In the April 2, 2014 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, a reader asks me to stop dissing job boards:

You claim that job boards don’t work. Yet virtually every job in the world is advertised on job boards, and employers use job boards all the time! Just look at all the traffic they get. I think you’re missing the boat — please admit that there’s plenty of evidence the job boards do work!

Nick’s Reply

Here’s the problem with job boards today: None of them offer any evidence that they work.

What does it mean that “they work?” It means they actually match people with jobs. You know: find jobs for people and find people for jobs.

Indeed-infographicAbout.com says, “The best sites for finding job listings in 2014 will help you find the most current job openings fast” (about.com). Finding job listings is one thing. But if job boards actually work, they should be able to show they are the cause of hires. They claim they are, but they offer no evidence.

Let’s look at Indeed.com, which is referred to as “arguably (and probably) the largest job search engine” (DigitalTrends).

On March 27, 2014, Indeed published an article and infographic titled “How 140 Million Unique Visitors Use Indeed to Find Jobs.”

On its face, the title seems clear — it’s going to tell you how people found jobs using Indeed. But the infographic shows nothing of the sort. In fact, contrary to the misleading title, the graphic seems to be very careful not to claim Indeed actually fills jobs. Let’s look at the data presented in that infographic (click here to follow along). It tells us everything except whether Indeed works:

1. 140 Million unique visitors each month. So what? What does tracking unique visitors have to do with actually filling jobs? All this tells us is that lots of people go there.

2. “Traffic on Indeed has increased by 40% over the past year.” Again, so what?

3. “Each month, 72% of online job seekers in the US visit Indeed.” But, how many get jobs there? There’s no mention of that. I’m still waiting for how all those people use Indeed to actually find jobs.

4. “There are 25 million resumes on Indeed that employers search for free.” Those employers could be printing resumes to line bird cages. Where are the stats on how many people they hired? All this statistic tells us is that employers might be stupid. Judging from the rising complaints about “a talent shortage” from employers, it seems “free” is worthless. And employers are indeed sometimes stupid.

5. “Job seekers use the 4 million employer reviews to research companies.” So what? They use Google to do the same. Does Google claim it fills jobs? Do we see a trend here? Lots of data showing big numbers, which seem impressive by themselves — but no outcomes analysis.

6. “45% of Indeed searches come from mobile.” Yah, so? Every marketing program today includes the obligatory reference to “mobile.” But how many of those searches yield hires?

7. There are 16 million jobs on Indeed worldwide, and 8.2 added per second. But how many are filled by people searching for jobs on Indeed?

8. Indeed is available in 50+ countries in 28 languages. Perhaps translators are getting jobs. What are the success rates by country?

The infographic slams us with impressive statistics about web traffic, numbers of job postings and resumes, percentages of job seekers that visit — all kinds of data. Indeed concludes that “More people find jobs on Indeed than anywhere else.” After scanning the clever infographic, you probably believe it.

Well, I don’t. I think it’s all b.s. All I see is that lots of people find job listings on Indeed. (Oops, could that be what Indeed really means?)

In the midst of all this promotional “info” there is not one shred of data that tells us how many people actually got jobs on Indeed, or how many jobs employers filled on Indeed. “People find jobs on Indeed” clearly means they found job listings in Indeed. So what?

The infographic is bogus. Those numbers do not indicate success rates. It’s classic deception by distraction that convinces people to keep patronizing job boards.

My challenge to job boards

I challenge Indeed.com, and every other job board: Show us your job fill rates and the success rates of job seekers who use the service, and point us to your data. Indeed’s revenues are not public, but they must be staggering. The company clearly spends a lot on advertising and promotion. You’d think that if Indeed had a shred of evidence that its service actually works, it would be prominently displayed in the infographic.

Why isn’t it?

I can’t find one word about Indeed’s success metrics on its website. Can you? Indeed features an “Engineering Blog” on its site — posts about database technology — but nothing about outcomes analysis or success metrics.

My guess is that Indeed’s dirty little secret is that human resources departments dump billions of dollars into an empty hole, and that nobody really cares how many jobs Indeed (or any job board) actually fills — as long as the cash keeps rolling in.

The job boards “show us the money” because they’re making it hand over fist. But they don’t show us results.

My challenge to employers:

I’ll make a second challenge to employers: Pay a job board only after you make a hire through that board. Suddenly, job boards will be able to accurately track who got hired from where. And you’ll know where your money is going. (This is no different from this challenge to job boards that charge job seekers.)

Funny thing

Every job board executive I’ve ever talked to claims that “there’s just no way we can track actual hires — it’s too complicated.” Gimme a break. Web analytics is rocket science today — we can track virtually everything you do online — and there’s no way to figure out whether a job board was the cause of a job being filled? Wouldn’t the very best job service be designed to ensure it gathers the necessary data to prove it works? I mean, what are all those “data scientists” for, anyway?

I think the truth is simpler: Indeed.com and most of the other job boards (the bigger, the worse) use deceptive marketing tactics to imply bogus benefits. Certainly, they fill some jobs, but just because millions of people gamble doesn’t mean enough of them win to justify the practice. All it means is that the house wins.

While you keep job hunting, you generate more visits to Indeed.com, which yields dramatic increases in “the data” — and in the number of suckers born every minute.

Do job boards work? I’d love to hear from employers who actually know where their hires came from. Did you get a job through Indeed? What’s your best source of hires — or jobs?

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334 Comments
  1. Bravo, Nick. Indeed.com’s stats in no way back up their claims of being effective for job hunters or employers — they’re web traffic stats and nothing more. Web traffic has value, certainly — but it’s no indication of the type of success that job seekers and employers are looking for.

    Job seekers who want to use online job postings (and I know you might argue against it altogether, pushing people to use their networks instead, but I think they have a place for junior and mid-level people) are far better served by using niche job boards that target specific fields.

    • I totally agree! I have been using Indeed for six years now and never have I gotten a call from it. And the scary thing is it is other sites too.

      • Indeed will post fake jobs and when you apply for such a just they used my resume data and sent me job postings that I am not interested in. It is just a big Phishing & Data baiting — SCAM. Yes, I said a SCAM.
        They suck!!

        Below is my communication to Indeed.

        “To Mr. Hisayuki Idekoba and the Entire Legal Department & IT Security:

        I am writing to you to formerly request that you please destroy all of my contact information as well as my resume. The reasons are outlined as follows:

        I applied for a position via Indeed.com. I had a bad gut feeling about submitting via Indeed.com due o the problems with so multiple data breaches at so many major companies. After thinking about putting my resume out on Indeed.com, I became even more concerned. After I applied for the position, I went directly to the company site to ensure that the position I applied for via Indeed was an actual position on their site. Well, it was NOT posted on their site. I proceeded to call the company and confirmed the position did not exist. Once again, the position does NOT exist!!! It is my opinion that Indeed is just data baiting by fraudulently posting a non-existing job! It is my opinion that your actions are equivalent to and Internet crime by fraudulantly baiting and or phishing the public.

        My second issue is Indeed’s complete lack of customer service. You treat the public like we are stupid by not allowing a job seeker to speak to anyone at the number (1-800-475-4361) listed on your site. If you are a legitimate company with nothing to hide, why can’t the public call and speak to a representative, your legal department, your compliance department, your IT security department? This is s a legitimate question. I want you to know that that public is not stupid and you will loose customers.

        I contacted Indeed via telephone number (1-800-475-4361 and @ 512-664-9300). Unfortunately if you are a job seeker, you are instructed to leave a message, which is NEVER answered. I wanted to talked to a live person, so just by chance I pressed 2 to see if I could reach a real person and I did. You see we are not stupid. I informed the person who answered that I felt that my data was highjacked by Indeed.com by posting a fake job. I told the rep that I wanted to talk to either the Legal Department or someone in their IT Security, because I want my data back! I was totally baited!!! The rep stated that I could not talk to anyone, but I could write to their Legal Department. I asked for a name and was informed that this is information she does not have and obviously refused to divulge. I also asked to talk to their head of IT Security, she did not have that either. That is such complete bologna. I told her that I understood that she is instructed not to give that information, but my point once again. If you are a legitimate company, this should not be a secret. I informed her that I wanted there to be a record of my complaint and if she could provide me a tracking number of some sort. No was the response once again. Really!

        I called the next day again to ensure that the information that I was given by the Indeed rep. was correct. I asked for the names of the legal department, IT Security as well as for a name and number of the compliance department. I was told that he did not have that information and could not give out that information and do not have a compliance department. Really!!!!

        I was given the following address to send a complaint.

        Indeed Inc
        Attn: Legal Dept.
        6433 Champion Grandview Way
        Building one
        Austin, TX 78750

        I did tell the rep that I wanted for him to send a copy of my complaint to someone and he was very, very hesitant and said that once I ask for legal he could not do anything. Give me a break.

        In addition, I want you to ensure me that you are not selling my data to other companies or your subsidiaries. I WANT MY DATA BACK —I WANT YOU TO COMPLETELY DELETE MY DATA. JUST LIKE HILLARY, SCRUB IT OUR OF YOUR SYSTEM.

        I am also formerly requesting that you please respond to my request.

        • You got that right on the nose. Fake Fake and False!

      • I have been trying to get a job for months. You wanna get experience but none of these employers want to take the chance to help you gain experience just by hiring you.

        • You’ve hit it directly on the head: employers don’t want to take the ‘chance’ of paying someone without experience to learn a job that they may not be successful at. Especially if experience does not remain focused in a specific area.

          • Even if you have experience employers always low ball workers

    • IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, INDEED FAILS TO WORK BECAUSE IT FAILS AT ITS MOST ELEMENTAL DUTY: TO LIST JOBS BY A CERTAIN SPECIFIC DESCRIPTION AND LOCATION. IF I SEARCH ON INDEED. COM FOR A JOB, E.G., PLASTIC SURGEON IN WEST ASS CRACK, IL, IT WILL GIVE ME JOB LISTINGS WHICH CONTAIN ANY OF THE WORDS IN MY JOB DESCRIPTION OR LOCATION. THIS WORSE THAN USELESS. I RECENTLY LOOKED FOR A JOB IN MINNEAPOLIS, FOR A CUSTOMS BROKER, AND I GOT JOB LISTINGS THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS FIELD OF WORK, BUT DID HAVE ONE OR TWO WORDS THAT MATCHED. AS FOR LOCATION, INDEED SPITS OUT LOCATIONS WHEN I PUT IN MINNEAPOLIS AS FAR AWAY AS DULUTH FOR GOD’S SAKE! SOMEONE AT INDEED.COM NEEDS TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE THEIR SEARCH ENGINE A LOT MORE “CHOOSEY”.

      • Jamie: That’s the “intelligent semantic processing feature” at work.

      • Indeed uses a boolean search. If you put quotes around your search, it will only populate jobs that match exactly what you’re searching. If you don’t know boolean, they also offer a step by step process to this using their “Advanced Search” link on the main page…. I have no complaints.

        • Did you ever find a job through indeed

          • This article is weird. I’ve gotten most of my jobs off Indeed. Solely applying from Indeed’s app and no other place.

            My only complaint is that their app is fairly often confusing (which is how I ended up here, searching for a page I found once an lost immediately).

            Also, yeah Indeed giving stats for hires WOULD actually be pretty difficult considering they use a self-reporting method and people (including me) just never check the box that says “I got the job” and I assume they use the same self-reporting method for employers.

            Just my take on it.

            • @Jenna: Thanks for your post. If Indeed works for you that’s great. But generating stats on success rates is not such a big deal. If Indeed and other job boards that profit from user fees and advertising, not job-finding or hiring success, really wanted to do it, they could set their systems up accordingly.

              Web analytics is a sophisticated science. Adobe Systems, Google and IBM, for example, offer very pricey web analytics software that can cost a major corporation well over a $million for an annual subscription. It can essentially tell the company which side of their nose a website visitor is scratching while on the company’s website. If Indeed really wanted to track success rates, I have no doubt it could. But from what I’ve seen in over 20 years of watching these job-board services, their actual performance for employers and job seekers is nothing they’d ever want to disclose or promote. I believe what you claim, but comments from most tell us otherwise.

      • I think Indeed.com is a good place to look for jobs, but their search engine STINKS!! I I put in a job description of Engineer, with a location of Chaska, MN, a very specific search, it will send me just about EVERY engineer job no matter where the job is located, despite my putting a specific town name in. I contacted INDEED.COM, and they said I needed to narrow down the search another way, and my response was, why the F*CK do you have a city box on the search if your software can’t use it to find ONLY the job I am looking for ONLY in this specified town?!!!?

        • They make employers pay per click. It is a bidding game, so if employer has a big spend then their jobs go to the top of the search results. Click through to the 4th page and you will probably get better results from the non-payers. If you are a big payer you have people clicking on your jobs that are not qualified and then you have to pay for that.

    • I’m here on this page because I was searching for a way to make Indeed remove a false listing for our company! They allow people who are completely unrelated to the company post listings with inaccuracies. They’re telling people that WE have an opening when it’s basically every location EXCEPT ours and YOU CANNOT APPLY IN PERSON OR ON THE PHONE. AND THEY WONT REMOVE IT.

      • I have had exactly the same situation as Virginia – suddenly all these vacancies I have advertised on our own and other reputable websites months ago, appear on Indeed. It has been a nightmare to try and get any customer service from Indeed, who now claims they did not place the ads. Positions currently advertised by Indeed (falsely) have been filled – which is embarrassing for me as the candidates applying now believe positions are back on! In the meantime, I am receiving 150 emails from candidates through the Indeed website for positions I did not advertise. I decided a year ago not to use Indeed as the quality of CV’s from their website lacks information, sometimes just puling through 1 pager with virtually no detail, etc etc. If anyone from Indeed reads this, please contact me – or better yet – just remove all these positions you advertise, or allow someone else to advertise on my company’s behalf.

      • bravo

      • Please reply Nick – it seems like you nitpicked an infographic to get your point across and ignoring this comment does not help.

  2. I equate job boards with reading the want ads. Indeed is tracking reader stats not employment stats. Reader stats are great for selling advertising space and future want ads but do they really provide value to an employer or job candidate.

    Are those want ads just wasted space? Given the practice of folks posting false jobs for a variety of reasons I wonder how many of the jobs posted are real? When I see companies post the same job over and over again it demonstrates either high turnover or ‘trolling’ behavior in their organization. If the job turnover is high then how stable is the organization? If they are ‘trolling’ for job seekers, why?

    There are so many ways to skew data and imply results that don’t exist. Reading is not the same as understanding what it is you read. Advertising hopes you won’t use mental energy to understand or look beyond their hype … interpretation of the data.

    It they want a real outcomes then they need to treat the jobs as inventory and when a candidate is hired then it is considered sold. What you failed to mention is that often employers have a mandatory field on their applications where you must identify where the job applicant found the job. I wonder how many job candidates select Indeed? I wonder if this practice just keeps the churn churning?

    • If they are ‘trolling’ for job seekers, why?

      I’ve been trying to research this. While there are some valid reasons, (hiring freezes, seeing what’s out there, salary research, mandatory posting of internal-filled jobs, etc.) I have a theory.

      My theory is that by posting a lot of job listings it makes the company appear to be healthy and vibrant to Wall Street and investors.

      • Of course a company or hiring manager would NEVER ADMIT this.

        • Agreed. The economy is largely a Potemkin village.

  3. Kudos exponential, Nick. Well-done. There’s most certainly a difference between “finding” a job and actually LANDING one. I point out in my job-hunting seminars all the time that job boards are not only a waste of time for job seekers but that often the ads that are posted don’t even reflect real jobs. Companies want to repopulate their talent pools with fresh resumes to keep the database current – certainly helps those folks in HR keep THEIR jobs if they can point to regular responsibilities that need fulfilling – or they want to do data mining to get a sense of market salary expectations, frequently-used software programs (“Forty percent of our competitors are using Indesign now vs. QuarkXpress…”), or other pertinent information. I once had an interview where the first question was, “Tell us what’s wrong with our Web site and what trends you see in the industry.”). This would have been fine, but I wasn’t interviewing for a Web position. The question struck me as nothing more than an attempt to use the interview to gather information about what the company could do better, which pretty much told me the interview wasn’t serious and I had wasted my time. (They went with another candidate & I got the reject in record time, something that appeared to confirm my suspicion, although the fact that the hiring manager was reading the I interview questions from an HR-provided sheet of talking points also had a bit to do with it as well….)

    But bottom line: You’re absolutely right. It’s not about how many jobs are filled; it’s about how many suckers can be conned into paying money and generating stats showing “hits” to the site. Anything other than a fill percentage is irrelevant to a job seeker and further proof he or she is wasting their time chasing ads on the Web.

  4. I was just hired for a job I found on Monster. I agree that job boards are the equivalent of want ads, providing the postings but no added value. However, I would not have reached this company without the Monster posting. I would not expect much from the job boards but I would not exclude them from future job searches either.

  5. Hey Nick,
    I finally found out indeed existed only last month and posted my hard to fill all commissions insurance sales job there. I received 47 applications from which i conducted 6 interviews, made 6 offers and hired one great agent. From the 6 interviews I’d still like to land 2 people. Indeed gave me a great guy to help me with ad writing and budgeting. These results cost me $500 for 30 days. I respect your opinion very much but so far i like indeed.

    • David must work for indeed. Comission only – 47 applicants and 6 great people to hire??? Who are we kidding here.

    • Yeah right. I do not think this happened for real.

      • I’ve used Indeed for years and only gotten one interview from that site. It’s a complete waste of time. I don’t know if it’s entirely Indeed’s fault though. There are too many people in the job market due to the constant flow of people coming into our country looking for economic opportunities. When you apply on Indeed, there are likely hundreds or thousands of people applying for that same job. You have to apply in person and stand out to get that job or know someone, not use Indeed.

