Swetha Hanuraj Kolalapudi is a Senior Product Manager with the Indeed Apply team in Hyderabad. She shares more about her role at Indeed, and what motivates her to get up every morning: helping people get jobs.
After graduating from both the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras with a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad with a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, my first job was with a leading Indian e-commerce company. I was the first member of the Analytics team and helped define the role of the Analytics function there.
When I joined, we were a team of two, and four years later we grew the team to over a hundred people!
After that, I decided to pivot my career and co-founded a startup making video content for online learning and technical skill development. Through the startup, I connected with many people who were looking to upskill to find better and more purposeful job opportunities. This inspired me to do more to help people with their careers on a larger scale. In November 2018, I found a role at Indeed, applied for it and joined as a Product Manager. With some grit, hard work and the support from my team, I was recently promoted to Senior Product Manager!
At Indeed, I’m part of the Indeed Apply team and we help job seekers apply for jobs. Right now, we’re working on improving the application process by redesigning and modernizing the application flow on the Indeed platform.
Our goal is to simplify the process, making it much clearer and easier for job seekers to apply for jobs.
While we work on improving the application experience for job seekers, we also facilitate millions of applications globally everyday. We collaborate with our engineering teams to innovate and devise ways to make substantial changes quickly while keeping our existing systems safe.
It is really exciting working on Indeed Apply as a product; I get to solve challenging problems and work on a mature product that has global scale (Indeed Apply is available in 60+ countries).
Our team is spread across the globe, where most of us are based out of Hyderabad and Tokyo, but we also collaborate closely with other teams in Seattle, San Francisco and Austin.
Though geographically apart, we connect through various ways such as through Slack and e-mails. What I love about working here is how everyone is respectful of each other’s time.
When we have Zoom meetings across time zones, we try to ensure that it’s not always the same person having to attend meetings out of their working hours.
We try to keep our meetings as focused as possible by maintaining an agenda and detailed meeting notes.
Read more: How Indeedians are staying connected while working remotely here.
Working at Indeed as a Senior Product Manager has allowed me to leverage my entrepreneurial experience and technical skills while working with very smart people in cross-functional teams such as Engineering, Data Science, User Experience and User Research to design great user experiences.
I’m grateful to work with such an awesome group of people with many different backgrounds and skill sets where I get to learn something new from them everyday!
In addition to working with a talented bunch, I’m most excited about the impact I make in people’s lives. My team and I continuously strive to make Indeed a trusted partner in their job-seeking journey.
One of my favorite things about working at Indeed is Open PTO (paid time off). Indeed’s Open PTO policy is by far the best leave policy I’ve seen or heard of. It indicates a high level of trust in our employees, which in turn encourages us to do our best.
The employee-centric approach at Indeed is also apparent in the care and thought that has gone into designing our office space in Hyderabad, as well as the amount of support we’ve received as we shifted to working remotely.
Indeed extended a work from home stipend where I was able to use to set-up a highly functional workstation at home. In addition, I also managed to get myself a little oven. Baking has been a great way to unwind from the intensity of the work week, and that’s what I usually find myself doing on YOU days!
As a Product Manager, we are constantly making micro and macro decisions that will ultimately affect the users of our product. At a place like Indeed, that means we’re really changing people’s lives with every decision we make. I believe it’s important to never forget who and what we’re doing this for. I also believe in being a strong advocate for our users and try to influence our teams to always do what’s best for them.
To find out more about jobs at Indeed Hyderabad, click here.
