Entagile: A staffing site shaped by learning what clients and candidates need to trust.

I was hired to find out what would make the firm credible online.

My first US role was a four-month internship at Entagile, a financial staffing firm in Fairfax. Its founder, Victor Wang, hired me for the user research I was studying in human factors psychology. He wanted the website to communicate a serious, professional operation.

The business had concrete credentials: engagements with Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Capital One, and universities including Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. Little of that substance was visible online. I did the research, the design and, later, the Framer build myself.

The research led to a five-page design covering the homepage, services, careers, blog and contact. On the live site, the information I added and a clearer information architecture raised organic click-through rates by 9% and average time on page by 46%.

A staffing firm sells trust, and the old site offered only claims.

Two audiences arrive at a staffing firm's homepage: companies deciding whether to hand over a hiring problem, and candidates deciding whether to hand over a career move. The old site treated them as one and gave both the same thing, statements nobody could check. There were no named clients, no named people and nothing specific about the markets the firm worked in.

That is a familiar weakness in the category. When every firm says it delivers exceptional talent, the sentence stops carrying information, and visitors fall back on whatever other signals they can find.

Companies asked about the firm’s clients. Candidates asked about their own prospects.

My main research method was stakeholder interviews. I spent time with the people at Entagile who made placements, then interviewed contacts at client companies and candidates, more than six interviews in all, alongside a benchmark of staffing and consulting websites. I asked what made people trust or dismiss a firm they were meeting for the first time.

Nobody was persuaded by tone. What moved people was information that would have been expensive to fake: the firms Entagile had actually placed people with, the specific markets it covered rather than a claim to cover all of them, the real people doing the work and evidence of ongoing expertise. Vague superlatives didn't read as neutral. They read as a warning sign, because interviewees had learned to associate them with firms that had nothing more concrete to offer.

The two audiences also looked for different proof. Companies wanted to know who Entagile worked with; candidates wanted to know what an opportunity would mean for them. I brought that distinction to stakeholders as the reason for two audience paths. It gave me, the most junior designer in the room, a basis for proposing a structural change that came from the firm's own customers.

A shared homepage with a separate path for companies and candidates.

The homepage opens on a shared promise, “Build better workforce with our talents,” then splits into two routes: “Reach the talents” for companies and “Launch my career” for candidates. A partner logo bar with Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Capital One, Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech answers the company's question in the first scroll.

Three service tracks (project staffing, career services and products development) and three specialization areas (finance, data and software development) made the offer specific. Further down, “Commitment to Clients” and “Commitment to Talents” carried the two paths into the values section, followed by the blog, the reasons to choose Entagile and a closing call to action.

The careers section had five sub-flows of its own: current openings, candidate registration, career challenges in static and video formats, and training resources. I prototyped every page in Figma and designed four responsive breakpoints. I targeted WCAG 2.1 AA, the latest published WCAG version at the time, through contrast, legibility and navigation choices.

I learned Framer on my own time, then asked to build the design myself.

A developer was originally assigned to implement my Figma designs. Working through asset packages, breakpoints and details that didn't translate showed me where handoff could lose the intent of the design.

I learned Framer during evenings and weekends, then proposed taking on the build. I explained to Victor how it could reduce that translation, and he agreed. It was my first experience expanding a role through a conversation about the team's work, rather than simply volunteering for another task.

I configured Job Postings and Blogs as separate CMS collections, with structured fields for titles, slugs, categories, dates and summaries, so openings and articles could be added without a developer. The capture below shows six job postings and seven blog posts in the CMS.

The Figma design and the Framer site.

The Framer site shows the design on desktop and mobile, with the CMS structure. The design work behind it, from wireframes to final screens prepared for developer handoff, is in the Figma design file.

The research changed what the live site said, and visitors stayed longer.

On the live site, I added the information the interviews called for and reworked the information architecture. Those changes increased organic click-through rates by 9% and average time on page by 46%, compared with the site before them.

Victor kept the complete Framer redesign on staging. He felt senior executives and students would respond better to a cleaner, less visually complex site, and he wanted to disclose less about the business model, which competitors could copy. That added a question the interviews alone hadn't settled: audiences needed enough detail to judge the firm, and the business still had to choose how much to make public.

Trust is built from checkable things. In a category people approach warily, the persuasive move is to put up facts that would be expensive to fake and let the reader verify them. That made the job evidence design, and the visual work served the evidence.

Research gave me a way to contribute before I had much professional authority. Interviewing the people on both sides of a placement made the two-path structure something I could defend, and time with the firm's own recruiters taught me more about what the site needed to say than the benchmark did.

Taking on Framer taught me to discuss implementation as part of the design. Victor's staging decision taught me the other half: a build can faithfully express a proposal and still need a different balance of detail and restraint for the business to adopt it.