        • @Struggling: I don’t think there are too many people in the market. There are too many fake or expired job postings and inept “recruiters” doing screening all wrong and no one in HR overseeing any of it.

    • I can support what David is saying. I work for a company as a recruiter and I have gotten over 150 eligible applicants and I have had 30 or so come into my office to fill out an application in just the past 2 weeks. One of a few things could be happening. 1. You aren’t employable. 2. You don’t have the skill set the employer is looking for. 3. The employer isn’t following up on their post. You have to keep in mind, just because you post your resume or show interest in a job on indeed, the employer isn’t looking to fill a job solely from indeed. Many of us have a wide range of networks to look for applicants.

      • We use Indeed as well as other job boards to fill positions and are quite successful. One of the main problems WE are seeing with Indeed are a TON of no shows. The applicants actually respond with a date and time (date / time range provided) they would like to attend an interview and then they no show. Only 11 out of 43 scheduled interviews from Indeed actually showed up at last week’s recruiting effort. I don’t understand. I’m sure that 32 people didn’t ALL find a job in less than 1 week in the same area.

        • We have a high count of “no shows”, too. I think folks, using their mobile phones, get push notifications about a particular job, and simply press the “Apply” button without giving much thought to job requirements, location, etc. We call on their resume, they (not wanting to decline), accept the offer to come in for an interview, and simply don’t show. However, in defense of INDEED, we have made quite a number of hires from our postings.

          • I must say that there have been more than 60 people applying for my job offer and not even one showed up for an interview. This site is fake and they give a false impression of high traffic. I literally think that not more than 10% of applications came from existing people. Total scam to make you pay money under the false impression of a high traffic.

            • Interesting take, because job seekers believe many job ads are fake. I have seen some evidence of that. What better way to scam both employers and job seekers?

          • Well, also keep in mind that people aren’t usually ONLY applying to your company. Most often when people are looking for a job they’re looking at a lot of other places and if they get an interview at (I hate to say it) a better company or a callback with a good enough offer after setting up your interview they’re just going to go on about their lives and forget to cancel your interview.

            Let’s put it like this: the MAJORITY of employers aren’t going to call you to let you know the position has been filled they’re just going to ghost you. Why do employers expect any different from job seekers?

        • I jam having the same issue. No shows. However in past two months I have hired three people from indeed.

        • No shows after the the agreed date and time provided could also mean that the job seeker had some time to check out the reviews on the job that they will be interviewed for and they probably caught a lot of poor reviews or scams. On the other hand job seekers are also overwhelmed with so many job opportunities out there that sometimes in desperate moments they agree to a job interview only to reconsider later for various reasons such as the job might not be the most suitable job for them.

    • I can also believe what David is saying. In my experience, the ONLY type of roles I get call backs from when applying to Indeed are sales gigs. Sales jobs. Commission based jobs, or recruiters posing as legitimate companies.

    • I agree.

    • you made it work not indeed

  6. Nick,

    i work with a startup. So they do not have money to buy space on any job portal for job postings. Indeed provided me free job postings. with them I was able to close 15 positions in last 6 months. Some of them were hard to find skills. However I do go through each profile carefully. Give a call. Keep record of the interest of the candidate. So if something does not work out right now it sometimes works in future.

    Job postings is a medium. But we have to do hard work ourselves.

    • SOME employers. you are the exception and not the rule. DATA. THAT. PROVES. JOB. FILLING. SUCCESS. PLEASE.

      “but we have to do hard work ourselves” please take your brilliant assertion all the way up to our country’s labor department, I’m sure it’s totally revolutionary and never been heard before.

      • @Boot: “DATA. THAT. PROVES. JOB. FILLING. SUCCESS. PLEASE.”

        Yah, please. Anything else is marketing and suckering.

  7. As a contract software engineer, I have found the job boards useful.

    The usefulness is a bit limited, of course. Essentially *all* of the listings on Dice, Monster, et.al. in my niche are placed by job shops (contract agencies). I’ve landed three of the last five contracts I have had through job shops, although only 3 of those shops actually bothered to establish a long-term relationship with me. I’m currently “between contracts” and those 3 shops are getting me the most quality leads.

    Surely job shops find some value in the job boards, or they would not continue to pay for those services.

    Since I’m not particularly desperate, and I’m getting some income and keeping busy freelancing, I’m being fairly picky about clients and rates, so it may be a while before I land another contract. Plus, I kinda like working under my own paper, so the shops have their work cut out for them — they have to do better than I can.

    …which shouldn’t be too hard. While I’m a good programmer, I’m really not all that good at marketing. And, like I said, 3 of the last 5 contracts I’ve had have been through shops.

  8. I wanted to agree with Alison about niche job boards and how they work for hiring junior to mid level employees. I have received two jobs in my career from my industry’s job board, which helped me twice gain a foothold in new parts of the country where I did not have existing contacts. Once settled, I could leverage my network to find the next job. When I have been hiring, this job board has proven successful at attracting talent as well. Our institutional HR pages typically get clogged with submissions from applicants who are applying to every job in the organization; the industry board gives us targeted applicants.

    As for Indeed, I have wasted many hours searching through listings and applying to jobs without ever scoring one phone interview. However, I was recently contacted by a headhunter who found my resume on the site. We’ll see what happens – though at this point in my career I have mostly moved on from using boards myself and am in a proactive-contact mode for consulting positions.

  9. This January I obtained two jobs through Indeed, one temporary and the permanent one I have now.

  10. Overall, job boards work very well for me. I had my resume posted on monster.com for just a few weeks, and I was recruited and hired for a full time tenured position at GE at twice my prior pay rate.

    Now, I am in a phased retirement, but I still find temp contracts to work on. I found two lucrative contract positions on simplyhired.com. One of them actually found me and offered me a project the same way GE did.

    The real problem with job boards is that countless unthinking recruiters find my resume, don’t understand what they read, and then ring my phone off the wall regarding jobs that I am not well qualified for or do not wish to relocate to. I have been forced to route all incoming calls to my answering machine and to screen calls via caller ID.

    Also, simplyhired.com has more jobs posted for my engineering discipline than indeed.com ever does. I even ran a statistical comparison to test both of these leading “metasearch” engines, and indeed.com missed many postings that simplyhired.com found.

    The time required is nil if email alerts are properly set up. I spend about 5 minutes a day scanning my email alerts from indeed and simplyhired.

    I hope we never have to go back to the days before the power of computing!

    But, what do I know? I am in a niche profession with a shortage of qualified professionals, so my experience may be different that that of other jobseekers. Not bragging. No offense – it is what it is.

  11. How about this…
    EVERY EMPLOYER IS HIRING!

    I’m no longer surprised by the number of professionals that don’t have a clue where their next position is coming from.

    Been following you for years and I just believe what you have preached. NETWORK!

    GOD Bless

    Marc

  12. Congrats to you who have used the job boards successfully. I have been out of work for over 6 months (not long compared to many others). I have not had any luck. Most of the jobs listed that I am qualified for end up leading right to an agency. ALL of the agencies I have contacted that are in my area(and I have contacted many) say they have nothing but manufacturing jobs. I have ended up taking those assignments because I need the money. The pay is usually less than $1 over minimum wage. So again I say congrats if they worked out for you.

    • Suzie, this looks like the same ’80’s pump and dump economy much like the housing bubble where what appears from stats ONLY that the economy is booming but the actual job quality in pay and longevity doesn’t pan out.

      I was a graphic artist in Texas back then and noticed I kept getting low balled ($6/hr) by start-ups that I could see from the work orders weren’t pulling in enough to pay rent much less payroll. The owners lived very well. I would quit and find out a year later the startup went belly up. I worked for about 6 or so of these kinds of businesses. All gone and my resume worthless.

      Now at 57 I’m seeing in my “fast growing” 50K population central Texas touristy town 900 Indeed job postings, but most of my town’s businesses have no customers to show evidence of that amount of population much less to fill that many jobs, but they’re offering a minimum of $9/hr and up for low skilled labor.

      I’m beginning to see this as a kind of developer driven pump and dump based economy to get investors to buy into. When the truth about the economy pans out 5 years later those investors are left holding the bag much the same that happened with Eagle Ford Shale workers. There’s just empty buildings and out of work citizens left behind in those small rural towns and the guys at the top made out like bandits.

      • Hey Tim,
        I totally agree. I started using (being used) by Indeed lately, only to start seeing more and more spam send to my email address. I believe they make a lot of money selling personal info. I tried to delete my account and was told they would “process my request” without any confirmation.
        I made a huge mistake. Also I am getting offers about jobs I do not want. I saw they are based out of Ireland, and that’s never good news…

        • I rarely get spam, John. When I do it’s seasonal around when school starts or ends and then it goes away. I’ve been out of the job hunting market since 2003 so maybe the cause of your spam is when you make contact with your potential employer or afterward. I’ve never used a headhunter.

          I get more disturbing phone calls from marketers who use sophisticated voice detection algorithms to talk to me as if I’m speaking to a real person. Last month I had a sweet sounding elderly woman asking me to donate to a cancer research foundation, but I noticed a pattern of unnatural pauses after each sentence where I asked what day it was. The woman said they’re not authorized to give out that kind of information and I immediately hung up.

          Marketing is getting creepier and creepier the more technology advances. Where are all the people?! It’s the Twilight Zone!

        • Indeed is not based out of Ireland. Do some research before you post your “beliefs”. Indeed is based out of Austin, TX.

          • Indeeds’ address: 124 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
            Perhaps it is you who needs to research before posting!!
            It is a big company. Perhaps they operate from more than one place, after all I am English and live in England and would not want to be trying to find jobs on a site operating out of a place in America.
            Having said that, I have been registered on Indeed for over 10 years. in that time I have always been working, but am always looking for something better, but have never had any contact from anyone because of my registration on Indeed or for any of the jobs for which I have applied.
            The only time I am contacted with regards to a job offer is through my profile and details on LinkedIn

          • Indeed is based out of Toyko, Japan. They are owned by Recruit Co. Ltd. and make a bazillion yen per year. Also owned by Recruit are SimplyHired and Workopolis. Soon they will likely own all job search boards and engines.

          • one of its offices is in Dublin.

  13. In the careerXroads.com annual Sources of Hire survey for 2012 (the 2013 survey isn’t out yet), Indeed was identified as the source 5.2% of the time, Monster 2.1% and Careerbuilder 1.9%. They have a great business model don’t they? Job seekers go there not really expecting success.

    If you’re gong to use Indeed, I recommend going to the Advanced Job Search options and and select ‘Employer web sites only’. That way you avoid all the scams, fake ads and the other junk that is aimed at job seekers. Or just use linkup.com. It only searches company sites by default. Employer sites are the second largest source (and fastest growing) according to careerXroads.

  14. I found my present position on Career Builder. For some, that is the best way to find open positions. My son found a job by networking.
    Job boards are just a replacement for the newspaper want ad

  15. I love your suggestion. Pay the job board once you make a hire through that job board! That’s practical.

  16. I think it takes all methods to find a job these days. My approach is kind of geeked out. I distribute my time between the different lead sources according to the probability of success for each method.

    I have also found jobs by networking, but part of my network came from job boards – and websites like LinkedIn.

    And, although I am eternally grateful for the excellent professional recruiters that have helped me in the past, I will admit that I have been forced to block emails from some of the less competent recruiters who do things like shotgunning resumes, submitting resumes without permission, and stealing job leads.

  17. I disagree with your conclusion because I disagree with your premise. You state “What does it mean that “they work?” It means they actually match people with jobs. You know: find jobs for people and find people for jobs.” That is what you do. I view job boards as the modern version of the Classified Ads in the newspaper. In this role, they do work.

    Most of their claims are misleading or irrelevant, but so is most advertising.

    Their search capability and email notification makes it so easy, why would you not use them as one of the tools in your search?

  18. I think the point of this blog has always been where’s the best use of your time toward landing a key opportunity to move your career forward, whatever that means to different people.
    Job boards are one tool among many, people do find and land jobs through them, and as a recruiter I find people by boards, e.g. Indeed.
    But if you’re talking about serious career development and not tire kicking for a paycheck, the probability of landing meaningful building blocks in your career are about 80% through networking, 15% through recruiters (not mutually exclusive from the former) and the rest through other means which is where job boards fall. I wish I kept the reference for those stats, but I’ve been recruiting and job hunting for 10 years and I believe them. From what I see, job hunters flip the stats and spend 80% of their time or more where they have a 5% probability of success. and the job board’s chest pounding imply they are connected to the 80% probability side of the equation, encouraging people to lose a lot of valuable time messing with them.
    Which is what I think is the point of this particular discussion

  19. @Ben J:

    “Most of their claims are misleading or irrelevant, but so is most advertising.”

    That’s my point. The fact that most advertising is misleading is no excuse.

    “Their search capability and email notification makes it so easy, why would you not use them as one of the tools in your search?”

    Why is ease of use a criterion for using a tool? A hammer is very easy to use. I’ve never seen a good dentist use one.

    The point of my article is that, while job boards like Indeed (and Indeed is not alone) go to lengths to promote all sorts of statistics, none of the statistics are relevant to the quality of their product. I challenge the job boards to publish success rates, and I challenge employers to demand to see success rates. Otherwise, employers are throwing money in the dark.

  20. Nick after my wife was let go from her company, I turned her on to your blog and got her a couple of your downloads. She had not looked for a job in 9 years(Miss “Find A Job While You Have One”). Job boards were like the old newspaper want ads, we tracked her resumes and made contact with someone in the company and also networking as we could. The job she is taking is nice and during the interview The Director of Programs came in,hugged her and said “long time no see”. NETWORK PEOPLE!!! ps. my sister recommended her to a VP she used to work with to start the process.

  21. I am sure they could work better than they do. I have never had any luck with them. If they did work, we would not see the unemployment rates that we see, we would not see the skills shortages that we see or bad matches. There is a lot of information that could be used for strategy and workforce planning, but it is really just a bunch of hype and phooey. We are a nation of untapped talent and wasted potential and we can’t afford to be that way.

    • I think the “untapped talent” is not a fault of job boards, but companies that want Purple Unicorns and don’t want to invest in employees or any form of training. So many people have transferrable skills… but a company won’t even consider HOW they could fit a role.

      • @MissD: Point well taken. But it seems that companies’ unwillingness to train and invest in employees is significantly related to the kooky notion that if a company posts a job in enough places, the purple unicorn “is in there.”

        Employers have been brainwashed to believe they can buy the perfect talent “just in time.” So why invest in training, development, or ramp-up time? On the flip side of this problem we have companies that dump their hires when they “don’t need them any more.”

        I’m convinced the job boards enable really lousy management in this way. They also contribute greatly to the fallacy that there’s a skills shortage, because goofy employers really believe that if they can’t find instant, perfect talent, the problem is in the education system and with workers. They don’t stop to consider that as employers they’re failing the professional communities from which they need to recruit because they add virtually nothing to the skills pool. When employers take skills but don’t invest in creating better-skilled workers, they’re destroying the pool.

  22. “A hammer is very easy to use. I’ve never seen a good dentist use one.”

    The implication that a dentist never uses a hammer is somewhat funny. You didn’t even limit it to use in the dentist’s practice (as opposed to home handiwork — actually, I once saw a dentist use a hammer in his office to hang his framed diploma).

    But even so…

    The Navy dentist who extracted my impacted wisdom teeth (a bit over 4 decades ago) used one on me, along with a chisel, in order to break them up for easier extraction. Granted, it was a very specialized hammer & chisel.

  23. @Howard: Thanks for that! :-)

  24. Nick,

    Do a bit more research here. We have to distinguish between “opinion” and actual reality.

    http://blog.indeed.com/2014/03/31/new-research-indeed-provides-more-hires-than-any-other-external-source/

    Indeed has been named the #1 source of external hire for three years by multiple third party sources including Silkroad, iCIMS, and Newton Software. All this information is published on Indeed’s blog, and all this data is coming from third party sources.

    I found my job on Indeed.

    Thanks.

  25. I would also like to add to this list:
    1. ZipRecruiter
    2. Dice
    I encourage everyone to ADD http://www.disconnect.com onto your computer and add DuckDuckGo as a search engine. Both track all the third party data tracking that is so insanely prevalent right now. Especially if you are applying through LinkedIn. My hackles stand on end with the excessive third party tracking that is occurring.
    As Nick has repeatedly said time and again…work on your internal contacts, apply directly to the companies that are your best fit and be careful what you wish for when using these sites. Instead of using any of these sites, contact the local recruiters if you MUST use a recruiter to obtain your next position.
    Just my thoughts and opinion.

  26. I have to disagree.. I like Indeed and know a lot of other people that do too. I found my job on Indeed within a few weeks. My employer is a large internet company and I know they don’t waste money on sources that don’t produce results.

    So have these people:
    http://gotajob.indeed.com/

  27. You only looked at the facts to spin it your way, Nick. There is another side supporting Indeed’s ability to drive hires that you chose not to only ignore, but to deny.

    http://blog.indeed.com/2014/03/31/new-research-indeed-provides-more-hires-than-any-other-external-source/

    http://www.icims.com/blog/post/2012/08/23/Where-Do-You-Find-Your-Best-Candidates

  28. @Robert: I think it’s just as important to inspect the assumptions and numbers in those surveys.

    CareerXroads produces a survey similar to that from SilkRoad each year, and the results mirror one another. But once again, the numbers are very deceptive.

