This page lists down the main products I’ve worked on as a Founder / Product Manager. These are in reverse chronological order, feel free to jump around depending on what interests you.
Apart from these, I’ve also worked on several side projects (primarily focused on writing), which you can check out across this website.
If you’d like to talk more, shoot me an email at hemantjoshiwrites@gmail.com
Smart Sourcing – India
(Product Lead – 2024 – present)
The simplest and most responsive way to source candidates for your hiring requirements
Context: In a sourcing-first hiring market, the AI powered Indeed Smart Sourcing product didn’t have product-market fit.
My role as a Product Lead started with owning the “Quality Profiles” area within this larger space, but eventually I went on to lead the overall product, including:
- Job seeker profile experience
- Recruiter experience
- Pricing and packaging
I worked with stakeholders across different teams to develop an executive leadership-aligned company strategy to differentiate in India, apart from executing on the near-term strategy for finding product-market fit.
Problems: There were 3 major problems we wanted to address:
- Job seekers had a hard time creating a profile that would get noticed by recruiters
- Recruiters were unable to use Indeed to find the right candidates, because of the lack of flexible search / discovery tools they needed.
- Indeed didn’t have market-relevant pricing and packaging, thus preventing it from selling in the market.
Impact:
- Achieved PMF with the biggest segments in Indian recruiting (IT Services & Customer care)
- Delivered 5x-10x quality profiles in different sub-segments, addressing a key pain point for recruiters.
- Delivered market-relevant pricing, making the product competitive in the market.
Main learning:
While going through some organizational uncertainty during this project, I found that the best way to make strategic decisions is to test different strategic hypotheses with customers using different methods. This has made me a more strategic leader.
Job seeker Engagement – India
(PM – 2020 to 2022; Product Lead – 2022 – 2024)
Job seeker re-engagement
(2022 – present)
Drive user re-engagement via app growth, push notifications and WhatsApp alerts
Context: Indeed in India had a very leaky user base. Most of our traffic acquisition was via SEO and we had a hard time with bringing users back once they were done applying for jobs.
My role here was to act as a Product Lead and guide the PMs in these areas to succeed.
Impact:
- Grew percentage of app traffic from <20% to 65% (growth + re-engagement)
- Drove re-engagement via push notifications & WhatsApp (16% users –> 25%)
Phone Number Accounts
Create an account using only your phone number, without requiring an email address
(June 2022 – present)
Context:
Most consumer products nowadays allow users to create accounts using their phone numbers. Sounds simple – but this was a mammoth thing to do at Indeed. Not because of the technological complexity, but the organizational complexity and the tech debt involved. Most of Indeed’s systems ran on email addresses as their way of identifying a user, which meant having to rewire these systems to be able to use a phone number.
In collaboration with my leadership, I pitched to the Indeed SLT (senior leadership team) to help drive alignment across the company to drive this product. We had to do a lot of validation upfront and justify that the multi-quarter effort requiring multiple teams to make changes to their systems was worth it.
Problem: Most new-to-internet job seekers do not use email addresses as their online identity. They are even abandoning email addresses for communication. Hence, being ready with a phone-based account and communication experience was key.
Impact: Over the course of almost a year, we delivered a phone based experience, leveraging WhatsApp to deliver communications (as it has better engagement than SMS) to job seekers and driving growth. We saw an immediate 16% increase in accounts on Indeed in India (1M+ accounts yearly).
Main learning:
My biggest learning while driving this was how to drive leadership in different teams and organizations to align to your strategy and getting them to commit. It was hard, but it was well worth it.
Indeed in Hindi
As a blue-collar worker in India, discover new jobs on Indeed in Hindi, the most popular language in India
(Jan 2022 – present)
Context: Until 2021, Indeed only operated its product in India in English. This was hampering its growth in the strategic blue-collar worker segment, which was the fastest growing segment online. This was a lot more complicated than a normal localization process, because the way Hindi is used in India today is very different from the actual grammar of the language. The modern-day Hindi is very casual, and borrows a lot of words from Hindi.
I pitched to launch Indeed in Hindi to senior leadership, acquired resourcing for it, delivered the MVP and iterated it until it was adopted heavily. We had to even define a style guide for a new language which we called “Simple Hindi” that borrowed a lot of English words in the Hindi script.
After the initial launch and scaling, I handed this project off to another PM who I was coaching.
Problem: Most blue-collar workers speak very limited English. They understand common words (which are a part of daily Hindi vocab now), but when using the internet, find it hard to proceed with English for complicated tasks like finding jobs.
