What does “Urgently Hiring” mean on Indeed?

Job postings with the “Urgently Hiring” label mean an employer has an immediate need to fill a role. This type of hiring reflects situations where roles need to be filled on a short timeline without compromising candidate quality.

On Indeed, the “Urgently Hiring” label appears as a clear visual indicator on certain job postings. It shows up on job postings to signal to job seekers that your hiring team is looking to move quickly. This label is a key feature of the Premium Sponsored Jobs offering in most markets and is designed to help urgent roles stand out during active job searches.

Several situations can create the need to hire urgently. For example, a retail business may need additional staff during peak season. Other common scenarios include sudden resignations, unexpected projects, rapid business growth or situations that require extra coverage on short notice.

Jobs with the “Urgently Hiring” label may receive more applications and have a faster time to hire. In the United States, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed with the Urgently Hiring Tag receive 74% more applications than Sponsored Jobs without it.^[1]

8 ways to hire quickly on Indeed

You don’t have to compromise on quality to hire employees fast. Indeed’s tools are designed to help you connect with candidates quickly and manage hiring activity more efficiently. Here’s how these tools can work together in your hiring workflow:

• Start with Sponsored Jobs: Sponsored Jobs help increase visibility by appearing more often in search results, making it easier for job seekers to discover your posting.
• Use screening questions: Add customized screener questions to your job post to help identify candidates who meet your required job criteria and reduce time spent reviewing applications.
• Leverage Indeed Smart Screening: Smart Screening is an applicant review tool designed to support the earliest stage of hiring through AI-powered candidate screening shaped by your specific, customizable candidate job criteria.
• Get a list of matches with Smart Sourcing and Premium Sponsored Jobs: Products like Smart Sourcing and Premium Sponsored Jobs work behind the scenes to immediately deliver matches that meet your job requirements.
• Automate routine communication: Pre-written messages help keep the hiring process moving without manual follow-up at every step.
• Stay informed with Indeed Alerts: Set up alerts to monitor new candidate activity so you can respond promptly as applications and updates come in.

These tools work together to support a faster hiring workflow and help reduce the effort required to manage urgent hiring needs.

1. Sponsored Job posts

If you’re hiring on a tight timeline, Sponsored Job posts can help increase visibility with job seekers who are actively searching. These paid job posts typically appear more often in relevant search results, which can help attract applications more quickly.

By maintaining stronger visibility, Sponsored Jobs can help you reach the right candidates faster. In fact, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed have 2.3X more impressions^[2] and 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.^[3]

As part of Indeed’s Premium Sponsored Jobs offering, you can also add the “Urgently hiring” label to job listings. This label helps roles stand out, and Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed with Urgently Hiring make a hire three days faster than Standard Sponsored Jobs.^[4]

2. Screening questions

Screening questions can help you quickly surface candidates who meet your must-have criteria for the role. By adding screener questions to your job post, you can focus your review on applicants who align with your most important requirements and spend less time manually sorting through responses.

At the same time, screening questions don’t limit your visibility into the candidate pool. You can still access all applications to review any applicant in more detail as you move through the hiring process.

3. Smart Screening

Smart Screening is designed to go beyond basic screener questions, supporting employers at the earliest phases of the hiring process. After candidates apply, Smart Screening begins screening applications against your job criteria. Shaped by your customized job criteria, it can evaluate resume information and guide candidates through a conversational question-and-answer experience using AI Recruiter

Each applicant is delivered into your ATS with a candidate summary, spotlighting relevant strengths, possible gaps. Alongside the summary, applicants are given a Smart Fit Score™, based on how closely they match your job criteria. This score can help make it easier to sort and prioritize the right candidates sooner—an important factor in hiring on a tight timeline.

4. Smart Sourcing

Smart Sourcing uses matching technology to proactively identify candidates whose skills, experience and qualifications align with your job posting. Instead of manually searching for candidates, you can view a list of people who match your job criteria across a range of industries, skill sets and educational backgrounds. Matching is based on information job seekers share.

From there, you can review profiles and decide who to invite to apply. Matched candidates you invite to apply are 15.1X more likely to apply than job seekers who only find your job in search results.^[5]

Smart Sourcing also includes collaboration options that make it faster and easier to work with others on your hiring team. Based on user feedback, 92% of users report that these features help their hiring teams save time.^[6] By adding and sharing notes on candidates, teams can provide feedback, stay aligned throughout the evaluation process and maintain greater transparency.

5. Communication automation tools

During urgent hiring, staying responsive can help keep candidates engaged as they move through the process. Indeed’s communication automation tools can help reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks like messaging candidates, making it easier to follow up promptly when timelines are tight.

These tools include a range of options to support outreach. Pre-written message templates help you communicate consistently with candidates at different stages of the application process without having to write individual messages each time.

In conjunction with tools like Smart Sourcing, you can also create customizable messages that you can tailor to reflect a candidate’s skills and the job description. Please note that AI-assisted messaging features are not available in certain markets.

To use automation thoughtfully, it can help to keep outreach personal and measured. Personalizing the first line with a role-relevant detail can help outreach feel more relevant. Spacing follow-ups a few days apart and limiting outreach to two or three messages can help avoid communication that feels overly automated.

Consistent responsiveness throughout this process can also earn you a Responsive Employer Badge on Indeed. This badge highlights your responsiveness to job seekers and can help your job postings stand out during active searches.