    Both studies break out “internal” and “external” hires. Yet, every position is required by law to be posted publicly. Thus, “internal” sources are merely another form of competition faced by job boards and other paid sources. Looked at that way, the “29% of external hires” delivered by Indeed is actually 29% of 41% of “all external hires.”

    (If you disagree that the distinction between “internal” and “external” is bogus, put yourself in the position of the job hunter. When pursuing position X, you face competition from all job seekers, not just “external” ones or those online.)

    Now we see that, according to the SilkRoad survey, Indeed.com actually delivers .29 X.41 or <12% of all hires -- far from the >30% Indeed shows on the graph you cite on Indeed’s own blog.

    The problem is, Indeed is a job listing aggregator — it scrapes jobs from all other job boards. Employers really have no way of telling where a job or applicant really came from — because Indeed isn’t telling them. This duplication of job postings corrupts the pool and the “results.”

    Now we’re arguing about how accurate <12% really is.

    I repeat my challenge to any job board: Start publishing your own data about hires through your system. Clearly, third parties cannot capture the data that a job board can about its own transactions. Doesn't it strike you as really odd that job boards don't track their own success rates?

  29. @Matt B: I’m not saying Indeed doesn’t fill jobs or that employers don’t use it. I’m saying it uses irrelevant marketing statistics to suggest how well it works, rather than actually gathering relevant data that reveal its success rates.

    Your statement about your employer is a bit of a tautology: You’re claiming Indeed produces good results because your employer would not waste money on a source of hires that doesn’t produce results. That’s like saying gambling is the best way to make money because so many people gamble – how could they all be wrong?

  30. I think if job boards work for you or not depends on: what industry you are in or trying to change careers and get in, what part of the country you live in, size of metro area, # of years experience and size of the business, etc. Some people have job skills that are in demand and live near metro areas where jobs exist; other people are not in that situation.

    Many businesses with no HR department or money for recruiting post on Craig’s List. Also for potential employees that do not have the magical number of years of experience and/or specific kinds of experience and/or degree in the right field… job boards will not help them secure a job. The problem is that most of this is in constant flux. I believe job boards only help select groups of people, not individuals looking for work.

    I also agree many businesses want to have new job applications on file in case some one quits, as the old ones are purged periodically. Job boards often advertise for jobs that do not exist or even combine various job titles.. into one description. Then the businesses categorize these applications… and break them down into specific job titles. Most people who apply for these jobs realize they are looking for perfect candidates: and these people do not exist. If they did exist they most likely would not need a job board to find their job!

  31. Headhunters and the occasional recruiter will find a person for a job. As far as finding a job for a person, only sports or talent agents can do with with any degree of success.

    In the tech / business / rest of the world, YOU are your own best agent. If you aren’t plugged into your network, highly outgoing, and so forth, you just will not be working in this economy.

    Speaking of lies & statistics: I saw a recent article in the Washington Post that stated that the unemployment rate was 7.3% but only 63% of Americans were in the labor force. This seems to mean that either 29.7% of the unemployed workforce doesn’t count, or the REAL rate of unemployment is closer to 37%.

  32. @L.T.: When you multiply fractions by one another, you know that funny things happen, right? I don’t think everyone does :-). I don’t think anyone told the marketing and public relations people what happens. I’m not sure that those who read marketing and P.R. materials get it, either. What a mess.

  33. I agree with those who compared Indeed, Monster, etc. to the old printed classified. In one aspect online job boards are better because they are searchable. Determining success rates would be difficult without some kind of manual survey just as it would have been with printed classifieds.

    LinkedIn might be the exception though. They could compare members’ ad responses with a members’ profiles to see if a company applied to actually shows up in that member’s profile. I wonder if they have that data and choose not share the results.

    Finally, I have one interesting story. I once networked with a hiring manager at a company that I was interested in and that I knew had a potential opening I was qualified for. They had not posted it yet. I kept in contact with the hiring manager on a consistent basis for six months (including a lunch). When they were ready to hire for the position, the hiring manager never let me know. Instead, I found out about the job opening on Monster. I ended up getting the job no doubt thanks to my networking.

  34. If Indeed (and I assume Monster, etc.) cannot identify how many of their posted jobs result in hires, how can any statistics on Internet as a source of job hires be accurate? Many job coaches quote varying percents for Internet job hires and the funny thing is that they all use different percents. Makes me wonder how accurate any of these percents are. If Internet percents are wrong, then logically successful Networking percents and recruiters percents must also be wrong. While I believe Networking and recruiters are great avenues, I also believe the job boards are. Both of my last 2 jobs were obtained through Monster.com ads. Yes, Networking and recruiters got me to interviews but it was through the Internet postings that I received the job offers.

  35. I concur with Linda. I have had good results with resumes submitted to jobs posted by recruiters on the job boards.

    The recruiters were well networked, and I found them on the web. And, most of them continued to work with me even if I was not a fit for the first specific job that I applied to.

    What defines a network anyway? I really don’t see any other working method for a niche career like mine with only 2 Schools in the entire USA graduating qualified engineers in my discipline.

    On any given day, there are around 500 jobs open – all over the USA. The real issue becomes one of relocation more than available leads or job offers.

  36. @Ken: “…the old printed classified. In one aspect online job boards are better because they are searchable.”

    I’m not sure about this logic. I don’t see how searchability makes job postings better. Classified print ads worked much better than job boards for two simple reasons that are lost on both employers and job seekers. (But recruitment advertising companies understand this and love it.)

    1. Print classifieds cost more.
    2. Print classifieds delivered fewer applicants.

    Please think about that. I’ll post the logic, but I’m curious to see what others think first.

  37. To those who have had success getting jobs through job boards, more power to you. In a column the other day, Paul Krugman at the NY Times discussed the big straw man in the jobs debate: “the talent shortage.”
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/krugman-jobs-and-skills-and-zombies.html

    Evidence is pretty clear that there is no overall talent shortage. One point he failed to make is that, given the glut of talent, the job boards should be filling jobs at an incredibly high clip — if they actually work. But they’re not. The point of my column is that no matter what the anecdotal evidence is, the job boards do not publish their success rates. The state of the job market begs for such information Why don’t they publish it?

    I’m a skeptic, and based on available information, I think it’s because their success rates suck. One legitimate test would be for employers to pay job boards only when jobs are filled. Unlike the old print classifieds, online and database technology make it possible to track placements, and this can raise the efficiency of the entire recruitment system. Why isn’t this being done?

    (I think the answer is simple. It’s in the job boards’ revenue model. They don’t need to fill jobs to make money. So they don’t bother measuring success rates. Employers are content to keep paying for a benefit no one will measure. Why indeed would the job boards measure it, if the customer doesn’t care? Is there a board of directors at some company out there reading this? Do you know where your HR budget is tonight?)

  38. Talent shortage? We are turning out an incredible generation of talented, worldly, socially conscious, and capable of young people from our universities every year..and companies complain they can’t find talent?

    Maybe you will have to put your managers on the hook for doing the most important job in your company…HIRETAIN…..

  39. My question, how do job boards know if an employer moves forward with a hire without them reporting that back to the boards? Source coding is something that is common place and can be found in a lot of the URLs for jobs that I apply to (i.e. &src= ) so I’m sure they know I clicked on the job from CareerBuilder or Indeed.

    • They don’t. Unless the applicant or the company goes back and fills in the data, which they probably don’t.

      • @MssD: You’re putting this on the job applicant. It’s the company and job board that would benefit from knowing the actual source of the hire. Neither party tracks this because — I suspect from years of observation — the success rates of job boards suck. They don’t WANT to report it.

        Case in point: For an article I was doing for PBS NewsHour, in interviewed CareerBuilder. They told me their data show that 57% of jobs are filled via CB. I asked to see the data. They declined. Duh?

        Erik makes a key point. If employers and job boards wanted to track sources of hires, the technology and processes are virtually no-brainers.

        I think it’s great you find jobs via job boards. But most disagree that the boards are a good or reliable source of jobs.

  40. Please note: I’m not questioning whether people find jobs via Indeed. Of course they do. My comments about Indeed pertain to its status as the preeminent job board and “source of hires.” The “articles” Indeed has posted (e.g., link in Ben S’s comment) don’t stand up on closer inspection. And I stand by my critique of Indeed’s infographic — it’s bogus because it does not offer any data about success rates. Anecdotal evidence is nice, but it’s not data. The “list” of people who “got a job” offered by Ben S. omits people’s names. Sorry, but that’s the oldest “tesimonial” trick in the book.

    Again, I’m sure people find jobs via Indeed. My beef is with the lack of data to describe how this leading job board actually performs. Don’t HR managers want data?

    As Erik points out, there are ways Indeed could accurately track hires through the site. It’s already got ID information from the job seeker, the employer, about the job posting and about the applicant’s data record.

    It’s troubling that Indeed’s advertising relies on third party “analysis” of how well it performs. While independent analysis can be a good thing, the available analysis is published by companies that rely on data flow from Indeed to run their own businesses — so it behooves the likes of SilkRoad to encourage employers and job seekers to use Indeed and other online job boards. But inspection of the data suggests the success rates are nowhere near what’s claimed for Indeed. SilkRoad, for example, doesn’t describe its data set in any detail. How do we know whether the companies polled are employers, contracting companies, or employment agencies?

    My criticism of the company is that it offers no objective way to measure success rates in hiring and getting jobs, and that it publishes questionable “marketing content” that tells us virtually nothing. If employers don’t really care what they’re throwing money at, it’s up to them. But the bogus-ness is showing.

    • A few points to look at:

      -Tracking hires is very easy for nearly all Applicant Tracking Systems. Indeed also has the ability to set up automated tracking so when source reports are run they will show the exact number of hires made as a result of applicants who started their job search on Indeed.

      -Seems like you are backtracking somewhat. In your article you dare Indeed to provide source of hire data, they then do and your argument turns to the number of hires is not large enough.

      -Indeed’s main role for employers is to deliver qualified applicant flow — essentially lead generation. The website has no control if a candidate who is a perfect fit on paper does not end up taking the job for whatever reason. Very similar to marketing leads for sales departments, the only thing Indeed can worry about is delivering qualified applications for an employer’s opening.

      -Ask 10 Talent Acquisition Directors who have Applicant Tracking Systems what their top 3 sources of hire were for the past year. If I were a betting man I would guess at least 8/10 have Indeed in that list.

  41. Nick, the “information” presented in the info-graphic seems remarkably similar to sites trying to sell advertising by the eyeball. Who cares how we do what we say we do (video, information, jobs, porn) but we really do have unique visitors to our site.

  42. Nick, my reference to searchable was for job-seekers to find more relevant job postings. Also, many job boards, such as Indeed and Monster, also have alerts when relevant jobs are posted. BUT, this does not necessarily leads to more hires.

    I see online job boards has having warped the process though. Isn’t the objective to hire the right person for a job? (Right, by the way, could mean a lot of different things.) Companies believe job boards have made the process more efficient because they can automate the whole application process down to reviewing resumes. For a number of reasons, as you know, this reduces a company’s chance of find the right person for the job.

  43. This just in…

    “7.1 million “sigh-ups” for Obama Care (AHCA)yet the mandated health program is and continues to be a galactic financial disaster. About $635 million for a website that STILL pumps out “error” messages??

    “Sign-ups”…really? Since late last year they have refused to show actual documentation for the same reason the job board CEO Nick referred to said it was “too complicated” to keep track of it all.

    Complicated? Doesn’t pass the sniff test thus it’s B.S.!

    Not only did Obama Care shuffle money behind the scenes away from Medicare and other sources the “health/young” crowd needed to make Obama Care work has been avoiding signing up and if they did have not paid.

    Nonetheless, like job board marketers in their crafty infographics, you get Obama parading and declaring success on the White House lawn.

    The story is the same and as old as dirt…a sucker is born every minute. Remember the promise “you can keep your doctor”. How did that work out for millions of you??

    I love it how the “me, me, me” crowd posts “I found a job therefore job boards work” self serving “facts”.

    Riiiight…and if a few hundred are “cured” of cancer there is no risk of remission and the rest of use can’t be afflicted with this disease since others were “cured”???

    Clearly logic dictates that job boards may work for the minority but as our economy shows we are WELL BELOW average, much less full, employment in the USA while many employers whine about “lack of talent”.

    Job board metrics track and boast traffic, hits, impressions in the pursuit of advertising $$$. Follow the money folks.

    Actual hires are not formally tracked or proven…no evidence. Unless you call their “glory” page (“testimonials” from unaudited claims of new found jobs) “proof”. It’s all self serving like the “me, me, me” crowd that bows down to job board hype.

    Hang my career hopes on savvy job board marketing with the rest of the delusional Sheeple in America?

    NOT!

  44. I was just unexpectedly contacted via Indeed by a recruiter from a well-known specialty staffing agency who found my resume when looking to fill a short-term role. Although I was coincidentally already an established candidate with her agency, I was living in a different city than her region and therefore didn’t come up on her internal database. The job is a perfect match and exactly what I have been looking for. Although it’s a different city than I plan to work in permanently, I accepted since I can easily relocate temporarily, build my experience, and come back to my city of choice. It’s truly a dream job and I’m still stunned by the fact that a stranger just handed it to me. Coincidentally, by a few degrees of separation, the recruiter and I have worked in the same cities and same companies although at different times. That also helped build trust between us.

  45. @S: I’m very happy you’ve got a job you really want. But what I’m stunned about is that the company will pay a huge fee to a recruiter who failed miserably at his job. You were in his database, but his databases are not connected. He knows you but didn’t think of you. You’re a perfect match, but he blew it. He completely miss it all. I don’t see why he’s going to be paid a huge fee. As for the employer, it pays its HR staff big salaries to find people on job boards — why didn’t they find you and avoid the fee?

    Don’t misunderstand. I realize Indeed facilitated your hire. But only because highly paid people aren’t doing their jobs. Do you see the incredible irony and failure of this recruiting system? We’re talking about hens picking at the ground for a grain that fell out of a bucket. (No offense.) That a third party database in a very redundant recruiting system coughed up your resume when everyone failed to “see” you in front of their faces — that’s indeed a success, but only in the midst of an incredible failure.

    I really wish you the best. Where they found you won’t matter to you — but the board of directors at that company should be turning the HR department inside out to figure out what went so wrong.

  46. @Ken B: Points taken. The problem is that recruiting is now a numbers game. Employers really believe that more is better.

  47. @Nick: re your question re why print ads work better than job boards, I think it is because with the old print ads, human beings were actually reading the résumés and applications, and they were talking to people who telephoned them about the jobs. They had direct contact with prospective hires. That is how I got one of my first jobs post-college with a management consulting firm. There was an ad in the newspaper; I telephoned them, spoke with the office manager, who scheduled me for an interview, and I was hired. When managers are talking to job hunters, both get a sense of whether they can do the job. With job boards, though they are much cheaper and easier because they’re automated, no human being ever looks at the résumes, applications, and sales letters that arrive via their online portal. A computer screens them and decides, based upon arbitrary key words, age of the applicant, level of education, etc. whether any of them are worthy.

    The other problem with job boards is that they are very literal. Everything must match exactly, and often must be completed within a certain amount of time (or the system times out and you’re thrown out, have to start all over again). When a human being is reading the responses or talking with job hunters, key words don’t matter as much–I might be doing the same job/have the same skill that a company is looking for, but my current company calls it something different from what company F calls it. Responding to a print ad will let me get around this barrier; requiring me to apply online and fall down the rabbit hole will surely get me thrown out as unqualified.

    It is a screwy system, with both jobs going unfilled and job hunters still unemployed and/or underemployed. But don’t forget, it is all the fault of the job hunters because none of us have the skills employers want–there’s a talent shortage! Yeah, right.

    I haven’t tried the job boards. About 15 years ago I posted a résumé on Monster because I had been advised it was the hot new best thing in the world. The last four jobs I’ve gotten have all been through personal contacts.

    To those of you who found jobs through job boards, congratulations! That is wonderful news, and I’m glad that it worked for you. I’ve read the stats, and often find that flipping them helps give me perspective. When Monster and others claim that x number of people have found jobs through them, and they break down the percentage to something like 4%, flip it around. That means that 96% of those who went to the job board DIDN’T find jobs. I don’t understand why employers continue to use (pay for) job boards. It isn’t chump change, and wouldn’t it be a better use of their money to hire recruiters in-house to scout for talent?

  48. @marybeth

    “It is a screwy system, with both jobs going unfilled and job hunters still unemployed and/or underemployed. But don’t forget, it is all the fault of the job hunters because none of us have the skills employers want–there’s a talent shortage! Yeah, right.”

    I had gotten some actual feedback from an interview recently and the HR rep actually called…. *gasp*

    I agreed with the feedback (all was fair, IMHO). I am kicking around a few ideas of what to do to improve. I was thinking of taking a class or getting a certification to improve my skills that may be on the rusty side. But, even if I spent the hundreds (or thousands) to do this, will I ever see the ROI? Even when I have networked with a decision maker, sometimes you get the run around – “you don’t have enough real world experience….”

  49. I think the reason we see so many job postings with job descriptions that are impossible to fill is because many companies want to dodge lawsuits.

    If every single candidate can be “rejected” for not meeting the “job spec” then no one can file a discrimination lawsuit for not being hired.

    I also know of companies that have laid older experienced people off and paid them an “exit bonus” for signing a no lawsuit agreement. These same companies then re-wrote the job descriptions to include skills not yet possessed by the laid off employees and then hired new younger employees at lower salaries who ostensibly met some, but not all, of the new spec requirements.

    I am still not bitter yet. It is what it is. We could all be living in some third world developing economy run by a brutal dictator. I’m still grateful and feel blessed to live in this great nation.