Impact: We grew to 100k+ users using the site in Hindi and opened Indeed up to a new audience that it wanted to grow with. Apart from this, the foundation set for Hindi can be used for additional Indian languages.
Conclusion: The Hindi site continues even today, though we had to change our focus segment a few years ago.
Main learning:
My biggest learning while delivering Hindi was to learn how “Hindi users” had a different mindset to using products, and we had to re-engineer many parts of Indeed to suit this audience.
Chat-to-apply
As a blue-collar worker in India, supply applications to jobs on Indeed simply via a chat – without having to fill complex forms
(April 2020 – June 2025)
Context: The “Indeed Apply” product was hard to use for blue-collar workers in India – a strategic segment for Indeed. This resulted in fewer applications for roles in a segment where employers consistently demand more candidates (eg: delivery drivers).
I was assigned this problem space and was tasked to grow the number of applications from blue-collar workers. After due product research and scrappy testing, we decided to build the chatbot.
Problem: Most blue-collar workers are new-to-the-internet, most adopting the internet post the internet boom in India starting 2016. So the smallest of things, eg: email addresses, unnecessary input fields, etc. caused confusion and led to drop off. They are familiar with common social media and entertainment apps, but beyond that, their internet usage is limited.
Impact: Created a chatbot-styled application experience whose design was similar to WhatsApp (most popular communication app in India) to make the application process stress free for these job seekers. Funnel completion rates jumped from 55% –> 79%, resulting in millions of additional applications delivered.
Conclusion: Based on the success of the apply bot, we also tested doing job discovery via chat. This was before the age of LLMs, so understanding user intent was hard. We did validate that users were able to express themselves much better on a chatbot, but had a hard time converting that into job searches.
We decided to sunset the chatbot in 2025 because the core apply experience of Indeed had evolved to a point where the chatbot was not showing any significant gains over it. The product has lived its time, and it was time to make room for something new!
Main learning:
While designing for a certain cohort, it is important to understand their design familiarity and the constraints preventing them from using something that works for others.
Indeed Incubator
Indeed Embox
As a recruiter, manage your candidates efficiently right within Gmail – no need for an ATS
(June 2018 – March 2020)
Context: I joined the Incubator formally as an Associate Product Manager and joined a team that had pitched a nifty Google Add on to help recruiters manage candidates called Indeed Embox.
I pitched, acquired funding and launched Indeed Embox, a Chrome extension to help recruiters manage candidates in Gmail.
Problem: Recruiters, especially SMB recruiters, track candidates in spreadsheets, pen-and-paper and notes. They could not afford an ATS, but were also not using the Indeed Candidate Management tools (which are available for free).
The reason was that getting them to adopt a tool that’s not in their regular workflow was hard.
Impact: The chrome extension was used by 10k+ recruiters at a time with a less than 10% uninstall rate per month at its peak.
Conclusion: The usage rate was promising, but adoption started to fall off after a certain scale. We realized that adding more features into the Google Add on was creating privacy risks (eg: access to all emails) that prevented recruiters from adopting the product.
Given the legal risks with Google’s change in policies around add-ons and chrome extensions, we decided to shut down the project.
Main learning:
I understood how legal decisions are made – evaluating risks, ROI and brand impact that a company could sustain because of an innocuous decision someone made.
As a brash early PM, I was attuned to thinking “Just ship it” would work, until our app was at one point frozen by Google for apparently violating some of its terms of use.
Indeed Placement
A career portal for college students in India to find jobs.
(June 2017 – May 2018)
Context: I pitched a new product to the Indeed Incubator (a company-wide incubator), acquired funding and ran this project as a founder for 10 months. Gathered funding, owned marketing and sales, led product discovery and resourcing.
Problem: Most colleges in India are not able to find enough opportunities to their students through the college career centers. Indeed Placement was built as a platform for helping these career centers discover opportunities beyond their usual contacts, and ultimately help more students get jobs.
Impact: Managed to get more than 5000 students from 9 colleges take assessments to prove their skills.
Conclusion: Product was discontinued because of limited ROI in a highly fragmented market.
Main learning:
This was my first experience as a PM. I never took any formal training as a PM – so there were several gaps in how I operated. The biggest learning from here was to pivot quickly. We were initially trying to build a 3 way marketplace (students, college placement officers, employers), but realized this was a hard undertaking for a small team, so pivoted to only a student <> employer marketplace.
If you’d like to talk more about any of these, shoot me an email at hemantjoshiwrites@gmail.com