Indeed recently announced a major policy change impacting staffing and recruiting firms:
“…as of January 7, 2019, jobs sent to Indeed sites in the US and Canada from recruitment-based companies will no longer be eligible for inclusion in organic search results. They will, however, continue to be eligible for promotion as sponsored jobs.”
Translation?
Effective January 7, 2019, if you want your jobs to be on Indeed, you must be sponsoring your jobs on Indeed.
While many staffing and recruiting professionals are frustrated by this policy change, we really do owe a big “thank you” to Indeed. For nearly 15 years, Indeed has been a great source of traffic for staffing jobs. And for most of this time, Indeed has provided no-cost, organic listing of your job posts on their website. They’ve never had any obligation to provide free candidate traffic to staffing firms, but they have done that for us for a very long time.
So now what?
Don’t panic! We’ve created an eBook to help you survive “Indeedmageddon” – and thrive in the coming post-apocalyptic recruitment landscape.
Today, I’m beginning a 7-part series of posts of strategies to help staffing and recruiting firms prepare for the loss of free job posts from Indeed. Each post is dedicated to a specific recruiting strategy your firm can use to attract, engage and convert more qualified job seekers:
Strategy 1: Job Advertising
Option 1: Pay to play
If Indeed is producing great results for you, you should look at the cost of continuing to get those results. This means talking to Indeed about what your monthly cost would be to sponsor all your jobs (or the most important jobs) each month. Before agreeing to any new contract, we recommend:
- Benchmarking your current results – spend, quantity of applications, cost per apply, quality.
- Determining where Indeed works for you…and where it does not.
- Developing a test plan – how much will you spend? How will you allocate the spend to your jobs?
- Testing and reinvesting – look at your analytics and reallocate funds to make better decisions.
Last, but not least, when entering into a new agreement with Indeed or any job advertising partner, make sure you are not locking yourself into a long-term commitment. Your recruiting needs change, and you need flexibility in your spending. Agreements should be structured so that you’re locking in the rate you pay for a year, but the amount you spend each month can vary.
Option 2: Expand or vary your job advertising
This is probably an ideal time to test other job sites. There are thousands of other job boards and job aggregators beyond Indeed. Some will take your jobs for free. Others charge you per post. And many work on a pay-for-performance basis – where you pay a cost per click or cost per application.
Job sites to consider (and this is by no means an exhaustive list):
The big job boards
- ZipRecruiter – For the staffing industry, this has become the #2 job site, right after Indeed (and in some markets ZipRecruiter outperforms Indeed). With a massive budget for advertising and a well-designed user experience, ZipRecruiter should be on your shortlist of sites to test.
- CareerBuilder & Monster – The granddaddies of the job board industry, these two sites may be worth revisiting. CareerBuilder is in the middle of reinventing itself and Monster has made some big improvements since being acquired by Randstad. CareerBuilder offers individual job posts, job slot packages, and resume database access. Monster offers these same services plus pay for performance options. While you probably don’t want to jump right into a long-term contract, test job posts for different skill disciplines in your market to gauge the level of response and your cost per application.
- Glassdoor – Built as a review site for employers, Glassdoor has become a major player in the job board world focused primarily on full-time career opportunities. Glassdoor offers job advertising and employment branding services.
- Dice – Once the dominant site for IT jobs, Dice is still a major player for active IT job seekers. Dice offers job posting and resume database access services.
The social networks
- LinkedIn – if you’re in staffing or recruiting, you probably live on LinkedIn. It’s become the lifeblood of direct recruiting and business development. While LinkedIn offers a variety of services to help you directly source talent, it also functions as a job board, and LinkedIn allows you to purchase job slots or advertise jobs on a pay-per-click basis. It’s not cheap, but it allows you to target your jobs to the right job seekers.
- Facebook – the world’s largest social network has gotten serious about recruiting. Facebook jobs was launched nearly two years ago, and it allows you to post jobs for free. While the process of getting responses from candidates is still a little clunky (sorry no integration with your ATS here), Facebook does integrate with ZipRecruiter to streamline getting jobs on Facebook and the application process. We’ve seen great success using Facebook jobs for light industrial, clerical and healthcare positions.
Wholesale job aggregators
These are companies that sell candidate traffic to sites like the big job boards.
- Upward.net, Neuvoo & Lensa – These job aggregators used to only sell their services to the big guys, but now you can buy direct, often at a lower cost per click than the big job boards.
Neuvoo has partnered with Haley Marketing, and pulls all of the jobs we manage through our our 600+ career sites into Neuvoo at no cost to our clients. Sponsoring your jobs on this site will get your jobs more visibility and more candidates applying.
Smaller job sites and job aggregators
There are literally tens of thousands of local, niche and smaller job boards and job aggregators. Many will take your jobs for free. Examples of these sites include:
- Job aggregators such as Careerjet, Jooble, Juju, Nexxt, Post Jobs Free, Talroo, Zippia and the aggregator we’ve created for the staffing industry, JobFuel.
- Local job boards such as Craigslist, local community newspaper sites, and local chambers of commerce and professional association sites with job boards.
- Niche job boards that focus on specific skill disciplines like design, engineering, finance, healthcare, IT, sales, truck drivers and more.
- Job boards specifically for freelance and part-time jobs like FlexJobs, Upwork and Snagajob.
- Talent community websites that allow job posts such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, engineering.com and TravelNursing.org.
Option 3: Get smarter about how you manage your recruitment advertising
Are you familiar with programmatic job advertising? It’s about using software to help you:
- Determine where to post your jobs.
- Decide how much to spend.
- Better match your spending to your recruiting needs.
Programmatic uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to make better decisions and serve advertisements to the people who are most likely to engage with the content. It’s like having a stop button on your advertising letting you:
- Turn off your spending when a daily, weekly or monthly budget is hit.
- Turn off spending on specific jobs once you have enough applications.
- Avoid budget killing jobs that receive a high-number of clicks and zero applications.
- Shift spending to the jobs that need it most.
- Determine which job sites are giving the greatest quantity and highest quality candidates.
Did you know that Haley Marketing just added a new BOOST feature to our job board that allows you to push individual jobs to a programmatic distribution engine? Login to your myHaley account to learn more about BOOST or contact our Success Team.
Up Next: Optimizing Your Career Site and ATS
In my next post, I’ll share ideas to plug the leaks in your website, mine your ATS for talent, improve your referral program and more. But if you don’t want to wait for the post to publish, you can download the full, FREE eBook: “Indeedmageddon? Strategies to help staffing and recruiting firms prepare for the loss of free job posts” here.