  50. @Steve: I don’t know if the reason for seeing so many job descriptions that are impossible to fill is because employers fear lawsuits. If that were the case, they would never hire anyone.

    I think technology has made it very easy to pile on the specs, educational requirements, and experience. In the old days, when you were charged by the line or letter to place job ads in newspapers, you had to distill the job description down to the salient criteria you wanted the candidate to meet not only because that is what was necessary for the job, but because you had a budget, and you couldn’t go over it. The other reason is that back then, newspaper ads only reached certain groups–the locals, and if you advertised in bigger newspapers (NY Times, Boston Globe, etc.), then it was who could afford the subscription fees.

    Today, with the ease of online job boards, the internet, and your own company’s website, you don’t have those limits. It also means that anyone with access to a computer or smartphone can see your ad, so you’re reaching more people, but not necessarily your target audience. With a poor economy, many people who aren’t otherwise qualified will apply, thinking that online makes it easy, and with the click of a mouse my application is in. What this has also meant is that employers are getting more applicants, so screening is more important. If you don’t want to deal with older people, you can set up your ATS to eliminate anyone who has taken off the dates of their college graduations. Don’t want to bother with young kids? Make having a bachelor’s degree a job requirement, even if the job is sorting the mail or answering the phone.

    What I think happens is that whoever is writing these job descriptions isn’t thinking at all and they’re using the kitchen sink approach (throw whatever they can and hope that someone out there has the skills, education, and experience). I bet if they had to write descriptions for newspaper ads, it would force them to re-think the specs due to their budget. Listing 28 specs plus 3 degrees and 8 years progressive experience would be very expensive.

    The other thing going on is the job market itself. It is, and has been, an employer’s market for a while. There are more qualified applicants than there are jobs, so employers feel that they can ask for the moon and get it at bargain basement prices/salary. If/when the labor market shifts again, hopefully one that is more balanced between employers and job hunters, then I think (hope) that we’ll see more reasonable specs and expectations.

    The thing is that candidates often don’t know why they weren’t hired; the company could have decided not to fund the position and re-distribute the tasks to the remaining employees. They could have hired someone who was more experienced, met the educational requirements, had the skills. They could have hired someone who they considered to be a better “fit”. All that means is that they liked candidate A better than candidate B. Maybe the reason is due to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, pick your favorite one. Most employers today will never say “I didn’t hire you because I hate women and think they should be barefoot and pregnant and not taking away a job from a man”, or “I didn’t hire you because you’re too old, because you’re Jewish, because you’re black, because you’re Greek”.

    With any lawsuit like this, the burden is on the plaintiff (the person suing because he didn’t get the job) to prove that the reasons were because of discrimination against a protected class, and that is very, very, very difficult to prove.

    Sure, no employer wants to get sued, but I don’t think they worry about this as much as people think. I think it is more about being cheap (great idea to combine the specs for 3 jobs into one job and expect that there is someone out there who meets all of them–employer saves on salaries and benefits if he hires one person to do three jobs instead of three people to do three jobs) and laziness (just not thinking period when they’re writing the job descriptions).

    @Dave: yes, I know…I’ve gotten the run-around even when I’ve had others contact the decision maker and speak on my behalf…I’ve gotten shunted to HR and/or told that I am required to fill out the application online, then HR will decide (even though I’ve spoken with the hiring manager, met with him, he’s “interested”, etc.) the next step. Say what? If the hiring manager doesn’t want to tell HR “I’ve met with Dave and I’m hiring him. Please contact him so he can come in and fill out the paperwork”, then the system is screwy. Why is the hiring manager letting HR commandeer the process? HR doesn’t know what the hiring manager needs, so unless the candidate has a criminal record or there’s something that is suspect about him, HR shouldn’t be involved at all at this stage. I don’t know that I would even trust them with background checks, if the employer requires them. I’d trust the company’s attorney before I trust HR.

    I read Peter Capelli’s article and book, and one of the stories he tells is about the engineering firm that ran an ad for an engineering job (not a highly specialized job either). They received 25,000 applicants, and the company’s ATS decided that not a single one of them met the specs. That’s not being afraid of lawsuits, that’s just sheer stupidity. Assuming that only engineers with the requisite degrees and experience applied, it seems preposterous that not a single one of the 25,000 applicants was qualified. Why? How the job description was written, the specs, and the automated ATS combined to create a perfect storm, weeding out perfectly good candidates, almost perfect candidates (those who didn’t meet all of the specs, but who could be up to speed if trained and given time).

  51. @Nick: thanks for posting the link to Krugman’s NY Times article. I think he’s right. Zombie is a good word to describe it. Most of the people who commented on Krugman’s article described the same challenges many of us (posters on your blog) have been facing and recognize that the system is so hopeless broken that it is beyond repair.

  52. Someone in the World Future Society group on LinkedIn posted an interesting article link this afternoon.

    Inc. ties the “skills shortage” to a lack of good old fashioned apprenticeships.

    If you ask me, it is also closely tied to pay issues.

    I have worked with skilled trades professionals for over 32 years, so I do have an insider’s perspective, and I do sympathize with these folks.

    http://www.inc.com/magazine/201404/cait-murphy/skills-gap-in-the-labor-force.html

  53. @Steve: I think it absolutely has to do with the fact that business has all but eliminated apprenticeships. “Internships” have largely turned into free slave labor with little benefit to the slave. It’s so bad that interns are trying to unionize. In the trades, masters expect to train apprentices, and many enjoy it. In business, no one wants to be bothered. Today’s business culture does not reward apprenticeship, either for the master or the apprentice. I think it’s a huge reason American business is in such decline. People act like new employees can be cranked out of databases, ready to hit the ground running. “Schools should be producing them for us to hire.” It’s all B.S. Business needs to take ownership of training and developing new generations of workers if it wants to be successful. Thanks for posting — insights like yours are incredibly valuable.

  54. Nick and all –

    Many good points and much food for thought in this thread.

    For those who might be interested in how facts, statistics and numbers are or can be developed, and how what we read on the Internet (or elsewhere) may or may not be “true,” the following two books might prove instructive:

    How to Lie with Statistics by Huff

    Trust Me, I’m Lying by Holiday

    Of course not everyone who presents facts and figures is lying (many of us may be sincere but mistaken), but the above two books should give the reader reasons to be and ways to be more discerning . . . more careful in drawing conclusions.

  55. I don’t know about all jobs, but in my field (tech) and area (silicon Valley) the predominant location for contracts and many FTE jobs is online in a central location. I have gotten contracts as well as interviews through these.

    Also, please note that Dice and Monster are job boards. Indeed and Simply Hired are aggregators, not job boards – they pull from Dice, Monster, Yahoo!, Walmart Labs, Apple, Twitter, Yammer, Cisco, Facebook, Google, and many more.

  56. I really like the job boards, but not for the reasons you might think….or that the employers will like!

    And I hate to give away the secret but this can help people. Job postings on job boards can tell you a whole lot about the company that posts them.

    – Do you want to know which companies have a revolving door and are probably not good places to work? Check the job board for the posting (in your field) that keeps popping up every 6 months. Might want to avoid that company.

    Do you want to know who is just interviewing “for fun” and will run you through multiple interviews like a dog chasing a fake rabbit at the track? And there isn’t even a real job? Look for the same job posting every single month without fail. They aren’t really looking, they are “keeping busy” or “filling a quota” or “collecting resumes” for interviews and phone calls, but they don’t really have a job. Don’t waste your time!

    – Do you want to know who wants the impossible from you and will set you up to fail — if you take the job? Count the number of skills asked for in the job posting, especially when they are counter-intuitive or skills that are not usually present in one position. Then you know the employer is either clueless about your field or is a slave driver.

    – Do you want to know who has a rigid, worker unfriendly workplace? Look for job requirements like “work until the work is done” “seek perfection — and find it” (that one is a real quote!) or “be ready to give your all to succeed.” And, the company benefits say ” one week vacation time after one year!” Yeah, sounds like a great place to work, huh.

    Those examples are real folks. If you want to know about how a company is run, read those job postings. “That’s their HR department? No thanks” should be what you are thinking.

    Listen to Nick. He knows what he’s talking about. You get choose who you want to work for, and go from there. It’s worked for me for the last 15 years.

    Diana

  57. @Diana O: What a hot bunch of insights. Employers reveal a lot when they post a job. A bit of analysis goes a long way when judging them. Thanks for sharing your tips!

  58. @Diana O: Excellent ideas. I think sometimes we get so focused on the job hunt that it becomes easy to forget that the prospective employer should be courting us just as much as we should be courting him.

    Yes, you’re absolutely right about jobs that are posted every month, every six months, etc. I’ve seen more than a few like that at my old employer. In one dept., I know why the vacancies are there–it is a micky mouse dept. and they eat up and spit out employees. Some very good people have tried, gotten disgusted/frustrated/pissed and quit. There’s also been years and years with a lack of a director, so leadership was either non-existent or there were power struggles–either way, it isn’t pretty, and makes it very hard. Now, anytime I see an opening in that dept., I don’t bother–not because I couldn’t do the job, but because I’d have to be nuts to want to be in that dept.

    There’s a radio commercial on one of the local stations that sets up the ad with a voice on an office/employer intercom: “Attention employees: the new jobs have been posted online. If you know anyone who doesn’t know any better, please send them to HR. Thank you.” It cracks me up because it is so true. There are some places where the only ones who get hired are those who either don’t know anyone on the inside who can give them the dirt or who just don’t know any better. And of course turning over prospective employees to HR is just classic for how many companies seem to hire these days.

    And you’re right about HR keeping busy with posting phantom jobs and leading unsuspecting people on a time sink.

    I think most of us here have come across these kinds of ads as well as companies.

  59. One last way job boards might be useful:

    If you have a firm you want to work for but they are still addicted to “try before you buy” (a.k.a. contract-to-hire), until you have a decent relationship with he contract firms they use, watching the specific contract firms on the boards to see when positions come up may have value.

  60. I applaud your challenge to job-boards to provide meaningful evidence that they work. In the interest of fairness, how about turning the challenge on your methods? Can you provide success and failure statistics for folks who have invested in your books and embraced your approach? Perhaps a control group study? My impression is that other than anecdotes and assertions no one in this area has hard data on what does and doesn’t work.

    I am job-hunting and did recently invest in your books. I do periodically search and apply through the job-boards (a curse on the house of Taleo). I have contacted recruiters. I keep my resume up to date. Since there isn’t a clearly effective tool, one must employ as many as resources permit.

    I like your challenge and think real evidence would be extremely valuable. I hope you accept my counter challenge and look forward to your findings in a future blog.

  61. Colin, I think that you should keep your own statistics about what works FOR YOU. Track what you do and what results you get. What works for most people isn’t really what you need to know. You need to know what works FOR YOU.

    When I kept statistics for myself I discovered that replying to ads didn’t work for me. For me, personal contacts is/was the most effective source of job leads.

  62. I would argue that Indeed does help people FIND jobs, and from what I’ve read, it doesn’t claim to help people LAND jobs. What it provides is one place to search keywords to find jobs a job seeker might not have known about without it. I never used Indeed thinking they would help me get the job, only to show me what I might not have seen otherwise. It also helped me notice trends – companies doing a lot of hiring, or hiring for the same position I’d heard about months ago.

  63. Nick, I completely agree with you…I am coming to the conclusion that lately looking for jobs on job boards and through headhunters is just about the worst way to job hunt. I am getting really tired of sending my resume down “black hole” online job applications to be rewarded by a form email and no other reply. I’ve been hearing rumors that recruiters are now rewarded for the number of resumes they send to their clients NOT for the number of jobs they fill. And obviously job boards are not rewarded for the number of jobs they fill, only for the number of jobs they post. It seems to me that any incentive either job boards or recruiters had in the past to actually place qualified people in jobs is gone. Conclusion: for the moment at least, one might do better to bypass recruiters and job boards altogether and do one’s own job search.

  64. Here are my stats for 2013. I have not refined the details as well as I would like to, but this gives me a good idea in retrospect of how I spent my time.

    I also devoted time to training and freelance pursuits, but that data is not included in these figures.

    2013 Job Search Stats for Online Job Boards
    Online Applications 103 Offers = 2
    Replied Interviewed Offered
    51.46% 8.74% 1.94%

    These figures are based on a skillset that combines Manufacturing Process Engineering, CAD, and Tech Writing.

    I did not cull through this data to isolate headhunters that did not post online. Maybe I need to track those figures a little closer to see which method offers the best hope for my own search efforts.

  65. Sorry, Mr. John Franklin, self-proclaimed job hunting expert… for everyone else on the planet, “FINDING A JOB” means finding a job and getting hired. ONLY YOU, the false expert, think that finding a job means finding a job to apply for.

  66. Observation from a Headhunter- the majority of the clicks on Indeed are headhunters reading each other’s job postings. A big chunk of the industry is on there all day.

  67. @DC: So headhunters are no different or better than personnel jockeys who sit in front of displays looking to see “who comes along.” That’s not hunting. It’s not even farming. It’s lazy. No wonder employers think there’s a talent shortage. They’re right: the talent shortage is in HR and among the “headhunters” they use.

  68. Nick, thanks for this post. Really helpful… painfully helpful. I live in Puerto Rico and I want a career change and need to find a career that fits my lifestyle’s wants and needs, so I turned to Indeed.com where I kept seeing new job posts every other day of the week. It was crazy! So after months and months of looking at Indeed’s info I decided to type the words (using Google just like you say in your Blog) “The Truth Behind Indeed.com” and I see your info. Bam, your info hit me like a train without breaks. Also the job postings are kinda crazy, but I won’t get into that right now. The thing is, how do we reach those who HAVE been hired through Indeed.com? I mean, for such a large website/corp there has to be some hired positions… at some point. Will keep following your updates and dream a little less dreamy ideas of the perfect job/career and go into full fed reality mode. Have read most of the comments and you really hit the nail. Hope the word gets out there and we all get an answer about the truth behind being hired vs demographic info.

  69. @Edward from PR: I’m sure there are people who’ve found jobs in Indeed. The problem is one of scale. For what it is and claims to be, has it delivered commensurate value to users (employers and job seekers)?

  70. @Nick Corcodilos: Yes, I know there have been jobs found in their site. I am not giving up my hope on finding one, either. Just want to change the approach of focusing ONLY on indeed.com to find my dream job. I did the search that someone suggested in one of the comments aboive by going to “Advanced Search Options” and using the “Show Only from Employer Website” and nothing came up. Not even for a Hospitalist career. Without the advanced search… you get thousands of job options. So, I hope that they DO deliver on their claims because it is a big jump to leave my business behind in Puerto Rico to go and work for someone else in the U.S. Anyways, Nick, thanks for your reply. Will keep you posted if I get hired through Indeed.com, Cheers!

  71. @Edward: From info I’ve seen, the odds a company will hire you via Indeed are so small that you might as well try straining tap water for loose change. :-)

  72. Nick Corcodilos: Thanks for the motivation, ha ha ha ha! Don’t worry, I have other ideas in mind. I’m more of the “Here’s My Resumé, Ma’m/ Sir!” Hand delivered and call every few days for follow up. Indeed.com just seemed more like a “HERE ARE YOU ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES” kinda place. But I will go strain water from other places. Thanks Nick!

  73. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING THIS! Excellent points and excellent questions. Definitely something to consider. I think overall, job seekers are much better off just sharing a resume on the job board, then working from the organization’s unique website. After spending years applying for positions on Indeed, I have never had a result from using it. Any interview or call back I have received has come from applying directly with the company of interest.

  74. I use a couple of job boards. I use Roadtechs and post my resume on Cjhunter. I have gotten jobs through both of them mostly because of the industry I am in. I have gotten one call from a job posted on indeed. The biggest problem I find with indeed is it is cumbersome. The apply process takes you to a company website and you can spend hours filling out useless forms. I have found this to be a complete waste of time. I don’t think any company H.R. ever look at those job applications. In fact, I’m certain of it. Indeed and the companies that advertise on it should have something as simple as roadtechs and cjhunter. “submit a resume”. You can find a posted job. Getting it is up to you. Good article Nick.

  75. It was tough to concentrate on the article. I was too busy staring at Nick’s photo. He is hot!!!

  76. From a jobseekers point of view, I think it depends on the level you are at. I’m a Digital Marketing Executive so I have specific skills and qualifications, but I’m not at CMO or head of department level and therefore I don’t get headhunted etc apart from the odd email on LinkedIn. So how else am I meant to time effectively job hunt?

    Indeed seems perfect for my level, it collections all positions under keywords I specify for the role I want. In the last 2 years I’ve had 2 jobs (the first a maternity cover contact, thus the 2nd job) both of which were initially found on Indeed. I’ve also had lots of interviews in that time, it’s probably about 30 – 40, again, all but a few I saw on LinkedIn first were found on Indeed.

    Doing my job I’m a pretty internet-savvy person, but I really don’t know of another option apart from Indeed that I’d want to use, it finds all the jobs listed on other job boards for me. If I’m wrong then please do tell me the other sources I should be using, but as a mid-level job hunter, I don’t see how a business wanting to find a full range (and therefore the best) employees couldn’t use Indeed.

  77. Most of our hires come from our own website, according to applicants. However, a large number (around one-third) come from Indeed. The problem is that we can’t tell whether they are a result of paid ads or organic. Experimentation leads us to believe it’s the latter and that PPC is mostly ineffective.

  78. Indeed does not have any filters to prevent unqualified job seekers from applying to a job.
    If I, as an employer lists a job for a legal secretary, the candidates that apply are cashiers, pharmacy technicians, store managers, payroll clerks, every and anyone who does not have the relevant experience.
    Indeed is a waste of time and money for me, as well as their annoying team who work there telling me that posting multiple jobs will increase the chances of getting the visibility I need for the quality I am looking for! That makes no sense.

