LinkedIn for Students
App Concept
Experience Design
Role
Product Designer (Student Mobile Flow)
Team
6 designers, 2 MBA advisors
Timeline
Feb - May 2026
Tools
Context
Every stage of the job search got its own software. Except the one that matters most for students.
The team at DFA Pro Studio ideated a possible new feature within LinkedInโs existing user flows, targeted at college students. We discovered there is a real gap that LinkedIn and competitors like Handshake and Indeed still fail to address for college students in particular: the career fair.
Attending the fair and following up after: both run on paper and memory.
How might LinkedIn help students get real value out of campus recruiting, when the platform both sides already use has no presence at the one event that matters most?
Research
Recruiters see 80+ students a day at a career fair. For students, it's hard to get remembered and know where to go.
Students spend
94%
of their time at career fairs waiting in line
At fairs, noise levels
-42%
drop in memory and recall
Physical density
+70%
at fairs over the past 2 years
Source: NACE 2024โ25 Career Services Benchmarks
LinkedIn already owns the piece no competitor has: recruiters live in LinkedIn Recruiter, students already have profiles built. Both sides of the table are already logged in, making a career fair companion the next step.
Thus, we prototyped a career fair companion app for LinkedIn, aimed at making the experience as smooth as possible for both students and recruiters alike.
Design Decisions
Built around one rule: reduce friction at every touchpoint.
The fair today runs on paper resumes and sometimes inefficient conversations. Both slow the student down and leave the recruiter with a stack to re-type later or simply memorize. We designed three decisions to fix that, each built on top of LinkedInโs existing flows so neither side has to learn anything new.
Decision
Check in with a single NFC tap.
Reasoning
Instead of handing over a resume, a student taps an NFC placard at the booth. The tap transfers their LinkedIn profile.
We went straight to NFC because it solved both problems at once, the friction of the walk-up and the recruiterโs need for a clean, structured record.
NFC Placard for Check-in
Interests Onboarding
Decision
Personalize the fair for efficiency via survey and profile.
Reasoning
Onboarding asks one question up front: what are you interested in? We pair that survey with the student's existing LinkedIn profile to recommend booths worth their time on their map.
Decision
Build this on LinkedIn, not a standalone app.
Reasoning
We chose LinkedIn for two reasons: the scale of its existing user base, and its room to expand into this moment. Both sides are already logged in. The profile, the credential, and the recruiter's inbox already exist. The design just connects things that are already there.
Career Fair Specific Company Page
Student Side
I built the student flow on top of LinkedIn's existing design system.
Craft Detail: the team hand-built a physical NFC placard prototype, 3D-printed, custom-coded. The tap is a small ritual, like Apple Pay. Something to do in the awkward moment of walking up to a recruiter cold and for the recruiter to keep track of attendees.
Recruiter Side
A parallel companion for the other side of the booth.
My focus was the student flow. A teammate led the recruiter view, and I paired with them on the shared check-in handshake.
The recruiter gets to see fairgoers quickly and select their standouts, and be able to get statistics also on the backend for later analysis and outreach.
Also in the pitch
A theoretical desktop dashboard rounded out the demo.
Student Hub (Desktop)
A theoretical desktop dashboard with extra student features, pitched as a direction to LinkedIn, intentionally left rough, not a deliverable. This provides more information to the student on the desktop end in particular, like job recommendations, as another entry point to student-specific services.
Student Homepage
Reflection
What I'd carry into the next pitch.
Designing something to be pitched changes the bar. Every screen had to survive a live walkthrough in front of a LinkedIn product director. We received positive feedback from the product director, and continued to discuss it as a potential client project in the future. I learned to keep the story on one thing, "why now and why this app," and let LinkedIn's own assets do the heavy lifting instead of pitching something built from scratch.
