I have other things to do… scheduling interviews is a pain and takes forever
I send a lot of interview invites and don’t get many confirmations
We get sooo many no-shows to interviews
The same three complaints, over and over
They showed up in research, in customer feedback, everywhere. So we did one more round of generative research, starting from a list of open questions about how employers really schedule.
Three things we didn’t expect
More messaging = fewer no-shows?!
“Are we still on for tomorrow?” Employers who talked with jobseekers before inviting them saw fewer no-shows than the ones who just sent an invite.
Wait, Indeed already has this?
Employers kept wishing for things we already had: availability-based scheduling (like Calendly), calendar sync that suggests open slots, and automated reminders.
Their availability, up front
Later interviews are with leaders whose calendars are rough. With the jobseeker’s availability up front, employers could offer colleagues options instead of playing telephone.
Get Indeed out of the way
Most of the concepts were anchored in messaging. We believed more human-to-human connection would do more for employers than more tools.
What if we collected availability while they applied?
It could make later interviews easier to schedule, and save some back and forth on screener calls too.
Notice when they’re about to schedule by hand
When an employer is about to go down an arduous manual path, nudge them toward our tools to save them the time.
Make it easier for the jobseeker to confirm
Let both sides act right inside messaging, so nothing gets lost in a sea of other screens. Keep the focus on the conversation.
…but where do we start?
We roughly mapped two to three years of experiments, then picked the ones we could ship first.
First, fix what was broken.
Then, test the nudges.
Make employers aware of our tools.
Handing off the scheduling work
We were just building momentum, with two or three years of experiments roughly mapped out, when the company went through widespread reorgs.
I moved to the messaging team and handed scheduling over to another designer on our scheduling platform team.