  79. Hey Nick, I understand your frustration with job boards. The results are hard to measure but they make tons of money without a way to show results. In my line of work, I am only concerned with and do work with low and minimum wage people. I found a board that caters for this crowd (http://1milejobs.com). It looks like its still new. That would be the closest thing I could work with among all the big boards.

  80. If only we had noticed this post before a colleague placed an insertion order for two months with Indeed.

    As other posters have described, the quality of candidates that you can expect from Indeed is poor. At one point we had 250+ jobs live on the site 90% of the applications were from people with no experience, skills or qualifications that matched the job.

    To make matters worst, they were costing approximately $1.67 per click and driving a fraction of the applications that a competitor who was costing $0.46 per click. Indeed is rigged in their favor to extort as much as from you as possible whilst throwing their hands up in the air that they cannot control the quality of candidates. Umm, yes you can by implementing technology that facilitates the screening of applications or disallowing them from applying to jobs that are blatantly off-base from their resume.

  81. @Richard: I’m sorry you were introduced to job boards in such a painful way. Job boards make money only when you DON’T find a hire, and only when job seekers DON’T find jobs. It’s the classic casino game – always rigged for the house. The trouble with job boards is that they’ve got ready suckers in the HR community who fund them. Like Indeed, HR never gets paid for filling a job. They get paid anyway. The more applicants HR gets, the busier it appears, and Indeed fits the bill.

  82. I am 39 years old. I have had 5 major jobs in my career, and will not include positions of less than a year, or temp work right out of college, or consulting. EVERY one of those jobs – all professional, well paid positions were found through job boards. EVERY other method I have used is utter nonsense. Social media in which it is entirely out of your control and some idiotic popularity contest with meaningless connections is a scam people should STOP promoting. You see these kids just out of school, who have worked for a year as an admin with hundreds of connections – it is meaningless. Linkedin even got sued for attacking peoples contacts in their email accounts. It is completely absurd. Job boards allow employers to throw open the net to all qualified folks, and it won’t depend on who you know, who your buddy is, if you have a friend who works there, etc. It is an honest and direct way to find talent. Further, I have hired in the past and I would say about 80 percent of my hires were from posting on job boards and 20 percent other means ( recommendations mostly though I did make the horrid mistake of using linkedin too) I have had far more success with those I found through job board postings.

    THE FACT IS that to get a job you should look for a job and anyone claiming that positions publicly advertised and replying to those positions is somehow not appropriate has an agenda and is suspect. All means are legimate, even the crappy ones like networking and social media. My issue with the crapy ones is it turbs it into a stupid game, and people who are perfectly well qualified and would be great catches for an employer are overlooked as HR and hiring managers sit bored in an office trolling through social media sites to find the most popular game player. Networking and recommendations can land people in spots they don’t deserve and qualified people are overlooked for not having connected pals in an organization. Job boards are a level playing field, and why anyone would argue against them… well, I think those are the folks who don’t want a level playing field and I question the motives.

  83. Oh, and I have NEVER had a decent experience hiring with a “head hunter” or recruiter or temp agency. You pay a fortune to have sub par candidates pushed on you by someone wanting a commission. Who needs the pressure… do the wotk yourself and screen the resumes and don’t waste time hiring over priced screeners who want to argue against job boards.. Job boards are the worst enemy of a recruiter, for obvious reasons – they empower employers to find talent on their own without games and without useless pushy commision hungry rectuiters involved

  84. I totally agree with Anna. I’m a responsible hiring manager, not a lazy hiring manager. At least once a week I get a resume forwarded to me from a recruiter which is labeled “confidential” or “exclusive” with the candidate’s name suppressed. But after gleaning a few key words or phrases from the submitted resume and then entering into the Indeed or Monster resume search engine I frequently find the same resume posted there. And thus I save my company at least 10K in recruiter fees.

  85. The data is actually out there that shows Indeed provides more hires than any other external source. Check out any ATS data and it will show you. Please learn all the facts before going on such a rant.

  86. Also, the only way to prove Indeed delivers hires is from 3rd party data since Indeed is an aggregator, just like Google is…if Indeed sends job-seekers back to each company’s website, where else would the data come from…it has to come from the 3rd party.

    Nick Corcodilos, you are erroneous and obviously don’t understand the basics of how Indeed is set up to clearly comment on any of the facts. Once you understand how Indeed works, you will be able to see why only 3rd party data is relevant.

  87. Nick, this was awesome! I’m sure you’ve seen this by now…

    http://gotajob.indeed.com/

    This is the “proof” of jobs. But check this out… when you click ‘add story’ you can submit a “new job” without filling info. What this means is that robots can actually click this and increase the job count automatically.

  88. @bob: Sunuvagun – You’re right. I clicked submit without entering anything. It tallied my job and thanked me. Fancy that. Indeed doesn’t care whether there’s really any job. Thanks for sharing this.

  89. @bob: This one’s for you:
    http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7571/the-indeed-com-game-are-you-as-dumb-as-hr

    Thanks for the heads up!

  90. INDEED SELLING NAMES AND VITA INFORMATION.
    INDEED POST ALL VITAL INFO TI THE INTENET>
    INDEED IS A SCAM>

  91. Hey Nick –

    Hope you’re well. I’ll add my perspective from corporate, as I’m the guy at my firm who tracks job board effectiveness (among other channels). We “stamp” each applicant’s source in our system – if someone applies via Indeed, the system knows where they came from and ties Indeed as the source. Same goes with any other digital source, referrals, etc. Agencies as well (they submit through a portal into the same system, and get named as source).

    I analyze those numbers obsessively – they’re how I plan training, budget, understand trends, etc etc. If a tool/ source isn’t effective, I first attempt to correct it in case it’s our fault, then dump if it’s clearly the source. Indeed has – so far – been working very well for us. Out of the “job boards”, it’s the most successful at this time. We are also playing around with tools like AppCast, which are based on a pay-per-applicant model (like you described), but it’s early days and I don’t have much performance data on those.

    Hope this gives some insights form the internal side of talent acquisition.

    All best,
    Martin

  92. Since moving to San Francisco I have had the following work best:
    1. Invited to a dinner party where I met the senior internal recruiter of a Fortune Top 10 best companies to work. Was hired within a month as a ‘contract’ worker (never again but that is a whole ‘nother story)
    2. I have gone into LinkedIn’s job board and searched for jobs I qualify for. Written the companies down…SIGN OUT of LinkedIn (this is imperative people!) and then gone directly onto the companies websites and applied directly – In one week alone I had six interviews
    3. having ONE professional headhunter (out of the hundreds out there) reach out to ME – just interviewed yesterday with a pre-ipo and it became very clear that this company thinks VERY highly of this external company headhunter. Make sure to do your research on who you allow to use your name!

    What has not worked:
    1. Headhunters located around Silicon and downtown SF
    These people are a dime a dozen and literally have NO follow through. Out of the two dozen I have contacted, not one has gotten me a job. What they specialize in is finding jobs off of direct websites, getting your resume and then Ad-Hoc’ing the data to the company…trust me…90% of the companies RUN the other direction from your resume.
    2. any and all search engines. Indeed, golden gate search, monster, etc. all you are doing is posting your personal information out there for the crooks and world to see

  93. @Lisa: Thanks for the nice rundown!

  94. NOTHING is absolute … obviously this applies to this topic too, there is a percentage of people for whom anything will work on the internet: indeed, monster, etc. beautifully and fast… but for the vast majority they won’t, and that’s the bottom line.

  95. I’ve gotten a job through Monster. The company saw my resume and hired me within days.

  96. I’ll agree with Nick here.
    This is nothing more than subtle sleight-of-hand and a built on not counting the beans that fell off the table. Even the worst of the worst tools will serve sometimes but what is the real ROI. Most recruitment agents of firms don’t know where their hires come from so I’ll doubt this 3rd party survey lot as providing anything factual!

    RWS

  97. Looks like the whole staff of INDEED has crawled out from the woodwork to provide “statistics” and rant about how great the service is!! Well then my hats off to their damage control and PR efforts!

    RWS

  98. I use Indeed.com to fish through the CVs and find people who have tutoring or teaching experience. I then am able to find them on FB or LinkedIn to see what they look like, and maybe what their life is like. If they appear to be a candidate that fits the mold we are looking for, and could fill a job that I may have available but wasn’t posted on Indeed, I can send a message to them and start the interview process. Over the last five years, I have hired several people in that manner. Indeed.com has no way of tracking that sort of thing. I cannot imagine that I am the only small business owner that uses this method.

  99. @Next Level Up: I’m glad Indeed works for you, but I don’t agree at all that “Indeed.com has no way of tracking that sort of thing.” Certainly it does, when you “send a message” via Indeed and via other methods. Today, web analytics are so sophisticated that advertisers can almost tell which side of your nose you’re scratching while you read their ads. Advertisers track all sorts of behavior; job boards can certainly create ways to track hires. I believe they’re already doing some of this, but the results are too pitiful to publish. That’s my challenge to Indeed and other job boards: Show us the numbers or explain why you don’t.

  100. Spot on. Job boards suck real bad. Useless now. I’ve found work with LinkedIn and right now I’m trying linkup.com since it filters out third party useless temp agencies and recruiters. It lists jobs by company website and location. Far more useful to me than wasting hours applying to nonjobs from a temp agency.

  101. @Scott: Glad you found Linkup.com – I’m a fan. It’s not a job board. It’s a search engine for job postings on employers’ own sites. Different concept.

  102. Recently we had a job seeker in our Resource Room who was trying to apply on-line to Summa Health System (the largest employer in Akron Ohio, by the way). Every time she tried to upload a resume and clicked Continue, the resume disappeared and an error message popped up. I noticed she was using Google’s Chrome browser and suggested she try Internet Explorer. She then successfully uploaded a resume and completed the application. I assumed it was a browser compatibility issue. I called Summa’s HR department and was referred to Lawson Software, the provider of their on-line app. The rep told me the problem actually happens when the application is accessed from a 3rd party such as indeed.com, which our client had done! I confirmed that it was not a browser issue as I was able to upload a resume using Chrome when I typed the URL directly into the address bar. Just what job seekers need, another hidden roadblock. I don’t know why indeed interfered with the application. The paranoid, cynical part of me wonders if they are eavesdropping.

    My advice to job seekers now is to go to the company site directly and avoid accessing applications through all 3rd parties.

  103. Thanks Nick, you are one of the few out there who speak truth. I’ve had past coworkers insist that I waste hours on crap boards like dice and monster to find a new job. These sites are great if you want your personal data stolen or if you want to be endlessly spammed by Foreign scammers for nonjobs.

  104. I use the .co.uk version for obvious reasons and I find it useful at times but it is full of complete crap. I ask for a specific area and it bulks up the jobs with vague nowhere near jobs that I thought I had avoided. Out of date jobs also from 30+ days old even though I search by date. It will do anything to give you the impression that there are tons of jobs available and its a great site when in reality its a waste of time

  105. I have never landed a job let alone an interview on indeed in my 14 year career. Everything came either from Careerbuilder or the companys corporate website. Indeed is all smoking mirrors

  106. Nick you said it all! I AGREE.. Not once in my extensive Job searches has Indeed Yielded one result not one! I have received more interviews and scores on Jobs from Craigslist! this is the way to go and is free as well its more simple and easy to respond and submit.
    INDEED, MONSTER ARE WAY OVER RATED! I DON’T EVEN LOOK AT THEM ANY LONGER!
    NICK COULDN’T HAVE WRITTEN IT ANY BETTER!

  107. Well, I must say that I wholeheartedly disagree with your assumptions in this article. While I can see where you are coming from, idealistically speaking, I do not think that what you are asking is in the realm of reality.

    In order to find out the percentage of hires that came from Indeed, it would require every single company that uses Indeed to report all of their hiring data back to Indeed. Why on earth would a company do that? This would akin Indeed to the Government’s Labor Department.

    You assert that “Web analytics is rocket science today — we can track virtually everything you do online — and there’s no way to figure out whether a job board was the cause of a job being filled?”

    Yes – analytics have come a long way – but this is in no way shape or form related to web analytics. To acquire this data, you are solely relying on employers coming back and sending it to you AFTER they hired someone, which is to say AFTER they contacted the person that came through Indeed. How on earth would Indeed enforce this?

    I have worked in the online recruiting industry for 3 years and have seen first hand the effects of Indeed on hiring. They are far and away the job board that provides the most applicants for my customers. They aren’t perfect, of course, but you are over-simplying this issue by a tremendous amount.

  108. Another thing to consider with job boards. Their usage rates are correlated not only by job TYPE but by GEOGRAPHY. Just because “Indeed doesn’t work for you” in one area of the country (US), doesn’t mean that that same job wouldn’t be extremely successful somewhere else. I see this each and every day when analyzing the statistics of my customers.

    And ANOTHER thing, employers generally don’t just use ONE job board when posting a job, they use several. So when you are complaining that “job boards don’t provide a shred of evidence” and simultaneously saying it should be easy because “web analytics” are “rocket science” you are creating a fantasy world. There is no way that you can expect any employer to report the result of each and every hire back to the appropriate job board that they were referred from. What you are asking is not going to happen. The statistics that Indeed provides speak for themselves, there simply is no other job board that comes close (aside from Craigslist). If that isn’t enough for you, then you do not understand the very nature of job boards.

  109. @Dave: I’ve been working in this space for over 30 years and I see it differently. My clients have been largely high-tech companies and hardware and software engineers. Tracking is not really so hard for Indeed to implement, but they have no motivation to do it. Why bother? They don’t care. Employers use it whether it works well or not.

    There’s no reason Indeed couldn’t make use of its system dependent on employers agreeing to use tracking code on all jobs and applicants. Amazon knows who referred a sale and credits that source with cash. The job boards make it sound impossible, but it’s not. Read my lips: They really don’t care because employers flood them with cash without those tools required.

    You also say of Indeed: “They are far and away the job board that provides the most applicants for my customers.”

    You imply you’re a recruiter. If you’re using Indeed to find candidates for your clients, you’re not recruiting at all. You’re an unnecessary middleman doing what HR can do itself but won’t. You’re diddling databases rather than actually searching. Any HR department that uses “recruiters” this way should be fired en masse. Talk about duplication of effort and cost.

    “How on earth would Indeed enforce this?” By building it into its software. But as I said, they have no incentive. Employers who waste money on third parties to search a database the employer can search itself don’t care. They’ll gladly pay three times to get one job done.

    “And ANOTHER thing, employers generally don’t just use ONE job board when posting a job, they use several.”

    That’s the most ridiculous statement you’ve made. Indeed is a JOBS AGGREGATOR. When an aggregator compiles jobs from all the other boards, why would an employer use more boards. Probably because they don’t know or care what duplication costs.

    Sheesh. This industry is insane and it’s propped up by employers and “recruiters” who really do not want to do any recruiting. Dialing for dollars is not a profession but gambling.

  110. I’m not a recruiter by any means. That last statement was not ridiculous because there are other job boards that are separate from Indeed that are not aggregated by Indeed. There are, in fact, plenty of them.

    I would agree with you that my job is a middle man, I am not a recruiter, like I said.

    You are still implying that it is very easy for Indeed and other job boards to do this. My point remains unaddressed, however. When you add a tracking token, you will see where the applicant is coming from, which is great, but that is only half of the equation.

    You suggest that they make it a requirement within the software, how do you suggest this happens? I ask you that question directly before and it was deflected pretty hard, I’m genuinely curious how you think it could be done since you are so adamant about how easy it would be.

    I am of the opinion that it wouldn’t be quite as easy as you make it out to be. It requires all employers to verify each hire after they used Indeed’s software to review the applicant and more than likely see the applicant face-to-face. If Indeed made it a requirement, the hard part would be how to enforce it. If, as a hiring manager or small business owner, I have the contact information of all of these applicants, couldn’t I just record it, cancel my Indeed account, and interview them without Indeed knowing? That’s just one example on why I think this is a complicated claim that you are simplifying.

    You say they have no incentive, but they do. Indeed isn’t dumb, they know that the percent of people hired from applicants they find for you is the main metrics. They want to be able to prove that. They want to be able to improve upon that. They aren’t blood-sucking monsters that only want your money, if they were, they wouldn’t be as successful as they are. Believe it or not.

  111. @Dave: You say “I have worked in the online recruiting industry for 3 years”

    You call yourself a middle man. What’s that? If you’re not a recruiter, then what are you? I’m interested to know.

    “In order to find out the percentage of hires that came from Indeed, it would require every single company that uses Indeed to report all of their hiring data back to Indeed. Why on earth would a company do that?”

    Why not? The benefit to a company is clear: It would have a solid outcomes analysis at hand to make it easy to decide where to spend its precious recruiting dollars.

    You ask: “You suggest that they make it a requirement within the software, how do you suggest this happens?”

    It’s very simple. Employers pay to access the Indeed database. Terms and conditions along with software provided by Indeed makes this very easy. HR is hardly new to reporting systems. Indeed could require its customers to report, and to sweeten the pot, it could provide useful metrics based on the hiring data provided by employers. Just look at the EEOC compliance practices required of every company. Indeed AND employers could know EXACTLY how many hires come from Indeed. None of this is foreign to HR departments.

    Of course, Indeed has no motivation to do this because it delivers precious few hires. Imagine the PR coup if Indeed could show it fills lots and lots of jobs.

    Dave, none of this really requires any real code at all. It requires a contract and terms and conditions for use of its system.

