Why hiring quality candidates may require connecting with passive job seekers

Posting a job can help you attract interested candidates, but relying exclusively on active applicants may limit the talent available to your organization.

For many specialized, leadership or strategic positions, candidates may be highly selective about new opportunities or more focused on factors such as career growth, company culture, flexibility or long-term impact than on compensation alone.

These candidates often aren’t actively applying for jobs every week, but they may maintain an active presence on Indeed.

Many passive job seekers update resumes, monitor industry opportunities and stay informed about potential career moves. They’re often willing to engage when a role aligns closely with their skills, goals and interests.

Connecting with passive candidates may help you:

• Improve candidate quality, not just application volume
• Build talent pipelines before hiring needs become urgent
• Reduce time-to-fill for roles that are challenging to hire for
• Expand your reach beyond candidates actively searching for jobs

Engaging quality candidates before they actively begin a job search can give you access to talent other employers may not reach.

Answering the question: Can Indeed help me find quality candidates among passive job seekers?

Some employers have the misconception that other platforms are better suited for reaching passive or higher-quality talent. In reality, Indeed serves a wide range of professionals across their career journey. While some users are actively applying, many others use the platform to research employers, explore salary data, update their professional history or monitor new opportunities.

Many passive and active candidates engage with Indeed in several ways:

• Searchable resumes and talent pools: Many professionals maintain current resumes on Indeed even when they aren’t actively applying. This allows employers using various sourcing tools to discover and contact candidates whose experience aligns with open positions.
• Actively updating profiles: Candidates who regularly update their resumes or career preferences may be signaling openness to future opportunities. These updates can indicate ongoing career engagement, even when someone hasn’t submitted an application recently.
• Monitoring job alerts and saved searches: Many job seekers create alerts for specific job titles, locations, salary ranges or work arrangements. They may not be actively searching every day, but they stay informed about opportunities that match their interests.
• Research and browsing jobs: Candidates use Indeed to research employers, review salary information and explore career options. This exploration can happen well before someone begins actively applying for new roles.

As a result, your next hire may not discover your organization through a traditional application process. Instead, the quality candidate you’re targeting for your open role may respond to a well-timed invitation, engage with your employer brand or encounter your opportunity through increased job visibility.

The key is understanding which tools can help you reach these candidates.

How Sponsored Jobs can help you find passive job seekers on Indeed

One of the most effective ways to engage passive job seekers is to increase the visibility of your job posting. Sponsored Jobs are primarily for helping you reach active job seekers, but may have the added benefit of reaching passive job seekers who may not be actively applying, but are open to new roles if the right opportunity presents itself.

For any open role, sometimes the “right” candidate may actually be someone who isn’t actively job hunting, but is passively browsing listings and open to a new opportunity. By increasing your job’s visibility across job alerts and recommendation surfaces, Sponsored Jobs help you reach quality candidates and passive job seekers at moments when they’re browsing, exploring or simply monitoring the market.

If you’re unfamiliar with sponsorship options, you can learn more about the differences in visibility by comparing free* and Sponsored Jobs or reviewing how paid job posts work.

*Terms, conditions, quality standards and usage limits apply.

Match with quality candidates and invite them to apply

Premium Sponsored Jobs include features designed to help you connect with candidates who match your hiring requirements, even if they haven’t searched for your role directly.

• Advanced matching: Uses information from your job description to help surface your opportunity to candidates whose experience, qualifications and location align with your hiring needs.
• Matched candidates: Helps you identify relevant candidates and invite them to apply rather than waiting for them to discover your posting independently. You can invite your matches to apply to your job by sending them personalized invite messages.
• Location targeting: Can also help increase visibility among candidates in relevant geographic areas, including candidates who may not have specifically searched within your location.

Together, these capabilities can help you engage quality candidates earlier in the hiring process.

In fact, Premium Sponsored Jobs have 3X more apply starts^[1] and move forward in the hiring process with 3X more applications compared with non-sponsored jobs^[2].

Reach candidates who are browsing, not just applying

Passive job seekers often spend time researching opportunities before deciding whether to apply.

They may browse search results, compare employers, review salary information or explore roles within their field. Increased visibility can help your opportunities appear during these early stages of consideration.

Regardless of tier, Sponsored Jobs receive greater visibility across Indeed experiences. These roles are featured on the main job seeker page for users searching for similar positions. They are also included in email notifications sent to candidates who set up automated job alerts.

These interactions can help your listings reach candidates who may not otherwise encounter them. This expanded visibility can help you engage professionals who are exploring the market rather than actively conducting a job search.

An elevated tier of Sponsored Jobs, Premium Sponsored Jobs builds upon standard sponsorship with additional matching, targeting and branding functionality. These added features are designed to further support your listing’s visibility and reach among both active and passively browsing potential candidates.

