In 2021, Meta declared it would be metaverse-first, and every team across the company was challenged to experiment with VR in its own domain. For Recruiting, that mandate became Recruiting in the Metaverse: an initiative spanning six orgs, tasked with launching 0 → 1 VR pilots in a single half.
I was the lead designer on Meta's Recruiting Offers team, so when the initiative needed someone to design the offer-stage experience, I was the natural fit on paper. In reality, nobody on the team had ever built a VR product. Not the PMs, not the researchers, not me. There were no mocks to draw, no design system to lean on, no precedent to follow. We had access to VR consultants (XR Hub, Meta's internal XR enablement team, plus third-party world builders), a pre-existing storyboard concept, and a deadline.
That is what this case study is really about. Not the headset: the ambiguity. Designing in three dimensions, for a journey that was both physical and digital, on an emergent platform, with a team learning the medium in real time.
The problem
Offers are the most expensive moment in the funnel to lose. Meta was extending tens of thousands of offers a year, and roughly a quarter of them were declined. That is thousands of candidates walking away at the very end of a hiring process the company had already fully paid for.
Our research pointed to part of the reason: candidates sometimes lack information at the offer stage, about compensation mechanics, benefits, and growth, and that gap may contribute to declines. The information candidates wanted most after an offer was exactly what we could deliver richly: roughly four in five rated compensation very important, with benefits and role expectations close behind.
So the brief became Immersive Offers: take the offer call, one of the most exciting calls of a person's life, and let candidates step inside it. The celebratory conversation that usually happens over the phone became a private VR world a candidate could share with their recruiter: a place to hear what the offer means, explore compensation, benefits, and growth at their own pace, and actually celebrate getting the job.
Candidates with a verbal offer would be invited in, on a loaned Meta Quest 2 if needed, to learn about their offer in a way no other company could match. All without touching the standard offer process in any way.
The dimensions of the problem:
- A P0 project within Recruiting in the Metaverse, H2 2022
- A core team of one PM, one product designer (me), one data scientist, one programme manager, and one researcher, plus dozens of cross-functional partners across six internal and external teams
- Real-world challenges (shipping and returning headsets, logistics, hardware) tangled with digital ones (VR platform constraints, security, privacy)
- Nobody, including me, had ever shipped a VR experience
Taking the reins on a project nobody knew how to start
The early weeks were thrash. We genuinely did not know what to hand to XR Hub and the world builders to get development started. A storyboard concept existed, but a storyboard is not a spec, and in VR there is no such thing as handing off a Figma file.
I decided the fastest way through the ambiguity was to make something concrete for the team to react to. I single-handedly developed the initial mood board, the vision inspiration, and the overall layout and structure of the world: effectively the floor plan of a building rather than the screens of an app.
That deliverable unblocked the project. It gave XR Hub and the third-party builders the structure they needed to start, and it became the backbone of the creative brief, the artefact I authored that served as the team's source of truth for the entire build. The brief established:
- Eight creative tenets (Seamless, Unobtrusive, Informative, Privacy-centric, Entertaining, Beautiful, Free flowing, On-brand) that let a large, disparate group of stakeholders make consistent decisions without me in the room
- The multi-layered candidate journey, spanning the real world and the virtual one
- Creative requirements for the world builders: intent, visual themes, content, and interaction triggers for every point of interest in the world
This is what design leadership looked like on a project with no established craft: not pixel-perfect mocks, but the artefacts that let twenty people move in one direction.
Service design: the journey was bigger than the world
The VR world was maybe a third of the design problem. A candidate's journey ran through a recruiter conversation, an opt-in, a headset shipped to their home, unboxing, a notoriously painful VR first-time setup, the in-world experience, and a return shipment. The real offer process ran in parallel the entire time, untouched.
I used a service design framework to map all of it. I blueprinted the standard offer process first, grounding the team in the baseline we must not harm, then blueprinted the immersive journey across candidate, recruiter, coordinator, XR Hub, and logistics swimlanes, with failure modes at every stage.
