We’re going to take Timebridge to where it should have been taken. We understand this product, and we can make it fantastic.
Jeff Barson, head of HireVue Labs (the research and development arm of HireVue) describes their recently acquired product Timebridge as “solving the problem around scheduling meetings.” If scheduling meetings is not a problem for you, congratulations! You must really be enjoying unemployment. If you are a part of the workforce, however, you know the pain of trying to coordinate with another meeting attendee, or worse, multiple other attendees. The back and forth emails, the complicated calendars, the chaos that ensues when one must reschedule. At least 30% of my billable time is spent suggesting times for calls.
So I was thrilled, to say the least, when, after reaching out to Barson to schedule an interview, using Timebridge he sent me a few available times and I’ll had to do was select the time that worked best for me. That was it. The meeting was scheduled. It appeared on my calendar, and I received an email reminder before our call. “If you’ve got complicated scheduling needs, we handle those really well,” Barson says. Complicated, for me anyway, means trying to coordinate with professionals outside of my organization, a pain point which Timebridge remedies. “Most competitors handle inbound scheduling but lack the flexibility that we have and don’t have outbound scheduling.”
Originally, Timebridge was founded in San Francisco in 2005. After raising 11 million dollars, the company effectively failed before selling to another company that did nothing with it for nine years. Then, a year and a half ago, HireVue acquired TimeBridge and tasked a full team to work on it. “It was in rough shape,” says Barson. “We really had to start almost from the get-go.”
HireVue kept the legacy product up and running while putting out fires and improving the product. “It was like rebuilding a house while still living in it,” Barson says, explaining the challenge of supporting an existing product while dramatically changing it. Timebridge now runs predominantly on the very best code base and Hirevue launched the product internally two months ago.
“We’re going to take Timebridge to where it should have been taken,” Barson says. “We understand this product, and we can make it fantastic.”
Published 5/27/2016
