Taking the friction out of interview scheduling at Indeed
Devin Jeffery
What motivated us
Some trends kept popping up in research and customer feedback when it came to scheduling interviews
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
Research
We decided to do one more round of generative research
Our team worked together to put together a list of open questions to better understand our employers’ scheduling workflows.
Our learnings
More messaging = fewer no-shows?!
“Are we still on for tomorrow?”.... Employers who had more human to human connection with jobseekers experienced fewer no-shows than those that sent invites without introducing themselves first.
Wait, Indeed already has this?
Employers kept describing features that they wished Indeed had…. not knowing that these features already exist!
Availability-based scheduling (like Calendly)
Calendar sync to recommend open time slots
Automated reminders
Having jobseeker availability would make scheduling easier
Later stage interviews are with leaders who have ROUGH schedules to try and set up an interview on. Multiple employers said that connecting their calendars wouldn't provide value since Indeed wouldn't find any open time slots.
If they had the jobseeker's availability up-front, they could give their colleagues options to choose from, rather than playing telephone between the two parties.
Our 3 year plan
Ignore our constraints… Let's imagine where we want to be in a few years
What if we DID collect the candidate's availability while they applied?
We learned that this could make later stage interviews easier to schedule, but it could also save some back and forth when scheduling screener calls.
What if we could detect when they're about to manually message about scheduling?
Once we notice that the employer is about to go down an arduous manual path, let's nudge them to use our tools instead to save them some time.
What if the jobseeker could confirm the interview without leaving messaging?
Let employers and jobseekers take action right within messaging so they don't get lost in a sea of other screens and features. Keep the focus on the conversation between both sides.
Our short-term roadmap
Fix a very broken experience - Rescheduling interviews
Scheduling interviews sucks. Scheduling the same interview twice double sucks. When the jobseeker requests to reschedule today, we only show it in the email notification… it's shown nowhere on platform.
Constraints + compromises
When the jobseeker requests a reschedule, it actually cancels the interview. We wanted to simplify this to simply update the current interview details, but the interview platform team would have needed to make significant changes to make it happen in our timeline.
Detect scheduling intent within messaging
Although we want to ultimately detect scheduling intent before the message is sent, that was too much work and too expensive for an MVP. We saw this as a starting point that we could build off of in future quarters if results looked promising.
We worked with data scientists to build a regex that would detect words and phrases such as “tomorrow at 1” – “Tuesday afternoon” – “anytime Friday”. Once we detect scheduling intent, we created a module to nudge them to use Indeed’s scheduling tools to help employers save time and effort.
Results
+5.31% employers with interview invitations
+3.21% employers invitations that turned into interviews
7.5% of employers who saw this module sent invitations from it
Bring awareness to our scheduling tools
This was a quick, low hanging fruit test we wanted to run to see if employers would want to use our scheduling tools if they knew they existed. We took a couple different angles on the messaging - saving time, sharing availability, and basic scheduling in general.
Test group 3 wins with a 2.94% increase in employers with 1+ invite
The interesting thing here is that this option is the only one that mentions interview formats. That brings up a bunch of questions we need to keep digging into.
Do people assume they can only schedule virtual interviews?
If people were more aware of scheduling capabilities, would they naturally use our tools more?
Is saving time not a major value prop for them?
Like this project
Posted Nov 12, 2024
Vision planning which helped us develop a long term plan to ease the pain of interview scheduling for our users.
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