6. Optimizing job descriptions

A clear job description helps attract quality candidates by providing key details about the role, required qualifications and benefits upfront. When this information is easy to understand, job seekers can more quickly decide whether the position is a good fit. That clarity helps reduce applications from candidates who don’t meet the role’s requirements and can limit back-and-forth questions later in the process.

For further optimization, consider using Indeed’s Job Description Generator to speed up the writing process. This can help you write job descriptions quickly while keeping them clear, engaging and focused on what candidates might search for. Employers who use the Job Description Generator have seen a 16% increase in applications compared to those who write descriptions manually.

The generator uses OpenAI’s GPT models alongside Indeed’s proprietary AI and draws from Indeed’s database of millions of job descriptions. Based on the details you provide, it surfaces tailored suggestions that reflect best practices for effective job descriptions, including structure, readability and essential information such as pay range, benefits and job type.

You can review each suggestion and edit, refine or replace it as needed. The final job description is always up to you, giving you control over what’s published while helping you move faster when hiring timelines are tight.

7. Indeed Alerts

Indeed alerts keep you informed about new candidates and job activity when hiring quickly. Setting up Indeed alerts helps you follow new candidate activity as it happens, so you can act fast and reduce your chances of missing a quality candidate.

You can configure these alerts based on new applications, keywords, job titles and other criteria. Alerts are delivered by email or via browser notifications, so you can monitor activity without constantly needing to check your dashboard.

If you use a paid Smart Sourcing subscription, you can also incorporate Smart Sourcing alerts into your workflow. After you define your candidate criteria, these alerts notify you when a job seeker meets those parameters, giving you visibility into potential matches as they become available.

Setting up Indeed alerts helps you manage challenges like candidate ghosting and no-shows by notifying you of new applicants in real time, so you can respond promptly and engage candidates before they lose interest.

8. Indeed Talent Scout

Indeed Talent Scout is an intelligent, conversational agent designed to support faster hiring by helping you work through sourcing and outreach more interactively.

Through a simple back-and-forth conversation, Talent Scout uses what you share along with Indeed’s searchable Job Seeker Profiles and data from millions of jobs to surface candidates who may be a fit for your role and help you connect with them more efficiently.

As you interact with Talent Scout, you can clarify what you’re looking for and adjust criteria based on your needs. The tool responds to that input and learns from your feedback and use, continuously improving in real time to help surface matches aligned with your criteria. This can result in more personalized insights to inform your hiring strategy.

This conversational approach can make it easier to build your initial shortlist and connect with hard-to-find talent, allowing you to focus on more important tasks.

Within that workflow, Talent Scout can support a range of hiring tasks, including helping you:

• Review a list of applicants based on your match criteria
• Review profiles of job seekers who align with your job description*
• Align on the criteria used to match candidates
• Review summaries that explain how each candidate aligns with your job requirements
• Explore ways to refine job content
• Create personalized outreach messages at scale
• Access market- and job-specific insights

Talent Scout helps streamline sourcing, matching and engagement within this workflow, giving you more support early in the process while keeping hiring decisions with your team.

*Only available with Premium Sponsored Jobs or a Smart Sourcing subscription. Availability may vary.

What if multiple roles need to be filled urgently?

When several roles are urgent, it can help to prioritize based on business impact and time sensitivity. Working with your hiring team to develop a short list of critical roles may help you focus your budget, sourcing and speed to contact. That list might include factors like:

• Customer impact
• Revenue dependency
• Safety or compliance needs
• Required coverage, such as open shifts
• Hiring complexity, including talent availability or seniority

Indeed’s suite of tools, including Premium Sponsored Jobs, Smart Sourcing, Smart Screening and Talent Scout, can support this process by giving you ways to define criteria, quickly review candidates and track progress from application through interview and hire.

For short-term spikes or defined projects, temporary or contract workers may help you fill gaps without long-term commitments, while full-time hiring may be better suited for ongoing needs or roles that require continuity.

Programs like Indeed Flex offer on-demand access to temporary workers, referred to as Flexers and include tools for shift management and timesheets. These programs are best suited for situations where you want a staffing-style solution managed on a separate platform. Please note: Indeed Flex availability is limited to select markets in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Tracking job posting performance to speed up hiring

When hiring urgently, tracking the right hiring metrics can help you understand what’s working (and what’s not). Metrics can show you where candidates may be dropping off and how to adjust your approach without compromising quality. Looking at performance data as roles are live can make it easier to decide when to refine job details, adjust visibility or respond more quickly to candidate interest.

Using Indeed Analytics, you can regularly review key metrics tied to your job listings through the Analytics Employer Dashboard (log in required).

This includes:

• Impressions: how often your job appears in search results
• Click-through rate: how often job seekers engage with your listing
• Apply rate: how many views turn into completed applications

Taken together, these metrics offer context around how job seekers interact with your postings at each stage.

Reviewing job data in context can help you evaluate job post performance with Indeed Analytics and identify where adjustments may be needed during urgent hiring.

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Hiring quickly doesn’t have to compromise the quality of candidates you receive. Tools like Sponsored Job Posts, screening questions, Smart Sourcing and automated features connect you with quality candidates faster. Features like Indeed Alerts can also keep you up-to-date on candidate activity.

Post a Sponsored Job on Indeed and start hiring smarter and faster now.

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