Summary
As Siemens Energy’s talent acquisition ecosystem evolved, its Hiring Manager Portal needed to keep pace. With hiring managers who may only use the portal occasionally in mind, the portal needed to support new requirements while preserving the simplicity those users depended on. Modernization meant rethinking the experience for Siemens Energy’s current needs while leaving room for what could come next.
Working with the Avature Advisory Services team, Siemens Energy drew on user research and collaborative workshops with hiring managers and recruiters to align priorities and shape a more intuitive portal that provides clearer visibility into candidates, pending work and required actions.
About Siemens Energy
Siemens Energy is one of the world’s leading energy technology companies. From power generation to grids and industrial applications, Siemens Energy enables reliable, sustainable and affordable energy worldwide.
The Challenge: When Feedback Becomes Hard to Act On
Siemens Energy’s Hiring Manager Portal was designed in 2017 and rolled out as part of its Avature ATS suite in 2018. At the time, around 70% of hiring managers recruited only once or twice a year, so simplicity was an important part of the experience.
Over time, hiring managers and recruiters repeatedly pointed to several areas for improvement:
- Fewer clicks to progress candidates through the process
- Clearer visibility into candidate status and progress
- Easier access to relevant candidate information and context
- A smoother CV review experience with less reliance on recruiters to provide additional context or take action on managers’ behalf
Siemens Energy had accumulated extensive feedback, but the harder task was turning that input into clear priorities that could guide the portal’s modernization.
We hear a lot from our recruiters and […] from some users like hiring managers. So we have a lot of information, but how to structurally put it down and convert it to an actionable requirements gathering and requirements to be used as the source to build and design the new portal or to make modernization, that’s a different thing.”
Maria Ma
Global Head of Talent Acquisition Transformation, Siemens Energy
The path forward also needed to support Siemens Energy’s multi-year talent acquisition technology roadmap.
The Solution: Structuring Insight With Avature Advisory Services
To move from feedback to implementation, Siemens Energy worked with Avature Advisory Services on an experience design engagement centered on the hiring manager journey.
The first task for us was to understand the hiring managers’ work, what they were trying to accomplish, where the confidence in that portal was lost and which moments in the usage of that portal created the most friction.”
Gustavo Ariel Casazza
Director, Advisory Services, Avature
Starting With the Hiring Manager Journey
Rather than starting with requirements alone, Avature Advisory Services proposed interviewing hiring managers to understand the context behind the existing feedback. To put that approach into practice, Siemens Energy identified its 10 highest recruitment-volume countries and asked recruiters to recommend hiring managers for interviews. These interviews helped establish a baseline view of the existing process while bringing regional perspectives into the work.
With that context, Siemens Energy and Avature Advisory Services used personas, empathy mapping and collaborative workshops to evaluate key tasks and decision points through the hiring manager’s lens, building a shared view of the underlying user needs.
Turning User Insight Into Design Principles
The research surfaced a set of practical design principles:
- Minimize effort across common hiring manager tasks
- Make required actions immediately visible
- Bring relevant candidate context together at key decision points
- Separate active work from historical information
- Create consistent patterns across lists and workflows
- Make the portal easier to adopt for hiring managers who use it infrequently
These principles created a common basis for deciding what should be simplified, what could be standardized and where customization would add value.
Translating Design Principles Into an Implementation Plan
With those principles established, the experience design work culminated in an interactive portal prototype, detailed recommendations by page and flow, cut-over considerations for the new portal and an initial view of implementation effort. Together, these outputs translated the agreed direction into a practical plan for delivery.
During implementation, the recommendations remained a working reference for Siemens Energy and the implementation team as design and configuration decisions were made. The recommendations also accounted for longer-term considerations, helping Siemens Energy address its immediate modernization needs without limiting later enhancements.
The Results: A Smooth Launch and Greater Hiring Manager Ownership
Following its 2026 launch, the modernized Hiring Manager Portal introduced a simpler experience built around the information and actions managers need most:
- An intuitive UI that required no training
- An actionable dashboard that brings pending work to the forefront
- Simpler tracking of candidate and job requisition progress
- Visibility into two key hiring-manager KPIs: candidate review time and offer approval time
- Outdated functionality removed to better reflect Siemens Energy’s current needs
It was the most smooth go live that I have ever done in my 10 years of HR IT systems experience. […] We received zero complaints from our hiring managers till today.”
Maria Ma
Global Head of Talent Acquisition Transformation, Siemens Energy
The redesigned experience also supported greater hiring manager ownership.
They have all the information, the recruiter notes, the phone screen form, all the information in one page. […] They do those actions by themselves more and more.”
Maria Ma
Global Head of Talent Acquisition Transformation, Siemens Energy
