Indeed phone number login (India)

Enabling millions of lightly-skilled jobseekers in India to join Indeed without an email address

Company: Indeed

Timeline: 2022-23

Role: Lead UX Designer

The Project

Mid-flight into a product that would reach millions

In 2022, I joined this project mid-flight as the sole UX designer, taking over from a colleague to shepherd the MVP through to launch. Working across global teams, I served as the UX point of contact across multiple product teams and stakeholders, ensuring design consistency, facilitating alignment, and contributing to key flows as we built a phone-based login experience tailored to user behaviour and technical constraints in India.

‍My role: As sole designer, taking over mid-project, I collaborated with:

Content design & PM
Several of Indeed's core infrastructure teams
India UXR team who conducted research with local jobseekers
Legal & security team overseeing compliance and phone number recovery

The Problem

An email requirement was locking out millions of Indian jobseekers

In India, many lightly-skilled workers don’t use email and prefer communicating via phone and WhatsApp. Requiring an email address to create an account was a major barrier to adoption.

Our were:

Remove email requirement to allow phone number-only account creation
Leverage WhatsApp as a communication channel
Increase account creation among lightly-skilled users

The scope

One simple change that touched six product flows

What seemed like a simple change — allowing phone number login — actually impacted many core product flows. We had to redesign and validate multiple end-to-end flows:

Account creation
Login
Forgot password (with fallback logic for recycled numbers)
Apply flow
Information request flow
Post-apply communication (traditionally via email)

Each flow was owned by a different product team, requiring extensive cross-functional collaboration. Gaining alignment and securing buy-in across these teams was one of the biggest challenges and successes of the project.

Redesigning core flows. We started by identifying all the touchpoints and collaborating teams, then redesigned all key flows – from account creation to post-apply communication and more.

The Constraints

Three technical realities that shaped every design decision

Phone number recycling placed limits on account recovery
Multiple entry points and fallback scenarios
User confusion risk with no email fallback for recovery

The launch

Phone-first flows for India's lightly-skilled workforce

The MVP launched successfully on Indeed India, delivering a fully phone-based experience across core user flows.

Phone number–only login, signup, and apply flows
WhatsApp-based verification and communication (SMS to come post-MVP)
Scalable support for non-email accounts

The Impact

12M+ accounts in year one

12M+ phone number-only accounts created by end of 2024
+15% QoQ growth in phone number-only adoption
+20% higher login conversion vs. email
Enabled more inclusive access for lightly-skilled Indian jobseekers

What I Learned

Two things this project reinforced

Designing for global audiences means letting go of assumptions about how people communicate and what they trust. In India, WhatsApp isn't a workaround, it's the primary channel. Getting that right required close collaboration with the India UXR team and a willingness to design for behaviour patterns very different from other markets.

The other lesson was about alignment. A change that looked simple on the surface – removing an email requirement – touched six different product flows owned by six different teams. Getting legal, content, infrastructure, and UXR aligned early wasn't a soft skill nice-to-have. It was what made the project ship.