How Indeed’s Marketplace Delivers for Both Job Seekers and Employers

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in August 2014 and has been updated to reflect more recent data.

Key Takeaways 

• To balance the traffic we send to employers, Indeed created features to better distribute started applications to your jobs and advanced tools to attract the right candidates.
• Our millions of users provide an understanding of what helps employers find quality candidates, like creating detailed job descriptions and actively updating your posts.
• Features like Indeed Apply help accommodate the needs of global talent pools by simplifying how job seekers submit various application materials.

Responding to every job application you receive for each open role can seem overwhelming, if not impossible. But this means qualified candidates who don’t hear back from you may move on to other opportunities. 

Indeed’s mission is to help people get jobs. That means helping employers connect quickly and easily with the right job seekers. When that happens, employers build a better candidate experience — and in the process, create a simpler, faster and more human hiring process.  

Founded in 2004, Indeed is now used in more than 60 countries and 28 languages. Today, Indeed’s marketplace has over 595M million Job Seeker Profiles globally and jobs can reach millions of active job seekers.¹

Here’s a look at some of the updates we’ve been making to enable Indeed to continue being the no. 1-ranked job site across the world.²

Ensuring a Balanced Marketplace on Indeed

Indeed is committed to delivering a fair marketplace that connects employers and job seekers. Given our culture of customer-centricity and innovation, we’re continuously evolving our experience to better balance the traffic we send to employers while helping job seekers find opportunities that meet their criteria with the greatest possible chance of a hire.

Throughout 2024, we will implement improvements and create:

• Better distribution and more predictability of started applications 
• Easier distribution of your budget to advertise jobs efficiently and achieve results that matter
• Fewer started applications to free job posts that lose relevancy over time
• Enforcement of policies against duplicate jobs to protect job seekers from bad actors that could impact the trust and safety of our platform
• Enforcement of policies against reposting job posts to drive unique content for job seekers
• Additional features for Sponsored Jobs to stand out so job seekers see them more often on Indeed, plus advanced tools to attract the right candidates

Why Are We Making Updates?

As mentioned, when some jobs attract an overwhelming number of applications, employers often can't respond to every applicant quickly enough, if at all. This creates a poor candidate experience for job seekers and prevents employers from connecting with potential hires. And when the same jobs are reposted over and over, job seekers lose trust that they’re applying to real opportunities. By addressing these pain points, these updates will help foster a positive experience for both job seekers and employers who use the Indeed platform.

Key Guidelines for Indeed’s Marketplace

In our journey to be the best matching and hiring platform connecting employers and job seekers, the Indeed marketplace is a cornerstone of our mission to help people get jobs. We want all jobs to be on Indeed, and we want employers of all kinds to hire on Indeed.

For our marketplace to be effective, we seek to connect employers with the most promising candidates. To discern which jobs will attract the right job seeker, our systems look at several criteria for a job. We’ve based these factors on an extensive understanding of what job seekers are looking for in a job and what helps employers find the most promising candidates:

• Relevance: Jobs should have complete and accurate information that’s relevant for the job seeker. Job seekers look for a detailed job description with accurate information about the job’s requirements, expectations and key attributes like title, salary, work location and schedule requirements.
• Likelihood to hire: We want to match job seekers with opportunities that have a high likelihood to result in a hire. Our marketplace considers multiple traits that indicate a successful hire will be made, such as the number of applications the job already received, how long it’s been open and whether a job seeker meets the skills and qualifications required to be successful in that role. 
• Uniqueness: Job seekers want to see distinct opportunities that help them understand what they’re applying for. They can perceive content that is very similar or repeated as spam and that discourages job seekers from engaging with the platform on a recurring basis.
• Engagement: It’s important that employers show they're actively hiring and are likely to respond to job seekers. Some ways to show engagement include ensuring jobs are up to date, responding to candidates quickly and meeting our community guidelines.
• Pay for performance: Sponsored Jobs stay visible longer than organic jobs and receive 2.1x more candidates who start applications.³ Therefore, Sponsored Jobs help employers who need to hire quickly achieve better outcomes. When you sponsor your jobs, you’ll increase your visibility in the search results and place your posts in front of active job seekers longer, reaching the right candidates, faster. Strongly budgeting jobs signal that you're actively hiring and engaged, so we prioritize them in search results.

What Does This Mean for Agencies?

We are always striving to improve outcomes in the marketplace for job seekers and employers to make a more fair and balanced marketplace and further align with our “pay for performance” value. 

In support of those goals, we’re working on additional initiatives that impact staffing and recruitment agencies. To bring parity between agencies and employers, we’re limiting the volume of calls to the Sponsored Jobs API.

We encourage employers to partner with their Indeed account managers to explore opportunities to invest in jobs that don’t organically receive adequate reach and applicant volume.

Building Up Local Market Expertise

To grow the best job site in the world, we require a team of highly qualified professionals who know their market inside and out. For every Indeed site we’ve launched around the world, we’ve hired people who understand the market and tailor each site to local needs, with the goal of making Indeed the most relevant job site for people everywhere.

Delivering relevant results with contextual translation

To ensure job seekers and employers everywhere are able to use Indeed, our teams use a three-step translation process: they begin with a baseline translation, which they then send to a professional translator and, ultimately, team managers verify the translations for each market.

Text plays a critical component in using Indeed, and we know that contextual translations help international users find the most relevant jobs. We developed this approach to ensure that we support cultural differences and local needs with the most accurate and contextual translations.

Designing the job search experience for every location

Indeed works the same for job seekers everywhere. No matter where they are in the world, they simply search for the job they want to do and where they want to do it. But to make Indeed accessible to job seekers in markets outside the U.S., we have to keep location-based needs in mind. Take our evolution of Indeed Apply, for example.

We created Indeed Apply to allow people to apply for jobs from any mobile device in one click using their resumes. But employers in countries outside the U.S. often require additional documents, such as transcripts or certifications.

We analyzed what would happen if we enabled people to include multiple attachments on a job application and estimated that it would increase the number of mobile applications. We routinely run these kinds of analyses to hone the improvements that will make Indeed more accessible to job seekers everywhere.

By taking the needs of both job seekers and employers into consideration, we can have a significant impact on the hiring journey all over the world.

Looking to expand your talent pool? Contact your account manager to learn how Indeed can help. And learn more about how strategically sponsoring your jobs can help their performance on Indeed.

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Sources

¹Indeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts that have a unique, verified email address

²Comscore, Total Visits, March 2024

³Indeed data, U.S. average, based on hires reported by job seekers on Indeed September - November 2022