- Job listings on a search firm’s site are a promise. Post a role that has been filled, or one whose application page no longer exists, and the candidate you most wanted to impress finds out first
- The roles lived in the firm’s applicant tracking system and needed to keep living there. Copying them onto a website creates a second version that starts drifting the day it is made
- The candidate database is the business, not a data source. Roughly 33,000 candidates and 19,000 contacts, built over fifteen years. Nothing we built could be allowed to write to it
- The previous identity was warm mahogany, champagne and gold. It read as hospitality rather than executive advisory, and the founder’s own email signature had already moved on without it
- The testimonials included an invented quote attributed to a person who matched nobody. For a firm whose product is judgement about people, that is the worst possible thing to have on the page
- Everything had to hold up on a phone, because candidates read job postings on a phone, usually while employed somewhere else
All client work
Case study · TriQuest
Every listed role has a door that opens.
How KumoKodo Studio rebuilt triquestx.com for a San Antonio executive search firm. The site carries two audiences who want opposite things, shows jobs that are genuinely open right now, and sends candidates to apply in the system the firm already runs on. Everything else was shaped by one rule: the website is not allowed to become another place where the truth lives.
100
Accessibility · Best practices · SEO
21/21
Compliance checks passed
0
Job listings maintained by hand
0
Candidate records touched
Client
TriQuest Business Services · San Antonio, TX
Industry
Executive Search · Staffing
Services
Brand direction, design, build, ATS integration, SEO
Status
Live at triquestx.com
The challenge
One site, two audiences who want opposite things.
TriQuest has placed executives, technologists, finance, HR and operations people nationwide since 2009, on direct-hire, contract and retained terms. A candidate arriving on the site wants to apply in one click. A company arriving on the same site wants a conversation with someone who will take the brief seriously. Send both down the same path and you serve neither.
Our solution
Split the two audiences, then get out of the way.
Candidates go to the jobs and apply where the firm already manages applications. Companies go to a conversation. The site is the editorial surface in between, and it stores nothing about either of them.
01
Jobs nobody has to remember to update
The careers page shows whatever the firm has published to its careers portal, with a detail page generated for each role. There is no list of jobs on the website to maintain, because there is no list. A role that gets filled comes off the portal and comes off the site the same moment, which means the site is never advertising work that is gone.
02
The listing and the apply button cannot disagree
Both are read from the same place, so a role can only appear on the site if the page a candidate is sent to exists. Candidates then apply on the firm’s own application form, exactly as they did before, which keeps every applicant landing in the system the recruiters actually work out of instead of in an inbox someone has to re-key.
03
A different first step for companies
Hiring clients do not want an application form. They get a contact route that reaches the firm directly, plus a referral path for passing along someone they rate. Separating the two was the founder’s call, and it is the reason the site needs no account system, no portal and no login for anyone.
04
An identity that reads as advisory
Navy, a soft off-white, and a powder blue lifted from the founder’s own email signature, with a serif used for headlines and its italic held back for emphasis. It is editorial rather than corporate, which suits a firm whose pitch is judgement rather than volume. Built as a small hand-written design system so a section changes tone with one attribute, not a repaint.
Key decisions
Why we built it this way.
The website stores nothing
No database, no accounts, no admin screen. Everything durable already had a home: candidates in the applicant tracking system, enquiries in the firm’s mailbox. Adding a second copy would have meant two versions of the truth, a new thing to secure, and a new thing to pay for. It also means there is no candidate data on this site to lose.
We stopped trusting the "published" flag
The obvious way to list jobs is to ask the system for roles marked published. We did, and it shipped a listing whose application page returned a dead end, because being published does not decide which careers portal a role belongs to. Reading the portal’s own list instead makes that failure impossible rather than merely unlikely. All eight live roles were then opened by hand to confirm it.
Real recommendations, at reading pace
The invented testimonial was replaced with five verbatim recommendations from the founder’s LinkedIn profile. They run around sixty words, so the six-second carousel we started with swapped them mid-sentence. Dwell is now set by each quote’s length, rotation stops while the section is off screen, and a touch parks it, because a testimonial nobody can finish reading is decoration.
Nobody is tracked before they say yes
Analytics is not loaded and then held back; it is absent from the page until a visitor accepts, so no cookie can be set and no request can leave the browser before then. We verified it both ways rather than assuming. For a firm handling people’s career moves, often confidentially, that is worth more than a few days of extra pageview data.
What the launch gate caught
We audit every site before it goes live.
None of these were visible by looking at the site. Every one of them would have cost the firm something real.
The newsletter was throwing addresses away
The signup said thank you and discarded the address, underneath copy promising no spam and unsubscribe anytime. Every person who signed up would have been quietly lost, and the firm would never have known to wonder why the list was empty.
The contact forms were failing in production
Both forms were returning an error to anyone who used them, because they were sending from a shared test address that could not deliver to the firm’s own domain. That is a lost enquiry from a hiring company, and there is no way to find out what you missed.
A filled role looked fine to a person, broken to Google
A missing job page said "Position not found" while reporting success to search engines, which keeps the page indexed and flags it as an error. Roles get filled constantly, so this was happening routinely.
Text nobody could comfortably read
Small caps labels sat just under the contrast standard against the navy. The fix is invisible to the eye and took the accessibility score from 93 to 100, which matters both for candidates using assistive tech and for the firm’s own compliance posture.
A live listing with no application page
The role that exposed the published-flag problem. A candidate clicking it would have hit a dead end, which is the one failure in a careers section that a real person actually feels.
A shared link still wearing the old logo
The preview card that appears when someone texts or posts the link still showed the retired gold-on-mahogany identity. For a firm relaunching its brand, the first impression of every shared link would have been the brand it just left behind.
How it shipped
One honest miss, named.
The site cleared every launch check but one. Compliance came in at twenty-one of twenty-one, and accessibility, best practices and SEO each scored a hundred, with desktop performance at ninety-nine. Mobile performance landed at eighty-seven against our bar of ninety.
We know exactly why, and it is the typefaces rather than the code. We had already trimmed every weight the site does not use, and what remains is the display serif in both upright and italic, which the design genuinely uses. Closing the last three points means changing a type decision the founder signed off on, so it stays on the list in the open rather than being quietly rounded up.
Built with
Technology stack.
Next.js 16React 19TypeScriptTailwind CSS v4Hand-written design systemMotionCatsOne ATSResendConsent-gated GA4schema.org JSON-LDFrauncesInstrument SansDM SansVercel
See it live
Visit TriQuest.
Take a look at the live site, or tell us about the system your business already runs on. We will build the site around it rather than beside it.