    • @nick – I own a business and also do all of my own recruiting/interviewing and hiring out of passion. I know my numbers and I know how much money I have haphazardly spent letting an HR team or remote recruiters handle this task. I actually have the breakdown or actual hires and compared to the amount of people who click, apply (without realization) and the type of person each ad attracts. I pre-screen my applicants through my recruiting system called applicant stream. I push through 15% of my daily applicants to further review or phone interview (10-15 out of 80-100 applicants). After this; they get an automated email which lists questions to narrow down who is serious vs. serial “clicker”. 30% of those applicants are relevant, great and will be a good fit.
      1. live within 30 miles
      2. Are not just shopping for jobs after a bad day at work
      3. Ready for a full time position in 0-2 weeks.

      From that- I will narrow it to 3-6 candidates and hire 1-2.
      I have lowered my monthly limit from 4K a month down to $700. I think the quality stems from the specific and detailed ads placed, titles and follow through on the back end.

      But that’s just me- you can email me if you have any questions. I have a lot of information on how butchered the perception of what we should do as employers and how the job seekers handle the mass deceptive “positions”.

    • “Why not? The benefit to a company is clear: It would have a solid outcomes analysis at hand to make it easy to decide where to spend its precious recruiting dollars.”

      -Is your argument HR departments have no incentive to track source of hire as they are being paid either way or that they absolutely would track source of hire in order to budget properly? Seems like you have made both arguments depending on which one better fits your narrative.

  112. My company provides a product that posts customers jobs automatically to job aggregators like Indeed and other online sites.

    What I will say, is that idealistically, I agree with what you’re saying. I wish that Indeed provided these statistics. But I stand by that it is not in the realm of realistically happening, especially with small businesses that do not have HR departments.

    You ask why a company would not want to report back hiring data to Indeed. There are many answers to that, depending on your business. What about industries with high turnover and low-wage workers? What about businesses that do not have HR departments (many small and franchised businesses and start-ups). If the incentive to report back their hires is that they have to PAY Indeed the amount they report back, I do not see that working. Especially if you consider the amount of extra reporting they would have to do solely for Indeed applicants.

    Right now, the barrier to entry to use Indeed is low – you pay to advertise your jobs, or you could use a service like the one I work for that automatically posts your jobs to Indeed and other services for <$50/month.

    So my premise, is if you tack on a requirement to report your hiring data for every hire, that far less people would use the service. Also (and I'm admittedly unsure of this), without requiring the same EEOC compliance data, I'm sure the data will be skewed and the system gamed by the customers, right?

  113. We have hired from craigslist three times. The talent pool is very good. Indeed actually costs more and we have not hired from indeed.

  114. Hi Nick, I do agree with most of what you’re saying and believe most of the job adds are irrelevant and low paying. But I just wanted to add my experience and what it made me to believe. After signing up with Indeed to browse the job adds I was contacted by an ITT Technical Institute Representitive. He hounded me relentlessly 3-5 calls a day, like an telemarketer (same job really), trying to set up appointments and get me to enroll after repeatedly saying no and showing disinterest wondering how they got my number at first. I was eventually forced to block the number. I assume corrupt corporate policies are to blame in part, being forced down the throats of their representatives to further profits by increasing enrollment. Anyway, in addition to the money Indeed makes from advertising from job employers that pay using the pay per click model, it seems that they are also mining and collecting our information, like Google and Facebook. It’s hard to trust anyone these days. I could only see Indeed helping given you know what field you’re going into, and on the off chance you may get lucky and find a rare gem in the rough. But given you know what field you’re going into and are qualified then I would much rather recomend going straight to the employing entities website for job listings or networking. The one thing I like about Indeed is the employee based company reviews, although I can just use Google for that too.

  115. Hello Nick,

    I agree and also disagree!

    Am 100% in agreement with your analysis pertaining to indeed.com. The board simply does not work. More than that, it keeps sending (fictitious) emails such as — “Reminder: XXX emailed you via Indeed Resume”. I replied to about half a dozen such mails and none of them even replied. Later, I could trace 4 company names & When I contacted them directly, one of them replied that they have never posted any job requirements on indeed.com. The three others didn’t bother to reply.

    However, my experience with other job boards has been better. Of all the freelance contracts I landed in the last 5 years, 15% came from Monster (India), 65% from naukri.com and others from referrals. And, as of now, I see job boards (except of indeed.com variety) as my main source for future contracts.

    Your post is a good alert for people like me. Thanks.

  116. OK there are some valid frustration with recruitment process. But none of it has anything to do with Job Boards or their promise.
    As job board is place to tell the world what job you are hiring for and what the requirements are. It is like a boardcast station or antena: Please get this job posting in front of potential candidates.
    It is not a job boards fault, that a job posting is bogus or phantom. It is not their fault, that bogus unqualified candidates apply to every job, specially those they are not qualified for.
    Blaming job boards, is like blaming your cable company that there is garbage program on every channel, and that the wrong people people are watching the wrong shows!

  117. I agree Indeed and other job boards are bogus. They often don’t lead to a legitimant site but just to another job board. It is a scam and if any one gets a job from them it is by accident not design. I am very underimpressed with these job boards and have stopped using them. I have better luck on craigs list and just going to the companies web site and looking their. Bogus, just another way to push advertisement for schools and so on.

  118. All I know is that in the eight months I have been actively looking for work I have only been asked for an interview if I contacted the employer directly by email. I answer up to 15 ads on indeed and others each day and if the resume is sent through indeed – it is guaranteed that nothing will happen.

    Then there are the employers themselves who can make our lives a misery.

    I was hired a week after I was laid off, by a call centre which required me to work there for four hours to see what I was like on the phone. The script basically was a total lie and intended to dupe the homeowner. I was hired to start the next week Monday. A day after my interview I had to have emergency dental surgery. The employer was not impressed by this and I was out of a job before I had even started.

    The next position was at another call centre which sold hockey tickets. My first evening there we were all bitten by bed bugs. Needless to say I didn’t go back.

    Then I was hired to work at an alarm company for a customer service position. The next day we had a three hour orientation meeting. The owner showed us photos of his holidays through the company. Photos of his fourth million dollar home, etc, told us about his wife’s diamond ring, his son’s expensive car, etc At the end we finally found out that this was a door-to-door position.

    I was then hired by one of those payday loan places. To get that job I had to go for an interview with two women, complete an hour long test, go back for another interview with two different women, pick up paperwork at a different location, bring the filled out paperwork to yet another location, wait two days and go to another location to fill out more paperwork. I then received a phone call to tell me that they were unable to a credit check on me and that they couldn’t hire me because of it. I had actually just received my credit info a few days before this happened and offered to email it to them – but was told they couldn’t accept that.

    I then had a job interview when I was told to meet them for an interview in front of a Tim Horton’s, one that doesn’t have tables and chairs. I was to bring ID, SIN card, the works. stood inside the door and waited. Three of the most revolting looking people showed up and met with three women in the hallway beside the Tim Horton’s. It all looked very shady and I left. I called the company and was told they asked to meet people this way because they didn’t have any room at their office. What?

    I could go on but I think you get the idea.

    Years ago when I went looking for a main job, or a second part time job, I would find one in a week or two. Now that these stupid placement agencies have taken over, the entire process has changed. The worst is Randstad by far. I just told them to get lost yesterday. I am an experienced office worker, graphic artist, office manager, etc., and the only job they found for me was to wash cafeteria trays for two days. I also found out by researching Randstad that they take a percentage off the wages, as well a being paid by the employer – who is their real client. This is of course against the law and they have been called on it. They do not care about finding people jobs! Event their ads are a mess.

    I just came back from a job interview this morning advertised as a customer service position. Five minutes into the interview I find out this is a door-to-door position. Their website is gorgeous, with photos of beautiful offices, etc. – in reality the place was a dump.

    Unemployed people are at the mercy of placement agencies, phony or misleading ads and unscrupulous employers.

    Be careful out there!

  119. Did you ever google the Silkroad Study on how many candidates were actually placed through Indeed?

    I think direct employers turn to staffing firms, but candidates aren’t waiting for a staffing firm and have technology at their finger tips. With all do respect, I’ve never been placed through an employment agency or needed to seek one out because of the internet

  120. @UNKNOWN: I just looked at the SilkRoad survey, but I watch the CareerXroads survey every year. They are similar, except CXR has been doing its survey for over a decade with little change in the results. Here’s the problem: Once you account for ALL hires, Indeed and the job boards are a poor bet. These surveys love to isolate “internal” hires, but I think that’s bogus. You are still competing with ALL those candidates, and by law ALL those jobs must be advertised, so let’s get real. Personal contacts blow away the boards as a source of jobs and hires. What you’re seeing in these surveys is catering to the job boards.

    Agencies deliver fewer hires than the boards.

    Either you invest in relationships throughout your career, or you’re at a job-getting disadvantage. That’s the toughest pill for people to swallow because they really, really want to believe that some “service” is going to find them a job. It probably won’t.

  121. We’ve never used Indeed before and had problems with other job boards (not monster or careerboard). However, with Indeed we got the perfect candidate.

    I have found every job I have obtained in the last 10 years from a job board.

    Your article sounds like a case of bitterness.

  122. @amye: You’ve never used Indeed before but hired the best and got every job with it. I saw Interstellar, too.

  123. A manager from a discount retail store told me that the applications turned in through indeed are never looked at and sometimes they don’t even get them.

  124. Gday Nick,

    Great article.

    Though, you have to understand:
    The way of one single job posting is very long and indeed might not even be the last link in it.

    Job Boards and job search engines are constantly selling and reselling traffic to each other.

    Nobody wants to go to the “pay per hire”. Pay per click is way better – you can push the ads up in your search results and make people view them even if it is not what they are looking for.

    You will be surprised, but the actual “apply rate” is only around 5% from the number of views.

    That is where the problem with job boards sits.

  125. Hey Nick,

    Excellent article. I can see your point about indeed being misleading about their infographic, but I am willing to bet it’s accurate.

    I’m the CEO & Founder of RecruitersMap, a new Applicant Tracking System and I read and understand my site analytics very well. If it means anything, Indeed provides more traffic to our site than the other leading job boards combined, by a long shot, and they also provide more traffic to any other applicant tracking system by a long shot so I am willing to bet they are correct.

    Another thing you mentioned that I can confirm is indeed might not track every hire, but I track every hire on RecruitersMap and where each candidate that gets hired comes from and 98% of the candidates that were hired came from indeed.

    I’m not providing this information because I am a partner with indeed. I only provide it because it’s the truth. You can look at the traffic for any ATS with similarweb.com and you will see why indeed is #1… again by a long shot.

  126. @Cedrick: I’m not sure what it means that Indeed provides 98% of hires for you. That’s like saying Google provides most of your web traffic. Indeed scrapes every resume and job on the Net. It’s the leader, but there’s no telling where an original posting came from when Indeed delivers it, since Indeed collects them all. If Indeed did not exist, they’d come from somewhere else, perhaps the place where Indeed found them. All Indeed is doing is adding one more layer to a thick business, and taking credit for “delivering.” All I see is a massive database racket.

  127. I came across this post in a search about the effectiveness of Indeed.com for employers. I just hung up the phone with a sales representative from Indeed. After 15 minutes or more he was unable to provide me any of the metrics mentioned in this post.

    The sales rep informed me that Indeed is the number one job board with the most searches. Only candidates looking for my specific position will see our sponsored ad. Only interested candidates will conveniently click on our Pay-Per-Click ad. This all sounds well and great but where is the proof, the metrics that these are qualified candidates and not just curious clickers? I requested a price list. There is not one. Why? Because the price model changes with the requirements of the position.

    Wait a minute.

    So a basic ad will cost .60 cents per click but an ad for an engineer costs more? How much more? Answer, well that depends. On What? No solid answer there, just more rebuttals of ‘trust me’ sales pitches. I gave the example of a problem I experience posting to another Optimized Search Engine job board, a Database Administrator. On this job board, I pay a fixed cost. I receive plenty of applications for OFFICE Administrators, NOT Database Administrators. This is the *downside* to keywords in job searches but at least I know what I am getting and how must it costs me.

    Now, say I post this job with Indeed at a recommended budget of $400. I could very likely be paying for curious clickers with no relevant experience. This is not a wise way to spend money. It is effectively throwing money at unknowns! The best rebuttal he provided was this scenario; would you rather pay a fixed rate to have a recruiting booth at a job fair and not get applicants or have the booth at no cost and only pay for the candidates who approach the booth? This is where you go wrong Indeed.com. You used a scenario with REAL and TANGIBLE information. A wise recruiter would research the job fair and understand the candidate pool before making the decision to invest time and money in that job fair; it is not just a shot in the dark.

    Indeed.com is a shot in the dark and their business model for job posts is vague at best.

  128. Nick, everything you said is true. In fact when I asked repeatedly for my cv to be deleted from their database, no reply. I think there’s another sinister reason why this info is being stored as these millions of cvs are of no value when the majority of jobseekers using their “service” aren’t getting any help from it.
    Thanks for speaking the truth.

  129. I’m trying indeed.com right now to find a job and it is sooooo frustrating I want to scream..They ask you for your passwords, social security #, code generator from Facebook, entering your name way to many times, and then more passwords..You post your resume but then you have to fill out an application, with more passwords needed and those employers you do find require you to start an account with them so the whole process starts over with the passwords, login accounts, SS#..and they give you jobs that are out of your area, when you ask them to locate the jobs nearby. It is a nightmare for people seeking employment..Can we go back to filling out a real application with no resume required? AND…Isn’t most if not all the info on our resumes included for them so we don’t have to fill out numerous applications for every single company? Something needs to be done. I have never heard of anyone I know that has benefited from Monster or Linked-in or especially Indeed. And what sucks is they know your info on Facebook, your passwords, your SS# etc…. You shouldn’t have to divulge so much personal identity information. I am worried about the future if this is the new norm for hiring. What if you don’t own a cell phone or computer? Why should we have to use Facebook? Sooo impersonal and scary….Only way to stop these employers from doing this is for people to demand a better and safer way to apply for jobs. Of course its nice for the employers but real life hell for the job seekers. No wonder its hard to get a job these days.

  130. This is goofy, I applied for a job on glassdoor, nothing, same job offered on indeed, applied there, nothing…saw it on craigslist, applied there and got response immediately, an interview. Still waiting to finalize. Job boards have same ads, so there is trading or sharing. But when HR contacted me they asked where I heard about the job, I mentioned all 3 sites, and the HR person said we didn’t advertise on those sites. Ok, does that make ANY sense???? I didn’t apply with them directly as they use Taleo, and that has caused me extreme computer issues going into that program in the past so I won’t USE it. Trying to navigate the online application process is beyond frustrating. Networking hasn’t helped me much in recent yrs, it was great, and I got all my jobs that way in the past, but now, it is a dead end. People are terrified to refer, they don’t want HR to even KNOW they work where they do. Times have really changed and I think seasoned workers have become paranoid as they are axed so easily now.

  131. @savannah: As you can see, these systems scrape jobs from other sources and employers have no idea where their jobs appear, for how long, or how they are presented. TheLadders was exposed by users (and employers) for making up wild salaries for jobs the employers never put on them.

    The idea is that everyone is so happy that every job is copied and replicated everywhere. What a benefit! Thank you, Indeed! NOT.

  132. I have to say, all of your comments are valid and kudos to Marybeth and Nick, wow! What great insight you have. Recently, I was contacted via Monster by a staffing agency for a legal research position that was ostensibly offered by their client Deloite. Being that I have nearly identical skills matching the job, I naturally jumped on it. The application process took 4 hours, count them, and it required not only a paralegal certificate but at least a BA degree as well. I have up to date legal research skills and four college degrees to boot, I went ahead and bit the bullet and applied. Even better, or so I thought, my neighbor has mid-level managerial position at Deloite in our DC area and he gave me the go ahead to use his name as a reference. Well, after jumping through all of the proverbial hoops, I completed the application process and waited a week. Well, after about eight days, I called the “recruiter” and inquired about the status of my resume. I was told that “everything looked good” in the most general of terms and that he would be contacting me after consulting with the client at Deloitte. Long story short, that application was submitted five months ago and I have sent a few follow-up emails and made a few calls and apparently, that so-called staffing agency’s number has been disconnected. The thought did cross my mind that maybe someone with a bogus job prospect got my information on Monster and either sold it or just simply used it to fill a “candidate quota” or other. In retrospect, it is a very odd confluence of events, what with the disconnected number and emails that bounced back to me, knowing that Monster is somewhat reputable and has been on the scene as someone mentioned, now for about fifteen or so years.

    Bottomline is that many shady or bogus recruiters may be falling through the cracks onto these job board sites. That, is another unfortunate angle in this job hunting scenario. Also, Marybeth is absolutely right in mentioning the CTS (Candidate Tracking System or ICIMS) software that is used by recruiters to “hunt for” qualified candidates. This is a key issue in the process that many haven’t mentioned. Most of the data regarding this buzz or key word software meant to streamline the process of finding qualified candidates is not reliable. For example, a friend whose name I won’t mention of course, is a Sr. level manager at a Silicon Valley tech firm and he has been there for a number of years. He used a bogus name to “apply” for his own job, albeit a similar one that his company was offering and he did not ever hear back from the recruiter. In other words, he didn’t get his own job (that he already had)! He just applied on a whim to test the efficacy of the computer software candidate sifting process. Imagine that! I just wanted to thank Marybeth for pointing this out, she’s right in what she says and it is quite upsetting to think that I and others have to pin our hopes on not only getting noticed by potential employers online, but also in passing muster with a non-human, electronically based software robot tasked with weeding out candidates using arbitrary, key word crap to find candidates. Could this be another reason we are reportedly lacking “good talent?” And for the record, I don’t buy this either, it’s a lot of BS.

