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Employer Reactions to Prospective Features

Client: SMB Teams at Indeed • My role: UX research as a rapid researcher

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Challenge

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Teams at Indeed added the ability for employers to save video interview questions for reuse and saving promising candidates for other jobs. Both of these were added due to an earlier iteration of evaluative research, and my partner and I were tasked with understanding how usable the changes were and how well they supported employer needs.


Our objective: to walk through the prototypes with employers and understand what would support their work and what needs improvement. In addition, we wanted to understand their reactions to the added features.

Executive Summary
Context
Indeed regularly ran iterative usability testing on new features. In this study, my partner and I were asked to explore two new features with employers:
  • saving video interview questions for reuse in later interviews,
  • saving promising candidates for another job and and suggesting a specific job for them to apply to.
In both cases, the underlying goal was to improve the hiring experience of employers on the Indeed platform.
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Save Questions for Later prototype

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Save Candidate for Later prototype

Findings
Saved Questions: Employers were interested in sharing saved question sets with their colleagues, but found it difficult to know where to find saved question sets and were unsure what to do with two ways to save their question sets.

Saving candidates for later: Employers were very interested in saving candidates for later, supplied additional scenarios in which this might happen, and appreciated being able to let candidates know they were being saved for later or considered for another position. However, they wanted to be able to personalize the message sent when a candidate was considered for another position, and were confused by saved candidates apparently disappearing.
Impact
The team saving interview questions did a follow-up study during a later rapid research session which resulted in improved understandability and ease of use. That later session incorporated both recommended changes.

The designer for the team saving candidates for later confirmed that being saved for later will have different behavior and employers can edit the considering a candidate for a job.
What we learned
Findings and Recommendations
Saved Questions: Employers were interested in sharing saved question sets with their colleagues, but found it difficult to know where to find saved question sets and were unsure what to do with two ways to save their question sets.
questions library.png
Questions Template Library was unclear
I recommended renaming "Question Templates Library"  to “Your saved interview questions” to clarify the use case.
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Two ways to save is confusing
I recommended offering a dropdown to support both save options and using clearer terminology such as "Save to candidate" rather than just "Save".
Saving candidates for later: Employers were very interested in saving candidates for later, supplied additional scenarios in which this might happen, and appreciated being able to let candidates know they were being saved for later or considered for another position. However, they wanted to be able to personalize the message sent when a candidate was considered for another position, and were confused by saved candidates apparently disappearing.
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Employers wanted to personalize this message
saving someone.png
disappeared.png
Employers thought Janett vanished after saving
I recommended having a saved candidate appear in the job's saved candidates list with 'consider for this job' replaced by 'undo'.
Provided actionable steps to improve usability
The team saving interview questions did a follow-up study during a later rapid research session which resulted in improved understandability and ease of use. That later session incorporated both recommended changes.

The designer for the team saving candidates for later confirmed that being saved for later will have different behavior and employers can edit the considering a candidate for a job.
Conclusion
Indeed wanted to understand employer thoughts on two new features. Myself and my partner ran a usability study to identify where the concepts worked well and where they needed changing.
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We learned that both concepts were well understood, with saving candidates for later very well received. We also identified points of confusion and uncertainty along with recomendations for improving the experience
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The team working on saving interview questions for later did a followup study with the recommended changes, and the designer for the team working on saving candidates for later had made the recommended changes but had not yet done a followup study.
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