Indeed
driving $750k of business impact
My journey of applying and interviewing on indeed.com was pretty rough
Ironically, it was for a job at Indeed HQ. I'll highlight just the key points of my journey to start:
01.
I applied for a UX Designer job on indeed.com
It's the role that this whole story is about. 🙂
02.
Later, an Indeed recruiter reached out to me about a different job
The recruiter sent me a link to apply, but the job looked the same as the one I applied to already. I was confused but decided to apply anyway and now I had applied for 2 jobs that looked the same.
03.
Right after applying, I somehow found the option to schedule a 'one-way interview'
It was on the first application I submitted. I didn't receive an email or any communications — I just happened to find a 'schedule' button on indeed.com. I was only able to schedule for the next day, so I scheduled it for the next morning.
04.
At 9pm that night, a recruiter messaged me to schedule a different interview
The available interview times were also for the very next day. I was confused why they would message a job seeker at 9pm to schedule an interview for the next afternoon, but I went ahead and scheduled a time.
05.
I completed both interviews the next day
The one-way interview was in the morning and the 1:1 interview was a few hours later.
06.
2 days later — I received an automated rejection letter
07.
3 days later, I received an email from the recruiter, moving me on to the next round
I was very confused because I had received a rejection earlier.
08.
1 month later, after completing the interview process, I got the job! 🥳
Did I mention that the process of getting this job was rough?
I knew that if I got this job, I wanted to share this experience because there was a clear opportunity to make big improvements throughout the product. And I did just that. I created a deck which illustrated my end-to-end user journey of my job searching & interviewing experience on indeed.com. You can see it below:
I truly didn't expect what happened next
The deck was shared so much throughout Slack that it essentially became ‘viral’ throughout the company, making it’s way up to the EVP who reports to the CEO. It sparked discussions amongst the VPs about how the entire E2E Indeed experience can (and should be) improved, and is still being referenced by internal teams today.
I transitioned onto the One-Way Interviews team a few months later
Who would’ve thought that I’d go from being auto-rejected by the One-Way Interviews (OWI) platform to being the person responsible for it’s design a year later?
OWI was originally a part of Indeed’s Incubator - where ‘startup’ teams where given the opportunity to prove if their product had Product-Market Fit. If they did reach product-market fit, the product would ‘graduate’ out of the Incubator and join another full-fledged team. OWI had reached an interesting transition point of being ready to graduate from the Incubator, but the receiving team (the one that I was on — Interviews), not being fully convinced that OWI fit the rest of the Interviews portfolio of products.
As OWI neared graduation, a small group of team members from Interviews (including me) was formed to help begin the transition
This team would continue to be responsible for the product’s growth after graduation. Meanwhile the original OWI Incubator team stayed on to serve as Consultants for our transition.
The UX stakeholders from Interviews knew that there were a lot of complaints about one-way interviews (not just Indeed's version — the concept as a whole), but we didn’t fully know what the E2E experience of the product was.
So far, we had only referred to resources from the Incubator team and anecdotes like these:
We needed to eat some dog food
Not literally though. Let me explain.
Conducting a heuristic evaluation would help us move forward
We needed to conduct some dogfooding to truly understand the user experience and the usability issues within it. The best way to do so in this situation was by conducting a Heuristic Evaluation, which I helped lead.
The dog food was a bag of lemons
Our heuristic evaluation of OWI left us with a lot of insight into how many broken experiences the product had, the amount of heuristics it violated, and why it led to bad user experiences like when I applied for my job.
So we turned lemons into lemonade
Of course, the decision on how to improve the product and how we should move forward wasn’t just up to me and the other UXers. Our team included Product and Engineering members and the VPs were also evaluating the future of the product. To inform the team and relevant stakeholders, I partnered with the UX Researcher — who was collecting a rollup of insights relevant to OWI — to combine our findings into one comprehensive deck.
I designed the deck to walk through the E2E user journeys of job seekers and employers using OWI and called out issues based on the Heuristics along the way. The heuristic evaluation and UXR rollup helped us determine 3 core focus areas for the future of OWI:
Address unmet jobseeker needs
Improve messaging throughout the experience, and make it consistent
Reduce Bias
Guided by the 3 focus areas, we presented 5 recommendations to improve the experience:
Employer Experience
Conduct value proposition research
Reduce the possibility of implicit bias towards job seekers
Job Seeker Experience
Conduct research to establish value
Improve messaging to job seekers
Make the OWI experience easier and more flexible to use
The outcome was unexpected
From my point of view, OWI was definitely broken, but there were clear opportunities to rebuild it and turn it into something better. However - doing that would require more time and resources.
Indeed was in a period of cost-cutting, and as the saying goes — “time is money.” While my team and I were evaluating OWI from a UX & Product perspective, the Interviews VPs were actively evaluating whether continued investment into OWI was worthwhile for the business.
The deck I created actually helped the VPs understand the true state of OWI and come to the decision to sunset the product due to the amount of resources required to move it forward.
Overall the efforts to evaluate OWI and subsequently choosing to shut it down resulted in $750,000+ of investments to be reallocated towards more impactful, revenue-generating opportunities.