According to Indeed data, Premium Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed have 9.7X more impressions than non-sponsored jobs^[3].

Stand out and signal urgency

Passive candidates are often selective about which opportunities they consider.

Premium Sponsored Jobs include additional features that can help your listings stand out and encourage engagement.

• Branded jobs: Feature your organization’s logo and branded elements directly within job listings, helping candidates recognize your company and connect the role with your broader employer brand.
• Urgently Hiring label: Communicate hiring momentum for priority roles. Signal to job seekers that you’re actively reviewing candidates, helping your job stand out to people who may be open to the right opportunity.
• The tech network: For technical and specialized hiring, extend job visibility to relevant technology-focused sites and communities, helping you reach candidates whose skills may be difficult to find through traditional application channels alone.

By combining enhanced visibility, proactive matching and employer branding capabilities, Premium Sponsored Jobs can help you reach quality candidates who may be open to a new opportunity even if they aren’t actively searching for one.

How the Employer Branding Suite can help you reach passive job seekers on Indeed and Glassdoor

Your employer brand is always at work, even when you’re not actively recruiting or in conversation with a job seeker. Passive job seekers often form opinions about employers long before they consider applying for a role.

They research companies, read reviews, compare workplace experiences and evaluate whether an organization aligns with their career goals. By the time they’re ready to consider a new opportunity, they may already have a shortlist of employers they trust.

The Employer Branding Suite includes your Company Pages on Indeed and Glassdoor, Display Ads and Spotlight Pages, alongside additional branded job features and review management within the Employer Branding Suite.

Each of these tools can help you showcase your workplace, strengthen your reputation and create a more consistent candidate experience across Indeed and Glassdoor.

Rather than focusing solely on job visibility, the Employer Branding Suite can help you build familiarity and trust with candidates throughout their decision-making process.

Display Ads: Grow brand awareness with targeted reach

Display Ads can help increase awareness of your organization across Indeed, Glassdoor and other participating sites. Campaigns can be targeted using signals such as location, search activity and resume information, helping you reach audiences that align with your hiring needs.

In fact, job seekers with 10 Employer Branding Ad impressions on Indeed are 6X more likely to apply than those with only one impression^[4].

Passive candidates may not be actively searching for jobs, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention to employers in their industry.

Consistent visibility can be particularly valuable when engaging passive candidates because familiarity often influences future job-seeking decisions. A candidate who encounters your employer brand multiple times may be more likely to consider your opportunities when they’re ready to make a career move.

Company Pages and Spotlight Pages: Build trust with your employer story

Company Pages on Indeed and Glassdoor allow you to highlight your organization’s mission, values, culture, benefits and open roles. Job seekers who visit a Company Page are 3.2X more likely to apply for that employer’s jobs on average^[5].

Passive candidates often seek more information before deciding whether to engage with an employer.

They may be evaluating workplace culture, leadership, benefits, growth opportunities and employee experiences long before they submit an application.

For organizations with multiple locations, departments or hiring priorities, Spotlight Pages provide an opportunity to create more targeted experiences. Instead of sharing a single employer story, you can showcase specific teams, business units or employee groups that may be most relevant to prospective candidates.

Since job seekers spend more than 27% of their time reviewing employee feedback when visiting Indeed Company Pages, reputation management can play an important role in influencing passive candidates who are still evaluating their options.

Convert interest into applications

Building awareness is important, but candidates often still need a clear path from interest to application.

Glassdoor users who viewed a company’s “Why work with us” (sometimes known as “Why join us”) content on job or overview pages were 33% more likely to begin an application with that company^[6], demonstrating the value of providing meaningful employer information throughout the candidate journey.

Branded job features help create a more consistent experience throughout the hiring journey by incorporating employer branding elements directly into job listings and application experiences on Indeed.

This consistency can reinforce trust and help candidates feel more confident engaging with your organization.

Measure and optimize your brand’s performance

Your employer branding efforts can be most effective when you measure their impact.

The Employer Branding Suite includes reporting and analytics tools that help you evaluate campaign performance, monitor brand engagement and understand how candidates interact with your employer presence.

On Glassdoor, Review Intelligence™ provides deeper insights into employee sentiment, while competitive benchmarking tools can help you understand how your employer brand compares with similar organizations.

On Indeed, the Brand Score allows you to assess your brand’s strength across Indeed and Glassdoor, highlighting strengths and gaps in awareness, consideration, favorability and reputation.

These insights can help you refine your messaging, strengthen your reputation and improve your ability to attract both active and passive candidates over time.

How Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant can help you find passive job seekers on Indeed

While Premium Sponsored Jobs can help candidates discover your opportunities, Smart Sourcing also allows you to take a more proactive approach.

Instead of waiting for quality candidates to apply, Smart Sourcing helps you identify, evaluate and contact candidates whose skills, backgrounds and preferences align with your job description.