    Claire

  133. @Claire: Here’s the problem. Employers/HR shift ALL the work of recruiting onto the applicant. You must invest ridiculous amounts of time so they can automate their review process down to keywords handled by a database. That’s the problem and the crime, and it’s the dirty little secret of employment in America. Nobody realizes it, but in most cases HR does not even really exist – it’s just a boiler room of clerks reading reports from Applicant Tracking Systems. HR is totally outsourced today.

    There’s only one thing for job seekers to do: Tell any employer you’ll meet with the hiring manager only. Til then, no forms, no applications. When enough people do that, this will change.

  134. I agree. It is easier than ever to track links. However, companies are too lazy to do so. Add to that, the fact that Indeed scours the web. So, they will find a job for you that may be at another job board and you would end up applying through that job board. It also sometimes directs you directly to the employer’s website or to an employment agency. Sure people can track links, but that doesn’t tell them if I was hired. As a job seeker, Indeed consolidates my job search better than any Google search or going from company website to company website or employment agency website to employment agency website — although I wish I knew which websites Indeed checks because I happened to notice there are never jobs listed from Craigslist. No loss because Craigslist job ads in my field are lame, but I could be missing out on other job postings at other sites. The other thing I wonder is how accurate Indeed’s salary estimates are for the jobs I search for. To save time, I would rather not search for jobs in my field in the lower salary categories, but am I weeding out potentially high paying jobs? And, speaking of bogus-ness. Since you love Google so much, how about Google’s pay per click model? That doesn’t tell Google if someone made a purchase at a website. Sure, an e-commerce site can track the links, but Google’s model isn’t based on purchases made. It considers a conversion to be a click. Google has no way of knowing the success of pay-per-click for their customers.

  135. When I was looking for a part time gig i found it on indeed, when I was looking for full time work, I found it through indeed. Sorry if it didn’t work for you.

  136. Our company hires >60000-70000 people in an year across many countries
    While I appreciate your comments, we have been seeing such stupendous success with Indeed (in few countries though / not globally). If I were to compare outcomes both in terms of outcomes as well as investments and returns, I have to say that we saw results that exceeded our expectations on both counts. (Our ROI on investments we have made on Indeed is >3000%!!). So I am not sure of the bogusness – but the way I see it is that people will not visit a site or the traffic will never be so high if one is not finding value in the site. It’s hard to create so many bogus users.
    Of course like every site, Indeed will have to keep themselves relevant but for now, from what I have seen it seems to be doing that quite well

  137. You are absolutely correct. The intern finding sites I use ask if a person was hired. There is no reason to expect less of a paid position, aside from the laziness of the employer, Dave. Also, when you close or remove a position it asks if someone was hired and if you got them through that site. It is a couple of buttons.

    Furthermore the skewed numbers like “1 million new jobs daily” irk me. Parker and Lynch post the same four positions on Monster every day, I have to assume they’re on indeed as well doing the same.

  138. Obviously you have no insight into the recruitment industry or digital landscape, I’ve worked on job boards and ATS’s and this all BS. Indeeds, and 99% of all job boards, job is to ADVERTISE jobs, not to HIRE people.

    The employers are the only ones who have the “success numbers” for the different boards. The boards will know how many people/applications they have sent through to employers, but they won’t know which of them they hired. And yes, most of the employers have the employment numbers from different boards neatly compiled through different ATS’s or CRM’s. But why would they spend their valuable time providing the job boards with how many people they hired through them? They don’t have to and they won’t, the job boards will never know exact numbers or stats of how many get employed through them, only how many they have sent through, and that is their job – advertising and sending through applications – not hiring people.

    Instead, the employers have the numbers, and so they will obviously spend their money where they know they get responses. An easy way of seeing which job board performs best is therefore where the most jobs are, which is where employers spend their money.

    Indeed is not mainly a “normal” job board, instead it acts like a search engine, searching all major job boards and many others and compiles the job on a single site.

    A technical application process can involve up to 5-6 companies, you have the job board, employer, ATS company, CRM company, parsing company etc. So building an integration to help the board track where the people get employed is not simple and would cost a fortune. And why would they do that, when the employers can already see which board they get result from? And it’s the employer that pays them, so why waste money on showing off to job seekers.

    Only paying job boards when you make a recruitment through them is also extremely stupid, the employer never really have to tell the job board that they hired someone through them? Contact details will be on the CV and even if it weren’t, it would be exchanged during an interview. If the job board then has to control and check for every position they advertise if the company hired someone through them, because obviously many employers won’t tell them and try to save money (for example, employers pay 1000-5000 pounds for a hiring through a consultant), that would also cost a fortune and you’d have to create a department who only checks up on employers and if they did hire someone, it’s just stupid, ineffecient and would never work.

    Please don’t write articles and throw sh*t around on companies/industries if you have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve worked at several job boards and ATS’s and your whole article is complete BS.

    I’m not from an English speaking country so excuse my spelling/grammar.

  139. @You don’t know: CareerXroads has done an annual survey for 15 years, polling employers, asking them what is their source of hires. Job boards in aggregate deliver only about 10% of hires. The fact that HR keeps throwing good money after bad has not changed those statistics in 15 years. It only proves that HR wastes money.

  140. Can I sue Indeed.com for posting jobs that were scams and now I’m a victim of ID theft/Fraud?

  141. @Michelle Klapper: I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but maybe you have a case. After misrepresenting jobs for years, and ticking off many paying customers, TheLadders was hit with a consumer class action:
    http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/index.php?s=theladders

    Until people stand up to be counted, this stuff just continues because everyone things it can’t be stopped. If you can find a few others who had experiences like yours, you may find that a law firm will take the case. I wish you the best.

  142. dude, you’re missing the point. of course it’s all about views, clicks and visitors – that’s how advertising on the internet works.

    I get my recruiting clients great results from Indeed, and we hardly even pay them. We rarely sponsor any jobs on Indeed. The last job I posted for free got over 1,000 applicants – and I made 3 hires out of it.

    Our applicant tracking system pushes out to 150+ job boards so our positions are searchable on them – that way we can reach candidates who are searching for jobs.

    Still, a good chunk of our hires do come from internal referrals — because we pay a $3K internal referral bonus to make sure that our employees always have an incentive to do our recruiting for us and build relationships with folks who would make great employees. We’d rather pay those to our teams than to advertisers. The nice thing about most job boards is that you don’t have to pay them if you understand how to use them well. Most employers don’t.

    Hiring is about relationships. Job boards are just a way to make an introduction.

    But the thing most people don’t get is that each position is going to perform completely differently from another. It’s easy to get a ton of resumes when you’re paying well for entry-level positions.

    It’s hard to get a lot of qualified people when you’re hiring highly qualified engineers in a competitive market. But we do get them – and we get a lot of them from job boards. We don’t even pay top dollar salaries – more like mid-tier, fair-market rates. The reason why people want to join us isn’t for money – it’s because we have a strong purpose and we work on amazing, landmark projects. Our company is a great place to work. We focus on letting recruiting be led by retention — the things that will get the best people to apply are the things that will get our best people to stay. So we make sure we listen to them and get them what they need to be happy, comfortable, and successful.

    Then on job boards, we tell candidate what we’ve done. We run great ads and make sure we use the right keywords so our ads come up in search. Then we get a ton of great applicants.

    As a master user of job boards, it doesn’t matter to me how many hires come out of job boards — because I know companies aren’t very good at hiring, they waste a lot of money, and they do dumb things. I’d never rate the effectiveness of a tool by the average results people get when they use it. I want to know how the best people use the tool to get the best results. That’s a lot more relevant data, but you have to work to find it.

  143. Love this discussion. Two issues:

    1 – Finding a job on a job board: you are right, there is a lot of competition. However, there are also plenty of jobs that are not getting very many applicants. Unfortunately hiring managers are looking for more than skills. They are looking for the “right fit.” It’s not measurable, and it’s totally vague. Once you apply feel free to follow up with the company on your application. The squeaky wheel…
    2 – Job Board Success. Job Boards are media. Period. Doritos is not going tell the Super Bowl that they will pay for the ads based on how may chips they sell off of that 30 second commercial. You are paying for the space the job ad takes on the boards.

    Hire rates are shaky, typically self select on the applicant side, and if the ATS uses source tags those tags can have bugs. Not to mention applicants who view a job on a job board and Google the company then apply directly via the career site. Now the tag is lost.

    Results are the key. I suggest companies that are skeptical run jobs on job boards for 3 months, then run 3 months without media and see if the time to fill openings lengthens or remains the same. If there is no difference, why pay for a board? If you save time with the media, then call up Monster.com and have them broadcast your openings across Twitter, Facebook and http://www.Military.com.

  144. I just used the indeed.com. I contacted two resumes- supposedly updated to 2014. Unfortunately, both are way out-dated. One of them even called me to question why I contacted them when they have moved out the State for over 5 years. I will contact 3 more.. If they all are ridiculously outdated. It is definitely a big B.S. like what this article has stated.

  145. @SR Employer: Thanks for posting an employer’s view. From time to time a job seeker who found a job on Indeed extols the service. But when an employer turns up 5 year old resumes… that’s pretty bad. I’d love to know how the next 3 you try turn out.

  146. We engage indeed with sponsored ads and thus far, nearly 12% of our professional hires have come from this site. Our primary source is our robust employee referral program, which pays up to $5k per referral for RNs, PTs, OTs, etc. It is arguably our best external source, followed closely by Google Ads.

    For paraprofessional, we also engage with Indeed, and 23% of these hires come from this site. Google lags behind at 8% for this group, while our employee referral program comes in nearly neck and neck at 22%.

  147. Indeed is a useless scam. Don’t use them. They take your information and post it on their site without your permission. They make it impossible to delete your account and impossible to contact anyone at the company. There is possibly a 12-year-old in his parents garage in Rahway, NJ running this “company.” Either that or they have not a single employee in this country. Some job boards are good such as Dice, if you are in IT. But Indeed has never helped me find work. They also posted a copy of a resume of mine on their public resume link although I had marked it private. I’ve been emailing on and off for months to try to get it deleted, since I am not looking for a job and never gave permission for them to post it. I have deleted the resume from my Indeed account and asked them three times to delete my account. My resume still shows up on an Indeed resume page returned in google searches. (I’ve never marked this resume public.) Also, my account has not been deleted. (Unlike legitimate sites, they have no function allowing a user to simply do this.) I saved my emails to Indeed. If this does not get resolved, I am thinking of contacting an attorney to get my resume and information off their site.

  148. Nick –

    What’s your take on the staleness of job postings on these sites? My contention
    is that by the time Indeed or The Ladders posts an opening, it’s been around a long time and likely the hiring manager has already interviewed people and isn’t even looking at the resumes brought in from the job boards.

  149. @Lynda: To understand those stale postings, you have to consider the business model of Indeed, TheLadders and other job boards. NONE of them get paid when jobs are filled. They get paid when people keep accessing their databases. Thus they are incented to maintain databases as large as possible. That’s why stale jobs stay in there forever. Think about it: They make money when you DON’T find a job, because you keep going back.

    It’s really that simple. What’s astonishing is the levels of b.s. job seekers will tolerate. They keep dumpster-diving into those boards because they think there’s no alternative. The purpose of Ask The Headhunter is to discuss and learn about the alternatives. After we debunk the b.s.

  150. I have searched Indeed for over 9 months looking for sales candidates for the company I am working for. I have never hired a job seeker from Indeed because either they either respond that they are no longer looking for a job or they just do not respond at all. All of the contacts I have made to job seekers from Indeed never resulted in a single interview. I’m not impressed with Indeed. I’m choosing LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media as sources for recruiting.

  151. It’s not complicated to collect hiring data, it’s *impossible*.

    Hiring is a private transaction between two parties, neither of which is the job board. And neither party has any incentive to tell the job board about it voluntarily, either.

    Maybe now you’re thinking “well then give the paying party a discount if they disclose it”? Then you’re going to get a bunch of people saying the deal was made through the board just to get the discount.

  152. Hi Nick,

    Are you taking in consideration an ATS? Most large employers use an ATS and add tracking tags to their apply urls to know the exact source of the candidates in their pipeline and how many of those converted into qualified, interviewed and hired employees. My recommendation for anyone using generalist boards is to always go niche. Niche boards are able to hone in on specific roles and also provide support in knowing exactly how well the job ads are performing. There also tends to be a greater ROI.

  153. Wow. Employers don’t have to publish and don’t like to publish yield stats. No incentive by HR or recruitment team to advertise internally or externally how efficient they are among many other reasons. So to ask a company where millions of users and jobs flow through it monthly to report a vague figure makes no sense.

    Am very familiar with the Crossroads survey. It is tilted heavily towards white collar jobs and the participants in that survey are highly incented to steer leverage away from the jobs boards, etc so are as biased as this article.

    Now, more than ever, employers have access to more HR tools than ever. There are over 100 new VC-funded HR services coming out of Silicon Valley every year in addition to the dozens of jobs boards, etc which are all continually refining their offering. Indeed generates about $1 billion of annual revenue and is growing by over 50%. The notion that virtually all employers in all of Indeed’s countries are simultaneously being duped and increasingly so is far-fetched to me. If they weren’t getting results, Indeed would not be the size it is and growing the way it is.

    We’d all like more data but your entire article rests on the Crossroads survey which doesn’t fundamentally conflict with the fact that Indeed is the most successful HR tool that’s ever existed. I can’t validate the studies they cite, but there is literally no statistical evidence that it is not responsible for an incredibly large % of hires and that its company reviews data, search technology, etc do not improve the process for employers and applicants alike.

    I have no dog in this fight.

  154. @Davos Wong:

    “Am very familiar with the Crossroads survey. It is tilted heavily towards white collar jobs and the participants in that survey are highly incented to steer leverage away from the jobs boards, etc so are as biased as this article.”

    Say what?? Though there are problems with the xRoads survey, there’s no evidence of what you suggest at all. I’d love to know how you come up with that.

    “Indeed generates about $1 billion of annual revenue and is growing by over 50%. The notion that virtually all employers in all of Indeed’s countries are simultaneously being duped and increasingly so is far-fetched to me.”

    Why?? The fact that HR dumps billions into job boards is no evidence at all that the job boards work. There’s no logic to what you’re suggesting. It’s just as reasonable to suggest all those HR departments are being duped.

    “If they weren’t getting results, Indeed would not be the size it is and growing the way it is.”

    Again, there is no logical relationship between how much revenue Indeed generates and how well its services work. Consider companies that make loads of money selling nutritional supplements. Do high sales mean those supplements actually work? Think about what you’re saying.

    But you established the biggest piece of nonsense in your comment at the very beginning, when you suggest employers don’t have to publish yield stats. Of course they don’t. But their “decision” not to publish their yields doesn’t support your argument that Indeed’s yields are high.

    The real joke here is that Indeed does not publish its yield rates, either. Why? I think it’s because they suck. While writing an article for PBS NewsHour some time ago, I contacted CareerBuilder to ask about their yield rates. They told me they were over 60%, but would not provide evidence and then refused to give us permission to even quote them! It’s the common deflection from any job board. They don’t talk about success rates.

    You think Indeed works and that HR prefers to hide the evidence. I find that ludicrous. If Indeed et. al. really worked, they’d be shouting the evidence from the rooftops. They don’t, because they can’t, because there’s no evidence that Indeed and other job boards produce significant numbers of hires.

    Ever hear of an “outcomes analysis?” It’s what anyone in business who cares about the integrity of their systems conducts.

    I mark HR and Indeed a big FAIL.

  155. I’m glad I found this article-I’ve been in business for 22 years-and methods for recruiting have changed quite a bit since I started.

    I’ve used a few job boards and have hired qualified people from them-but Indeed is not one of them.

    They say that your job will be more visible if you pay a set amount of money per applicant-the hire the amount-the better.

    I realized that I was spending money for literally hundreds of people to paper their resumes at my jobs which they were no where near qualified to obtain.

    It was a costly mistake on my end-and my Indeed representative flat-out harassed me via email about my account.

    Indeed is one of the most unprofessional businesses I have ever dealt with.

  156. IT Is bogus, I’ve been doing active job search for over 5 yrs. NOTHING !!!!! and better yet I am working with an organization that helps disabled people find jobs. and what are they using ??? INDEED !!! I am so discouraged I cant believe that this organization is Using Indeed as a job search tool , I go in and meet with them on a weekly basis, and all we do is go over Indeed.

    I am so fed up , I do this my self Morning noon and night. and about to total stop using it period. I cant believe that the Bureau of Vocational Rehab would seriously believe that indeed is the only way to find a job.

    So i am changing my game up and looking at actual companies and I will say I have had more interviews with Craig’s but no offers.

  157. My mid-sized company of over 3,000 employees used Indeed to fill approximately 41% of corporate hires in 2015 and 33% of corporate hires, so far, in 2016. I know this because I compiled and analyzed the data. And by corporate hires I’m referring to businessmen, analysts, engineers … basically graduates of accredited institutions with specialized skills dealing with information, data, finance, etc. And we, somewhat shockingly, do not use an ATS, which makes Indeed a lot more unwieldy and referenced/internal hires a lot easier and more appealing by comparison. If we had an ATS those figures would probably be even higher.

    That is not even including blue collar workers and tradesmen, which constitute about 80% of the workforce, and are overwhelmingly pulled from Indeed. Almost exclusively, in fact.

    So, while I can’t say my company represents all or even most companies out there, it is a pretty ordinary mid-sized, mid-western company. So to claim Indeed is bogus is … pretty bogus, at least according to my experience.

    • Jon: What company do you work for that’s had such success with Indeed? Do you work in HR?

      • Yep, in HR.

