Seamless Candidate Delivery
Indeed Open Interviews
Indeed Open Interviews showcases how my team and I collaborated to address critical pain points faced by small and medium businesses hiring for high turnover roles. Through user research, iterative testing, and simple design. Open Interviews led to a 250% increase in walk-in interview postings on Indeed.
The Problem: The hiring process for small and medium businesses for high turnover roles faces many challenges including limited resources, scalability issues, and at the very end - interview no-shows.
What if we skipped the process and sent qualified, interested job seekers straight to the interview?
High-turn over roles like the ones small and medium businesses were hiring for - dishwasher, cashier, stocker, server, etc - demand outpaced supply, and interview no-shows were high. Often times, just showing up to the interview was the interview.
Idea to Pilot
Sending qualified, interested job seekers directly to the interview sounds nice. But is this a pain point worth solving?
My team and I needed initial validation for our hypothesis.
Our hypothesis
The challenges in hiring for high turnover roles, along with frequent interview no-shows, is an acute enough pain that our target businesses would be willing to pay for a service that delivered them qualified candidates efficiently.
We were not going to get our initial validation sitting in the office.
Knowing our initial validation would not be found sitting at our desks, I pulled together my team - a product manager, two engineers, a marketing person, and a sales person - to conduct in-field, moderated user interviews with me.
We divided into two groups and walked around a business dense area of Seattle that had a high concentration of businesses who had recently posted a position in a high turn-over role on Indeed.
Field Trip
Our route took us through the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
Field Trip
Our route took us through the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
How do they hire today?
5/6 said they would hire almost any qualified person that walks through their door. These businesses are lean and nimble - they're not looking to waste time or money and view their hiring manager's time interviewing as a cost.
The inside of Neko Cat Cafe - one of the businesses we stopped at to talk to.
How often are they hiring?
They're always looking to fill positions. These employers have high turn-over roles such as customer service, cashiers, stockers, servers, and dishwashers. These jobs are typically tough and can be unpleasant to work in at times.
How are they getting the majority of their applicants?
4/6 were getting the majority of their candidates through sponsoring jobs on Indeed.
2/6 used other methods such as word of mouth, social media advertising, newspaper, Craigslist, and LinkedIn
Fun fact: I signed up our first pilot user on this outing. They were an Italian restaurant, and they ended up hosting 5 recurring open interviews.
How do these businesses schedule interviews?
5/6 - Don't do interviews on specific days - the days they interview vary on the availability of the candidates.
3/6 - Try to lump interviews together when they do get one scheduled.
3/6 - Call and interview applicants immediately when they see the resume come through
Interesting finding
These people have a fear that the good candidates are applying to multiple places and will get snatched up fast, so they want to push these people through the pipeline as fast as possible.
They want to be more hands off
Of the employers we spoke with, they wanted to be more hands off - that's why they're paying Indeed. Since these were small businesses, they don’t have dedicated hiring resources and instead have their location manager taking on the tasks of hiring in addition to their other responsibilities.
We had our initial validation, now it was time to align
Based on the feedback we received from our in-field interviews and the pilot customer I signed, it seemed like our hypothesis was initially validated. Next we needed to align on an MVP that would help us further validate our hypothesis at a larger scale.
I pulled the team together to brainstorm what our MVP could be and what we could test (pilot) while engineering propped up the mechanics for the MVP.
Indeed Open Interviews Pilot
During the brainstorm we aligned on an MVP and how we would pair it down for the pilot while engineer worked to get in the more complicated pieces around payments and SMS reminders. We sent the email for the pilot to a small number of small and medium businesses who had posted a high turnover position recently.
Employers
Email → Landing Page → Employer Intake →
Job Seekers
View Open Interview Posting → RSVP → Get Email and
Pilot to MVP
Usability testing and feedback
With the pilot up and running, I decided to run a usability test to help optimize the flow while engineering worked on implementing the payment feature.
My usability research led to two impactful design changes.
Being clear on the benefit
A simple change that more clearly communicated the benefit of open interviews - consolidation of interview scheduling - drove a 250% increase of In-Person job postings on Indeed.com.
The email was our first impression, and our first pass needed to better explain what Open Interviews had to offer. By more clearly communicating the benefit of open interviews, the number of in-person job postings increased significantly.
Before
After
Explaining ‘Recurring’
We were able to baseline 62% of posters setting up a recurring Open Interview.
Refining the intake form to better explain what ‘recurring’ in relation to open interviews meant, allowed us to really tap into our target audience of small and medium businesses that are regularly hiring for high turn over roles. Prior to this change only 20% of posted events were recurring.
Before
After
Indeed Open Interviews MVP
For the MVP we made improvements based on my usability research findings and we increased the volume of employers we were reaching out to through email. Implementing payment took longer than expected, but we were able to move forward launching our MVP by creating a test that would give us a signal on our final question:
Are small and medium businesses willing to pay for this?
To validate willingness to pay, we divided the employer intake into three steps and added a $20 and $50 payment test. Choosing the "premium" option led to a free upgrade. This allowed us to get a signal on willingness to pay while engineering continued to work.
Employers
Email → Landing Page → Employer Intake →
Employers were showing a willingness to pay
Prior to launching the ability to pay, we got a strong signal that employers were willing to pay $50 to post an Open Interview. With payments now implemented, we wanted to see if users would actually input their credit card number and pay for the service. We removed the “free upgrade screen” and implemented a payment screen into the employer intake form.
The outcome: They paid for and posted recurring Open Interviews!
MVP Outcome
After 9 weeks of ideation, building, and testing, the final results for the Open Interviews MVP were in and the concept of a self-service tool to optimize walk-in interviews for small and medium businesses hiring frequently was validated as a desired product offering.
244
Scheduled Open Interviews
42
Unique Customers
However, validating the MVP was not the end
How do you scale an MVP into an established ecosystem?
What happens when your idea is proven out at a company with an established product and revenue line? Integrating back into the larger ecosystem is one of the biggest challenges with innovating inside of an enterprise company. Each path to exiting and becoming part of the main product line is unique because your product or service needs to fit within the framework that exists today. If not planned for and executed well, successful, revenue earning products and services can fade into the ether.
For Open Interviews, I identified early on the opportunity to take over a long neglected corner of job posting - walk-in interviews.
Though it may sound straightforward to integrate our enhanced employer intake form into Indeed's job posting system, the reality was more complex. As is typical with enterprise operations, seemingly simple tasks often involve intricate underpinnings. We successfully switched everything over to the job posting flow after 3 months of dedicated engineering work.
And of course, the entire time we were still running the MVP, learning and earning revenue.
Reflections & Learnings
Over a 9-week period I led the design and user research for Open Interviews as it underwent rigorous validation From ideation to a tested and validated MVP. Through the process my top key takeaways were:
Scale at an Enterprise level looks different
Enterprise product scaling differs from a smaller company. While smaller businesses aim to reach broader user segments, enterprises can target specific, nuanced audiences at a scale that allows them to address their unique pain points.
Test value early
I was initially hesitant about testing willingness to pay through a fake door test, but I was proven wrong. Testing value early is crucial to validate if a solution addresses real pain points. Customers invest in solutions that alleviate their most significant challenges.
Get user feedback and iterate fast
Early user feedback highlighted changes that helped us scale the MVP quickly by increasing click-throughs from email to landing page. It accelerated our learning process and confirmed the anticipated value.
Project Details
The Team
1 UX Designer - Me
1 Product Manager
2 Engineers
1 Marketing Partner
1/2 of a Sales Partner
Timeline
9 weeks -
Ideation to validated MVP
3 months -
Integrated Open Interviews into the broader Indeed ecosystem