This approach can be especially valuable when you’re hiring for specialized, difficult-to-fill or high-priority positions where the strongest candidates may not be actively applying for jobs.

Within Smart Sourcing, Sourcing Assistant (available within the Smart Sourcing Professional and Enterprise tiers) helps streamline candidate discovery and outreach activities, helping recruiting teams spend less time on repetitive sourcing tasks and more time engaging with quality talent.

Some features may require a Smart Sourcing Professional or Enterprise subscription. Terms and conditions apply.

Search and discover candidates beyond your applicant pool

Smart Sourcing provides access to millions of sourceable profiles worldwide, helping you identify candidates who may be a strong fit for your role even if they haven’t applied.

On average, employers who invite matched candidates through Smart Sourcing are 3X more likely to make a hire on Indeed^[7].

You can search and evaluate candidates using criteria such as:

• Skills and qualifications
• Resume recency and activity
• Education
• Job preferences
• Location and relocation preferences

This allows you to discover professionals who maintain a presence on Indeed but may not currently be applying to open positions.

Matched candidates who receive invitations to apply are 15.1X more likely to apply than job seekers who only encounter a role through standard search results^[8].

For employers hiring in competitive talent markets, expanding your search beyond active applicants can significantly increase access to quality candidates.

Let Sourcing Assistant help your team build your candidate pipeline

If you’re managing multiple openings, candidate sourcing can be one of the most time-intensive parts of the hiring process.

Employers saved seven hours per week when using the Sourcing Assistant.^[9]

Sourcing Assistant helps streamline this work by continuously identifying relevant candidates and facilitating outreach based on your established criteria.

Key capabilities include:

• Precision matching: Use conversational prompts to define sourcing criteria that go beyond a traditional job description, helping you identify candidates who align with specific experience, skills or hiring priorities.
• Streamlined outreach: Reduce friction throughout the hiring process. Engage quality candidates using Sourcing Assistant’s personalized invitations and your approved, on-brand templates to convert interested candidates into completed applications.
• Recruiter-directed strategy: Maintain control over sourcing criteria, messaging preferences and candidate thresholds. This helps ensure outreach aligns with your hiring standards and employer brand, all guided by your human recruiting team.

Applicants sourced through Sourcing Assistant were hired 31% faster on average than applicants hired through other sources^[10].

Because Sourcing Assistant continues candidate discovery and outreach activities in the background, it can help maintain pipeline momentum while your team focuses on interviews, evaluations and hiring decisions.

Some features require a Smart Sourcing Professional or Enterprise subscription.

Connect with passive candidates who are more likely to respond

One of the biggest challenges associated with passive recruiting is determining which candidates are most likely to engage.

Smart Sourcing helps address this challenge by surfacing candidates who have recently demonstrated activity on Indeed, such as updating resumes, refreshing profiles or engaging with platform content. According to Indeed data, Smart Sourcing delivers positive candidate responses in an average of 12.7 hours^[11].

These signals can indicate a greater openness to hearing about relevant opportunities.

Candidates discovered through Sourcing Assistant are also 2.9X more likely to be hired than candidates sourced through other channels^[12].

You can personalize outreach using information from a candidate’s experience and your job description or apply your own messaging templates to maintain consistency across recruiting efforts.

How Indeed Talent Scout can help you find passive job seekers on Indeed

If you need help getting started with hiring for your role, Talent Scout can help surface a list of applicants and potential candidates*, provide hiring insights and streamline outreach. All while keeping hiring decisions firmly in your control.

Finding passive candidates often requires more than simply increasing job visibility or searching resume databases. You also need a way to quickly evaluate potential matches, understand market conditions and determine the best next step.

Talent Scout brings these activities together in a conversational experience that helps you identify, assess and engage quality candidates more efficiently.

*Requires Premium Sponsored Jobs or a Smart Sourcing subscription

Find potential candidates beyond your active applicants

Talent Scout can identify quality candidates both within your applicant pool and, when paired with a Smart Sourcing subscription, within Indeed’s broader pool of searchable job seeker profiles.

To speed up reviewing applications, you can ask Talent Scout to identify applications that closely align with your job requirements.

Talent Scout can help you:

• Identify applicant matches: Talent Scout can help you evaluate applicants against your job requirements and help you create your own shortlist, along with explanations about why a candidate may be a fit.
• See prospective candidates: For employers with access to a Smart Sourcing subscription, Talent Scout can surface prospective candidates who match your job description and help you invite them to apply, even if they haven’t previously engaged with your job posting.
• Refine candidate matching: You can provide additional hiring context, intake notes or example resumes to help Talent Scout better understand the qualifications and characteristics you’re prioritizing.