To make the journey tangible for stakeholders, I also built a storyboard version, following a candidate and a recruiter through each moment:
These diagrams were not shelf-ware. They scoped the pilot and drove the logistics plan for shipping headsets. I also designed the unglamorous artefacts at the edges of the journey: the printed instruction brochure that shipped in the headset box, and the in-world lobby flow with a secure passcode gate protecting the experience.
The world itself
We built the world in Horizon Worlds with a third-party builder. I co-led creative and UX strategy alongside our content designer and gave creative direction and UX feedback throughout the build. The world had the same two jobs as the vision: teach and celebrate. Research drove the teaching half, with booths mapping directly to what candidates said they wanted most at the offer stage. Celebration drove the rest: the central stage, the DJ booth, the golden offer letter.
Pilot, feedback, and fixes
- Launched the internal pilot in November 2022 to dozens of internal dogfooders: Recruiting's first externally-oriented VR pilot, real headset shipping logistics included
- Identified the need for, and saw through, a candidate-facing survey in Career Profile asking candidates whether they owned a Quest and wanted to join metaverse pilots. It answered our short-term planning question (how many loaners do we need?) while building a warm pilot pool for the future
- Collected and triaged dogfooding insights with the team; we shipped fixes for dozens of critical issues the following month
- Published the project feedback summary for the wider organisation
What the pilot told us:
- 84% of participants had no logistics issues: the shipping service design held up
- The majority found it easy to review the offer details in-world
- Average time spent in-world was over ten minutes, meaningful engagement for entirely optional content
- And honestly: VR's new-user setup burden was real, 30 to 60 minutes for many testers. The medium was not ready to be ubiquitous. Learning that with evidence was the point of the pilot
The ending, and what survived it
The project ended after the pilot, as company direction changed and priorities shifted across the initiative.
It still ranks among the most formative projects of my career. The work put further XR projects on the following half's roadmap and led to patent filings, including one for the immersive offer letter itself. The learnings, about building in VR, about designing services that cross the physical and digital boundary, about enhancing rather than replacing human processes, were documented for every org in the company to use.
For me, the takeaways were not about VR at all:
- Ambiguity is a design material. When nobody knows what to build, the person who makes the first concrete artefact sets the direction. The mood board and world layout I built unblocked an entire cross-org team
- In new mediums, design leads through frameworks, not mocks. The creative brief, tenets, journeys, and blueprints were the design system
- Put on the headset. The fastest alignment tool we had was getting stakeholders into VR and letting them feel the answer
- The experience begins long before the product does. Our hardest problems were cardboard boxes, passcodes, and half-hour setup flows, not anything inside the world
In their words
“During the early stages of planning and scoping the work for our Recruiting in the Metaverse efforts we were thrashing somewhat significantly. We really did not know what to deliver to XR Hub to get development started. Despite this massive ambiguity, Rob took the reins and single-handedly developed the initial mood board, vision inspiration, and overall layout and structure of the Immersive Offers World. This deliverable completely unblocked work… If Rob had not taken this initiative, I believe we would have continued to remain at an impasse.
This was just one of many areas in which Rob drove the creative and product direction of the Immersive Offers experience… Rob incorporated feedback from a large and disparate group of cross-functional partners, filtering the signal through the noise. Rob also built user journey output that helped us scope and successfully execute a complex pilot which involved shipping headsets. This process diagram, along with the Creative Brief he built, were constantly referred to by myself and the broader team (including the 3rd party that was building the World) as a way to anchor to our overall vision and direction.”
Beyond Immersive Offers
Immersive Offers was the flagship, but my role extended across the initiative. I supported and coached the lead designer on VR Interview Prep, our parallel pilot giving candidates unlimited avatar-based behavioural interview practice, and contributed to the longer-term vision of consolidating all recruiting experiences into a single Meta Recruiting app in the Oculus Store.
