Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Canada, two frontend, one backend, one DevOps, with me carrying full stack delivery (Nest.js + Vue 3), team leadership and direct project management with the client. The PM hat was the deliberate choice. With a team this small, an extra layer of translation between client and engineering would have added more cost than coordination value.

The stack was Nest.js on the backend with TypeScript end-to-end, Vue 3 on the frontend the year Vue 3 stabilized, before the ecosystem had fully caught up. That call paid back: the composition API mapped cleanly to the kind of state-heavy, multi-step flows the resume builder needed, and we weren't going to rewrite frontend in two years.

The schedule was the harder constraint. With teammates spread across four countries and a client a continent away, the working day was split: deep work and team coordination in the morning, client calls and reviews in the late evening, occasionally past 1 AM when a release window forced it. The 2022 crisis hit the industry mid-project. The team held. Five-star Glassdoor review from the client at the end of it, 100% of the core team retained through the storm.

The team carried the platform across the finish line: a resume builder and job board with the personality assessment integrated directly into the resume, so candidates carry their personality signal into every application. The matching layer reads that signal natively, so working style, communication preferences and team fit show up in the result, not just keyword overlap.

Beyond what shipped: the team came out the other side intact. A 5-star client review in a year when most relationships strained. The platform is still running and the personality layer is still the spine it builds on.