Indeed: Just How Good Are Indeed For Finding Candidates?

A guide as to how Indeed can help with your recruitment requirements.

You can take any statistic which measures a job-boards success and more often than not - Indeed will be at the pinnacle.

They continue to dominate the job-board market across a host of different countries, ranging from the significant presence that they have in America - all the way to where their holding company (Recruit Holdings Co Ltd) are based in Japan.

Within the UK market, they have come up against stiff competition from the likes of CV-Library, Totaljobs and Reed. However, you can only really argue that LinkedIn match them in terms of marketing, candidate attraction and technological innovation. These two platforms have been battling it over the past few years, and despite working quite differently from a user standpoint, both are incredibly effective in their own right.

What kind of free content do they offer?

Where Indeed have mainly found success is by offering free job postings to all businesses across the country - both large and small. This provides a great entry point for clients to see the effectiveness of their product at first hand before deciding to opt for their paid-for sponsored advertising.

The turnover of posting a free advert with Indeed is usually relatively quick and you can do it via their site on the following page.

How do their job adverts perform?

The good news for Indeed is that even with such a high volume of job postings, they still continue to pull through an industry-leading application ratio for their job postings.

The reason for this is because they attract a phenomenal 300m candidate visits every month (Totaljobs receive 12m as a comparison). It’s a seriously high number of visits and it truly pays homage to their aggressive and innovative marketing which you can seemingly never seem to get away from. They feature on prime-time slots on the the television, YouTube and radio channels - the scale of marketing is relentless - and it works to great effect.

It's for this reason that Indeed have established themselves as one of the most effective recruitment tools in the world. Like most other job-boards, they host vacancies from all sectors and salary-levels. However, they do tend to attract both lower and mid-level candidates - as oppose to more executive-level candidates. This type of candidate usually gravitates toward the likes of LinkedIn, The Guardian & sector specific sites.

Generally speaking, the sectors that Indeed particularly excel in are the following (mostly sub-£50k roles too):

• Admin

• Construction

• Driving

• Healthcare

• Retail

Is it worth sponsoring an advert with Indeed?

The main advantage to using their sponsored advertising is that your job will stay highly visible at the top of the listings, which increases your chances of hiring your next employee. This is because your job is attracting more candidate clicks. The rates for their sponsored advertising can be quite steep, sometimes even thousands of pounds a month, which can be prohibitive for many agencies and SME’s.

If you do have the spend available, it’s definitely worth looking at sponsoring your adverts though and it's highly recommended for roles that you want to fill fast. After all the initial fee for the advert will soon may become quite redundant once you're placement fee lands.

What makes Indeed unique to other job-boards?

A feature which is highly-rated with Indeed is the candidate messaging facility. It works quite a lot better than the standard phone-call and email combination that many of the other job-boards provide, as it simply provides a third method of contact which usually pulls through a better response rate from candidates.

How does their candidate database work?

Clients using Indeed will have access to one of the furthest reaching candidate databases in the world, so naturally they have made the platform very easy to use with a number of helpful features included. One of which is when you purchase a CV download with them - if the candidate isn't interested - then you can be reimbursed for that credit too.

Where do Indeed excel?

• They attract a huge volume of site visits, which ultimately leads to more candidate registrations and applications.

• Over 225m candidate CV’s worldwide, the largest pool of active job-seekers by a long-way.

• Indeed offer a variety of packages ranging from free advertising options, to their premium sponsored listings.

What's holding them back?

• Not suitable for higher-level job types these candidates predominantly visit both sector specific sites and LinkedIn.

• A Trustpilot score of just 1.6 out of 5, mostly the negative feedback was in regard to the unexplained disabling of accounts.

• Sponsored pay-per-click advertising can quickly become expensive and it’s also difficult to control.

Indeed are fully integrated with the majority of ATS' and has a streamlined hiring process - with a clean and clear job-posting functionality, as well as the CV search system too. Typically, users do say that the job posts are the most effective way of making hires from Indeed due to the sheer volume of clicks and applications that they can pull in due to their huge candidate inflows.

Overall rating: 8/10

Indeed are a safe-investment for businesses of all shapes and sizes to assist with their hiring needs. The intuitive marketing campaigns have led to them consistently pulling through astronomical levels of candidate activity. They are known to be less effective for more senior job types, yet they remain a must-have tool for the vast majority of recruiters.

Please feel free to reach out either in the comment section below or via email to smartfind@outlook.com if you have any questions!