Because Talent Scout learns from your feedback and continuously improves its recommendations, it becomes a more effective hiring tool the more you use it. This approach can help simplify the way you find, engage, and hire the right talent.

Some features, including prospective candidate sourcing and invitations, may require a Smart Sourcing subscription or Premium Sponsored Jobs.

Optimize your job to attract the right passive candidates

Even the strongest candidates may overlook a job posting if it doesn’t clearly communicate the opportunity.

Talent Scout can help you evaluate and improve your job postings using insights informed by Indeed data and hiring trends.

For example, Talent Scout can provide guidance related to:

• Job titles
• Job descriptions
• Salary information
• Benefits information
• Candidate availability
• Local hiring conditions

You can also receive insights into how your posting compares with similar opportunities and identify opportunities to improve candidate engagement.

These recommendations can be particularly valuable when trying to attract passive candidates, who can be more selective and may only respond to opportunities that clearly align with their interests and career goals.

Reach passive candidates with personalized outreach

Passive candidates receive many recruiting messages, which means relevance matters.

Talent Scout can help you create more personalized outreach by incorporating information from a candidate’s experience alongside your hiring requirements.

This can help your communication feel more relevant and tailored to the individual receiving it.

Talent Scout can assist with:

• Personalized candidate messaging: Generate outreach messages tailored to individual candidates or candidate groups based on their backgrounds and your role requirements.
• Interview coordination: When candidates express interest, Talent Scout can help you move the process forward by facilitating interview scheduling and next-step communication.

By helping you create more relevant outreach as a human recruiter, Talent Scout can improve engagement with candidates who might otherwise ignore generic or automated recruiting messages.

Some features, including prospective candidate sourcing and invitations, may require a Smart Sourcing subscription. Certain advanced matching capabilities may require Premium Sponsored Jobs. Terms and conditions apply.

Putting it all together

When you’re hiring for specialized roles, passive candidates can represent some of the strongest available talent. While these professionals may not be actively applying for jobs, many remain open to opportunities that align with their skills, goals and interests.

Indeed offers several ways to connect with these candidates.

Premium Sponsored Jobs can increase visibility among professionals who are monitoring the market, exploring opportunities or engaging with job alerts. The Employer Branding Suite can help you build familiarity and trust before candidates begin actively searching. Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant can help you proactively identify and engage quality talent.

The most effective strategy often combines multiple approaches and product tools. By increasing visibility, strengthening your employer brand and proactively engaging quality candidates, you can expand your talent pool, improve hiring outcomes and connect with candidates who may never have applied on their own.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an active and a passive job seeker?

An active job seeker is actively searching for and applying to jobs. A passive job seeker is not actively submitting applications but may still be open to the right opportunity.

On Indeed, passive candidates may browse jobs, maintain an updated resume, set job alerts or periodically update their profile. While they may not be conducting an active job search, these activities can indicate openness to future opportunities.

Should I use Sponsored Jobs or Smart Sourcing to reach passive job seekers?

The right approach depends on your hiring goals.

Premium Sponsored Jobs help increase visibility across search results, recommendations and job alerts, helping you reach candidates who may be exploring or casually browsing opportunities but have not yet started applying.

Smart Sourcing takes a more proactive approach by helping you identify and contact “right fit” candidates directly.

Many employers use both strategies together. Premium Sponsored Jobs can help generate visibility and engagement, while Smart Sourcing helps recruiters proactively connect with highly relevant candidates.

Do I need a paid subscription to engage passive job seekers on Indeed?

Some of Indeed’s tools for engaging passive candidates require paid plans.

Premium Sponsored Jobs requires a budget to increase job visibility and unlock additional matching features. Certain Smart Sourcing capabilities, including Sourcing Assistant, are available through Professional and Enterprise subscription tiers.

However, there are also steps you can take without additional investment. Maintaining a complete Company Page, responding to reviews and creating clear, informative job descriptions can all help improve your ability to attract and engage passive candidates.

How do I know if a passive candidate is open to a new role?

While no signal guarantees interest, certain activities may indicate that a job seeker is more receptive to opportunities.

Candidates who have recently updated their resumes, refreshed skills, adjusted job preferences or otherwise engaged with Indeed may be more likely to respond to relevant outreach.

Smart Sourcing can help surface candidates based on recent activity, allowing you to focus outreach efforts on individuals who may be more open to hearing about new opportunities.

Can small businesses without a large recruiting team benefit from these tools?

Yes. Many Indeed tools are designed to help employers work more efficiently regardless of team size.

For example, Sourcing Assistant can streamline candidate discovery and outreach activities, helping employers save a median of seven hours per week^[13].

Talent Scout can provide hiring insights, surface candidates based on your criteria and offer outreach guidance through a conversational experience that does not require specialized sourcing expertise.

These capabilities can help smaller organizations compete for quality candidates without significantly increasing their recruiting workload.

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