Indeed University
Cultivating the next generation of tech leaders
Indeed University (IU) is an immersive onboarding program at Indeed that brings together newly hired engineers from around the world to learn about data-driven decision making. Using Indeed's product design philosophy, IU participants work together to conceive, develop, and pilot products that create WOW experiences and help people get jobs.
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Indeed Virtual Hiring Events
Adapting to the new normal
On April 23, 2020, Indeed held the first official Virtual Hiring Event
, an online event where employers could conduct individual or group video-call interviews with job applicants. The idea was brought to life in response to the COVID-19 health crisis.
The seeds of Virtual Hiring Events were sown several years ago, when members of Indeed's Job Spotter unit—a product of Indeed University—noticed that many companies hosted planned recruiting sessions. Stores would display signs that read: "Come back between 3-5pm on this day to talk with us about our open positions." They realized there was an opportunity for Indeed to provide value, and pitched the idea to Indeed's internal innovation lab, the Incubator.
After receiving encouragement from other Indeedians and at the behest of management, the Job Spotter unit set up a form to aggregate open recruitment slots so that job seekers could sign up online to attend interviews. This service became known as "Hiring Events," and functions as a hiring workflow management system for employers. It allows job seekers to skip the application process and jump straight into an interview with a hiring manager.
Following the success of Hiring Events during 2019, particularly during the holiday season, Ryan Arroyo (director of product management at Indeed) and Naveed Heyrani (senior product manager of the Indeed Incubator) decided to expand Hiring Events and make them fully virtual so that any job seeker could bypass time-consuming back-and-forth application processes.
When the COVID-19 health crisis suddenly began impacting in-person hiring events in March 2020, the Indeed Hiring Events team went into overdrive to quickly set up and release the new virtual hiring workflow system. The new system manages and automates RSVPs, candidate screening, and interview scheduling and reminders all to streamline and simplify the hiring process. Further, the team came up with a way to recreate the experience of walking into a waiting room, getting processed by a hiring manager, and completing an interview, all online.
"Virtual recruiting is the only way that many employers can hire right now," said Arroyo. "I find it really inspiring to see how quickly people have been willing to embrace these new kinds of events. We came up with an idea for a service we hoped might one day be possible, but it suddenly became a real tool that people all over the world now rely on."
Indeed's Virtual Hiring Events quickly became indispensable for large employers hiring frontline workers. In one case, the tool enabled a well-known retailer to hire 10,000 essential employees in a single day.