Inside JobTarget: A Conversation with Shravanthi Reddy Chinthakuntla, Executive Director, Platform Experience

Dear reader,

Welcome to Inside JobTarget — a new blog series where we sit down with the people behind our products to share the stories, ideas, and insights that shape them.

In this tenth conversation, we’re diving into Product Experience — what it feels like, how we build it, and why it’s helping recruiters and hiring teams solve today’s biggest hiring challenges.

Interview with Shravanthi Reddy Chinthakuntla, Executive Director, Platform Experience.

Tell me a little bit about what you do at JobTarget. 

Shravanthi: I think of myself as an advocate for our end user. My job is to make sure that when we make decisions as a business, the person actually using the product has a voice in the room.

My teams own the connective layer across everything under the JobTarget umbrella. I stay close to the end users interacting with our Platform, while keeping an eye on where the company is headed.

As far as how I've gotten to this point, I've been here eight years. When I joined, we had three core products and a legacy platform, and I was the first UX designer on the team. Today there's a full UI/UX organization, and watching that happen has been the best part of the job. But that growth is also the real challenge, honestly. Twenty products can very easily become twenty different experiences. Making it feel like one unified platform is the continued work.

Can you describe what the Platform team manages and the strategy behind it?

Shravanthi: The Platform Apps team holds the shared experience together: shared components, navigation, the Reports App, the app store, and the design system itself. Everything sits under one login, and that team owns the pieces every product depends on.

The Internal Reports and Analytics team watches what users actually do. Where users starts, where they drop off, engagement time, and the direct feedback coming in. That's how we understand user behavior for product planning. 

UI/UX Design is where the product teams come for ideation, wireframes, and prototypes, and where that evidence turns into the next iteration or feature. They're also constantly updating the design system and proposing new patterns based on what product teams are actually reaching for. The question we always ask is: "what does the JobTarget experience look like for the user?"

The loop closes on the shared layer. The team that sees the problem in the data designs the fix, and for the components every product touches, we have the engineering to ship it. Beyond that layer, we stay in the room as advocates in integration and user flow conversations, so the experience holds together end to end.

What does your team do specifically to create a seamless customer experience? How do we make workflows easier for recruiters?

Shravanthi: The starting point is always the task, not the product. A recruiter isn't thinking "now I'm in a specific platform," they're thinking, "I'm posting a job." 

So a bulk of our design work happens inside our ATS and Payroll partners' platforms. We work closely with those systems on what the experience should be within their product: how someone discovers JobTarget, what the flows could look like, how well we integrate.

How integrated we make it always depends on what the user is trying to do, and how that weaves into what we're trying to achieve. Those goals are real ones: user acquisition, a stronger relationship with the ATS, and supporting our ATS partners in helping their own users advertise jobs. But all three depend on the same thing. A recruiter who gets the job posted without thinking about it is what we're aiming for. 

How has our platform gotten better overtime?

Shravanthi: Consistency and learnability, which sounds small but compounds. When every product taught the user something different, users were relearning the platform on every visit. Now the patterns carry across, so what you learn in one place works in the next.

How does product experience connect with the larger JobTarget ecosystem?

Shravanthi: My teams sit in an unusual spot. Most groups go deep on one product. We work across all of them, which means we see the experience the way a customer does, end to end.

Practically, that's a lot of cross-functional work. Partnerships, product teams, the job seeker side, and staying closely connected with leadership so the experience work stays tied to where the business is going. 

It also means we don't rely on opinion. We run audits and research to modernize our approach, and we consistently watch real user sessions. We learn and grow by watching our users interact with our Platform and we constantly strive to save them time and make their workflows easier.

The ecosystem only feels like one thing to the customer if somebody is responsible for that.

What are your future plans for the Platform? What's your vision?

Shravanthi: We're working toward a data-driven, personalized dashboard. Customers use the platform in very different ways depending on their goals.

AI is changing how we think about the work, not just how fast we do it. We use it in research synthesis, pattern exploration, prototyping, and catching issues in monitoring earlier. That changes what we're willing to try. Our loop gets faster too: we measure what users do, design against it, and ship, so we can test more ideas with fewer assumptions baked in.

What is the most rewarding part about working in product experience and design?

Shravanthi: Mentoring easily.

I've come a long way at JobTarget, and a lot of that is because people were there for me when I needed it. I try to be that for my team. 

Everyone on the team now is someone we hired and grew. And the part I enjoy most these days is that several of them have become the experts other people go to. They're not just doing great work, they're in the mentoring seat themselves now. Some of my favorite conversations at work are with them.

That's the part that outlasts anything we ship.

Interview concluded.

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Learn more about Shravanthi Reddy Chinthakuntla here.