Scheduling & Availability
Simplifying the interview scheduling experience across Indeed’s products.
Company
Indeed
Role
Product strategy
UX/UI Design
User Research
Team
Product Manager
Engineering team
User Researcher
Content Designer
Timeline
Q1 2021
Impact
Designed and launched availability component to power employer and job seeker interview scheduling.
Unblocked launch of interview scheduling features within Indeed Resume product
Published new component to Indeed’s Design System
Overview
Context
One of my main focus areas during my time at Indeed was interview scheduling–a core capability of the employer platform.
The "Scheduling and Availability" team was created in 2021 to centralize the employer experience and eliminate duplicated efforts in collecting interview availability across various Indeed products. Our team built an interview scheduling API to power all products at Indeed.
Problem
What was the current state?
Every product at Indeed with scheduling needs had built their own solution which led to multiple problems:
Disconnected experiences: Users had to repeatedly provide the same information across different products, maintaining their availability in multiple places.
Duplicated efforts: Scheduling components were built in a way that was not easily reusable, causing multiple teams to build the same features.
Inefficient solutions: Teams spent significant time and effort creating scheduling features that lacked essential capabilities and did not meet user needs, as interview scheduling was not their main focus
Solution
What was our goal?
Our goal was to create a single solution for collecting and storing employer interview availability in order to streamline the interview scheduling process.
Approach
Process Overview
Research
Understanding the current state
In order to create a centralized interview scheduling solution across Indeed's employer products, we first needed to understand the current state.
I collaborated with my Product Manager to identify key stakeholders and met with UX designers from each team. This allowed me to:
Share our team’s mission.
Review current scheduling flows and gather team resources for a shared library.
Understand user needs and issues specific to each product. Teams had a wealth of past research that helped to set our foundation for user needs and feature prioritization.
User research
To collect employer feedback on our proposed interview scheduling experience and its initial implementation in the Indeed Resume product, I worked closely with UX research. We conducted moderated research sessions using an interactive prototype.
Learnings
Indeed isn’t the only tool employers use
Employers user a variety of different tools and platforms to schedule candidate interviews.
Employers live in their calendars
Employers consider their personal and/or work calendars the main source of truth for availability. Therefore, calendar integration is crucial for adoption of other scheduling tools.
Adding time manually is too much work
Employers value their time and prefer not to manually select interview slots. It's time-consuming and can become outdated as schedules change.
Alignment
Setting requirements
After completing an audit of the current state, Product, Engineering, and UX met to discuss findings and align on a phased roadmap of interview scheduling features and capabilities.
Our MVP scope was focused on building a new component that would allow employer user the ability to manually add and save times they are available to interview.
Design
Initial Explorations
Defining the employer experience
During our initial planning phase, we met with partner teams to align on how our proposed availability solution might fit into existing scheduling flows across products. This helped to inform designs for our first use case: Indeed Resume (a product employers can use to source and connect with candidates).
Navigating the “what if’s”
One of the most challenging aspects of designing the availability component was the amount of edge cases uncovered during review sessions with our UX Dev and Engineering teams. We worked closely together to discuss, solution, and document potential scenarios.
Designing the job seeker experience
Along with collaborating with Employer product teams, we also worked closely with job seeker interview experience teams to align on how availability should be incorporated within their scheduling flows. This allows job seekers to choose from an employer’s available time slots when scheduling interviews.
Refinement
Shift in direction
Our research uncovered that calendar sync was “paramount” for scheduling interviews and employers rely on their calendars as the source of truth. Based on these new findings, we chose to expedite work to incorporate calendar sync capabilities.
Final solution
Our availability component was first launched within Indeed Resume, a product employers can use to browse and connect directly with potential candidates.
Calendar sync
Users can optionally connect their calendar to automatically update their availability, ensuring it’s always current. This also prevents candidates from scheduling over existing events.
Supported calendar providers:
Job seeker experience
When a job seeker receives an invitation to interview, they are able to select their preferred time slot from an employer’s availability.
Design system contribution
I collaborated with our UX Developer, Design System, and Accessibility teams to publish our component to Indeed’s Design System for broader use. We ensured the component was fully accessible, well-documented, and easy for other teams to adopt and use independently.