        Since we don’t have an ATS, we do everything via email. It makes it real easy to tell where the applicants are coming from, and since that’s a concern of the company, albeit not a particularly pressing one. I am in my twenties, not exactly a seasoned veteran, but it’s not rocket science to run a spreadsheet and do basic statistics.

        As someone mentioned above, Indeed doesn’t really have a way to determine how many people are being hired using their site. Part of their process involves asking me, once I close a position, whether I made a hire. I just say “no”, because it’s easier. Not quite the ideal method for collecting accurate data.

        I want to point out again that, while it is relied on heavily where I work, it isn’t necessarily the case across industry or geographical location. Silicon Valley is unlikely to use Indeed much, if I cared to wager. I’m not an Indeed supporter really, but I will comment on the facts; that being, we hire people who apply through Indeed. Whether that is the ideal method for acquiring great candidates … that’s another matter altogether, and one I’m not qualified to answer.

        As for which company I work for, now that I’ve disclosed actual numbers, that information is property of the company, so I’d have to make sure I’m not violating any ethical standards. I can say they are a logistics company.

        Cheers.

      • Also, I wonder whether a consulting firm might be able to provide accurate data on this subject. I do know they haven’t asked for one word about source of hire from us, so I doubt it, but it might be worth it to reach out if this is still something you care about.

        Indeed is actually pissing me off right now. It’s buggy as hell after their recent update.

  158. I think the article is interesting and has some merit if Indeed is claiming to “fill” jobs. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Indeed says they are helping people “find” jobs. The purpose of Indeed and other job boards is to provide employers a tool to communicate job opportunities while also providing job seekers a tool to find job opportunities. As for actually filling the jobs, that is between the job applicant and the employer. In the end, it is up to the applicant to make a compelling case as to why he/she is the best candidate for the job opportunity. So, I don’t think Indeed or any job board can be blamed for not matching specific candidates to specific opportunities OR take credit for matching specific candidates to specific opportunities. Indeed is simply a tool, nothing more and nothing less.

    For example, if you gave me a pencil, I could draw a stick figure. However, if you gave an artist a pencil, they could draw you a landscape. If I was competing against the artist for a position that required a “drawing landscape” ability, who do you think would get the job? Not me, that’s for sure. Is Indeed the reason I lost the job? Is Indeed the reason the Artist won the job? I would say no in both cases. The reason I lost the job was because I was not the best candidate available.

    I agree that Indeed was very careful not to say anything about filling jobs, but, only because it’s not really possible for them to make that claim in the first place.

    • Very good point. Indeed is merely an aggregator. What do people expect?
      It may help you see what’s out there… It won’t get you the job.

      Yes there are scams. You’ll see these pretty quickly. I don’t blame Indeed. It’s not their job to sift through lying companies that post, and I’ve had recruiters do far worse.

      • @MissD: Indeed is free to behave as it does. And job seekers have a right to expect more than a dishing up of a mixed bag of “jobs,” many of which are bogus, stale, fake, or posted by lame recruiters who have no idea what they’re doing.

        We can justify that by saying the market bears it. We can also criticize it for what it is. And frankly, it sucks and deserves to be held out as a crummy service.

  159. As a job seeker, after reading all of these comments I’m not sure to feel. I’ve only just started using indeed 4 days ago so Im still hopeful that maybe finally I’ll have better results than 3 years of Craigslist. I used to stay away from indeed cause the arrangement of listings always looked messy to me mainly due to sponsor ads.

    I hate the networking world were in now because it favors popular people rather than people who can do the job. People shouldn’t be getting jobs just cause they know someone. There’s something wrong that and with ppl who think that’s okay. Many factors like our financial and social status that we were born with effect who we know so networking truly helps those born on top to stay on top. It’s much more difficult to network ur way up. And only for certain careers I can understand why networking would be useful.

    Another thing I hate are employers who won’t even interview someone cause they feel that person is under-qualified. But is the person severely under-qualified or just hasn’t checked off EVERY single box of the PERFECT candidate? Cause there’s a difference. Why don’t employers understand that job seekers can’t get expierence if they’re not hired. It’s a vicious circle for us. Why not at least give a person an intense week trial to prove their worth? Not everyone can do free internships, ppl have bills to pay. You want the perfect candidate but you’re not willing to train someone who is not exactly perfect but knows the basics. Perhaps that person is a quick learner.

    As a retail worker with administrative experience including at my current retail job I’m afraid I’ll be stuck in retail hell forever cause no one is willing to give me a chance to gain expierence while being able to pay bills. Also what’s up with needing expierence for an entry level position. Why even post it as entry level.

    Anyway, for now I’m going to continue to use indeed despite a lot of negative reviews here but thanks to reading the comments I’m also going to try link-up and the roundabout LinkedIn method another poster mention.

    • I am proof Indeed and other job boards can work. Don’t believe the hype that it’s ALL fake or scams. So not true.
      But don’t make job boards your ONLY source of job hunting either.

  160. Indeed is not obligated to provide you anything. What makes you so entitled? Are you lobbying for some other job board?

    It’s obvious the CareerBuilder – Monster price model has left corporate america with cost fatigue… other alternative means of posting a job ad / posting a resume would eventually come forward. This is the basic law of economics.

    Finally, I don’t want to have deal with multiple job boards as a job seeker or recruiter.

    Give us the one aggregator… even if its statistics does not clearly show its success at placements. At least the tools and resources exist in this alternative environment.

  161. Does anyone else incur a higher degree of porn spam around the time they post job advertisements on Indeed?

  162. Indeed’s job alerts stopped coming some time in September. they cant figure out why.
    They are not blocked by me or verizon. i even have them set as safe sender list.
    So weird. i want my job alerts back. no one can solve it. Indeed has no clue what is causing this.

    • GM, have you tried deleting the job alert and recreating it?

  163. I use the job boards to get noticed by recruiters. It’s the recruiters that virtually always place me in a position that not on the job boards.

  164. Indeed is ripping employers off, we have tried Indeed a number of times and no results, I am at all most 100% that the candidate does not show for the interviews.

    • Same here. did you pay for the service?

  165. I have found jobs and helped hire people through Indeed.ca The problem with Indeed and any other on-line job site from the perspective of job seekers is exactly what was posted in that info-graphic and that is the ever increasing volume of prospective job hunters. It is a lot easier to just send your resume and/or cover letter digitally to a slew of jobs without truly reading what that job is about or even qualifying to perform that particular job. This is what probably happens: Too many people flood the postings and at times this can cause those people who do take the time to personalize a cover letter and CV to employers feel like they’ve wasted their time. Indeed works to the employers benefit. If anything, the sheer volume of traffic on Indeed is most likely those seeking employment. Just as in real life (real life is increasingly more on line than it is anything else), its an employers market and they get to pick and choose through the tons of job seekers. As mentioned with the volume of these job sites, it is a matter of patiently sifting through a bevy of low quality job seekers, given the simplicity these sites offer to scatter your cv and cover letter to as many jobs with little, if any research and this floods those particular jobs and causes the employers the need to spend more time and money by skimming through and this may cause passing over some prime candidates, who get fed up after putting in a good amount of effort and time properly matching their skills to job postings.

    • I think the problem is obvious. Indeed provides a tool to encourage employers to recruit with a scatter-shot approach. They just want more applicants. So job seekers comply and “play the numbers.” That’s why it doesn’t work well, while employers complain they’ve got “too many of the wrong applicants” — after they use a tool that encourages too many of the wrong applicants. It’s pretty obvious, but loads of folks want to believe they can put something clever in their resume that the algorithms will “find.”

  166. I’ve gotten plenty of calls from jobs off of indeed. In my experience if your not getting calls revisit your resume or cover letter. Don’t just knock a job board until you know that your issues aren’t with you and your resume itself. Also, literally hundreds if not thousands are submitted applications to the job.

    • That’s precisely the problem most job seekers complain about: plenty of calls for jobs via Indeed. Most of them totally wrong jobs.

  167. Indeed does have a screening thing, of a sorts, though a liar can easily bypass it. (It sometimes asks you questions that if you have X amount of experience, if you live in X place, etc.) However, one can lie. Also, one could possibly be rejected if it asks if you live in Chicago, IL and you put no because you live in a town right next to it.

    It does have features that email you if an employer views your resume.

    (And there ARE features, that the job seeker can use on their job logs that indeed does (It can store “Applied”, “Save for Later”, “Viewed”, etc. Also, there is a spot to say if you got an interview, got an offer, if you accepted the offer (i.e. got a job), so there is a way at least for the job seeker to show the information you mention.

    (And, since Indeed probably has access to your stored data for you, it can probably aggregate it for others and use this to find it for job seekers in general that use Indeed. However, I didn’t even know some of these features existed till about a month ago or less, so if Indeed did use those statistics, they would only factor in those that knew the feature existed.)

  168. I’ve been using Indeed.com on and off for years just looking to see what’s out there. (I’ve been working at the company I’m at currently for a very long time) Once in a while I would like to see what else is out there, but Im never too sure about the jobs posted on Indeed…but what I normally would do is look on Indeed for postings then go to the company’s website and check for the same job posting there. If it’s something I think I may be good for then I will apply.

    But if you can’t trust Indeed, where else can you go to look up job posts that is legit? I would also look on Glassdoor.com but even on that site I’m not sure I could trust what I’m seeing either.

    Great article and comments!

    • Try LinkUp, which supposedly publishes only job postings direct from employers and their websites. The idea is that it’s not a job board but a job search engine that works like Google to find postings on employers’ own sites.

  169. I landed a single contract job from Indeed back in 2007, a time of its relative infancy and pre-saturation. Today, forget it. Chances are, you’re looking at a recycled posting of a position that never existed in the first place.

  170. I’m in agreement with you on this, hence how I found your article. But do you have one that tells people an effective way to search for jobs? Everything I’ve tried (checking company sites and cold selling included) have failed. I don’t have anyone I can network with. So I’m at a loss.

  171. Throughout my entire 20+ years working experience, and being an employer over 10 years, I had perhaps only one no show. However, with indeed.com, I have over 6 of them no show and could not get hold of them afterward to follow up as why no show; when I only had only 2 jobs posted with paid premium. This is really suspicious to say the least!

    Wonder if anyone have similar experience.

  172. I think INDEED are a bunch lying crooks, at no time ever have they been accurate in the location box for postcode. Every time I type in desired location post-code, it takes me to a page that states these are the jobs listed in my post-code, only when I click (MAP) they are 3-4000 kilometres away, sometimes even in other countries, I only visited the useless site because the info given by them led me to believe the info was valid. I wish these people could be banned from internet trolling!

    • Hi Adrian,

      The issue you mention can definitely entitle indeed.com being named as “site with very sub-par implementation”, “technically incompetent”, etc. Not necessary a crook yet, unless I find it for sure they did deceptive acts on purpose.

      For example, in my case, within a single week, 4 out of 5 people whom I set interview (back in 2016) with did not even bother to call me that they could not show up. It just happened to me yesterday again.

      While they cannot be responsible for unprofessional candidates, it is just simply strange or simply my bad luck for the high % of no show. But then, that never happened to me when I used craigslist back in the old days. I almost tempted to trace the call to find out if they are just google voice number which anyone can get plenty of. Now, if that’s what they did (which I am not saying they did at all), that will truly entitle indeed.com a crook. However, I hate to call them that before solid proof.

      • Looked up your website…storming robots. Very smart idea for teaching robotics. I see why you’ld need qualified hires. There seriously does need to be some kind of simple to implement verification system that Indeed job postings are real as now I see with your experience the potential phoniness works both ways for employer and future hires. The internet is still a wild west in this sense.

        I couple this with the rash of for profit tech schools around my here in San Antonio Tx that are closing their doors due to being investigated by the Feds for questionable practices with school loan and lack of curriculum certification where students aren’t getting the right training for their chosen tech career. It’s getting ridiculous especially for a country that practically invented modern economics and job creation. Something is definitely not adding up.

        • Tim: When Facebook implements simple methods to make users accountable, it’s hard to understand why employers and job boards don’t do the same. Unless we assume job boards are just out to make money rather than make matches (Sssssssssss……) and HR just doesn’t care.

      • Oh I have proof! Read my post. Your cancellations were companies either taking money by showing interviews, or and highly doubt this one… But they found out how they are ripping people off and wasting job seekers money and time. But they were cashing in. At least you had a call. Most just pull my resume with no contact. See they are charged every time their post is clicked, doesn’t need to apply- just click. So they take money per interview and $5000 per hire.

  173. I have signed up with Indeed before and have deleted my account from them. Well just recently I signed back up with them and noticed like CareerBuilders.com I get alot of spam emails and (Indeed) I get alot of calls from another state go figure. And all have nothing to do with the jobs I applied for.And to make matters worse I can’t delete my account from Indeed.com.

  174. Indeed is a SCAM!!! Complete rip off. Every interview from Scam, I’m sorry… Indeed, was a waste of time, money, paper, gas, etc. I am in the legal field and they just stole 2 months of my life and $100’s of dollars. I put the pieces together- I go to an interview which clearly they already have the position filled (few slipped and said it) and when I get home my resume was pulled while I was at interview! This happened on all Indeed interviews. You see, the employer gets paid BIG to interview= pull resume. (even resumes pulled with no contact, no call even) Then Indeed had a sponsored link that promises employers $5000 per hire! It’s BS and I would never work for anyone who post employment on Indeed. A law firm practicing such dishonesty should be brought before the legal commission. I have spoken to over 50 job seekers who used Indeed… NOT ONE HIRE! Just keeping the unemployed down.

    • Perhaps the legal field is NOT the field to be seeking jobs on Indeed. Just because you’ve had a bad experience, does not mean the whole thing is a scam as you put it.

      I’ve done very well with Indeed, and indeed most job boards in general over the years.

  175. After reading this article and keeping up with the comments (especially Cass’s input) I’m now convinced I made the right decision going on disability back in 2004.

    From ’78 to ’98 I hit the ground running cold calling and getting job interviews and hires 20 times on my own for various graphic artist and support service positions in Texas before computer skills were required. All employers low balled me at around $5 to $7/hr- half the market rate, after I was told by my high school senior career counselor before ’78 graduation I’ld start out at $14/hr.

    I had thought the internet would be this great social marketing tool for getting better hires when I took it upon myself to save up from my pizza delivery job $10K and sink it into buying my own digital imaging workstation and teach myself computer graphics skills. I was so overwhelmed by the complexity and gave up and went on disability.

    That high school career counselor that had advised me about my career choices in ’78 is now a big real estate broker with her face on billboards in the region of Texas where I went to high school.

    I swear talk is cheap now online or in life in general! When in doubt about the truth always follow the money.

  176. Making a decision to use Indeed to search for work probably depends on the category of jobs you are seeking.

    Entry level nursing without experience is not a category to be searching in Indeed. Waste of effort and time because they have not properly listed the jobs in that category.

    • If Indeed doesn’t properly list jobs in one category, what does that tell you about Indeed?

  177. Indeed are a company that dig very deep with their little Irish sales people in Ireland and somehow find out who your clients are, then go directly to your own clients, get this, your own clients to sell them Indeed services, but in the mean-time continue to try and sell the very companies they have stolen those clients from Indeed services.

    I loathe Indeed, they are a leeching company that eventually will fall. We know the saying, the bigger they are, the harder they call.

    I have even considered getting on a plane to Ireland to meet with Sam Gilmore who is a leech as far as I am concerned to put him in his place.

    Utter scumbag, thinks he is smart, but is aggravating a lot of companies. The same applies to the other Irish sales people. Aggressive, ill-experienced and only after your money.

    You are right, Indeed can not prop up their statistics.

    Leeching company.

  178. Wow, this post has sparked some heated debates over the years. Fwiw, I have a had some success with job boards. My previous job came from indeed, but I left after a year. My next job looks like it’ll be from indeed as well, fingers crossed.

    Because employees are the ones in control, there is no one size fits all solution. I have used friends as references in their companies only to learn that they hired internally from the get go. So, they only posted the job externally because they were legally obligated not because they had any interest in outside candidate.

    I’ve also had other friends actively recruiting on social media for their companies.

    I have been applying to a lot of jobs on indeed… a lot. Once, one of the recruiters dropped me because I asked for an alternate interview date. Conpletely ghosted me. On the other hand, I have been contacted about local postings and done a few interviews.

    TL;dr: Job hunting sucks, you have to keep try multiple job sources a lot of times to stack the deck in your favor. You CAN get a job on a job board. You just might have to apply to 100+ -_-

    • I meant to say employers not employees. Stupid autocorrect

    • Well, “Hired”, it’s been said many times by career counselors “Looking for job is a full time job.”…but that was in reference to old way of pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, cold calling on the phone and networking which involves looking at real people face to face and have them say no or yes to being hired.

      Online job boards appear to be cattle calls from hell!

      I just found a posting to a local company that my skill set would be perfect for but when I clicked on the listing in my email inbox it took me to Indeed’s page presenting the “Help Wanted” call out headline that underneath said “The person posting this on Indeed is not with the company” where all it shows is two cellphone photos of the familiar front bounding fence of the company I live blocks from showing “Now Hiring” signs. No other information describing what the job is.

  179. Indeed has lately gone to a new low: posting pictures of help wanted signs as a job ad. Something like this:

    https://helpwanted.indeed.com/jobs/viewjob/2d6fa263fd9f02a7?jk=409fa649d682ba34&serptk=1bi9j43tb1a4j5pn

    Then there are the babysitting jobs, etc. Then there are all the staffing and temp agencies.

    I noticed that for within 25 miles of my town, assuming I enter no keywords, and don’t use advanced job search, that it shows 1137 jobs.

    If I reduce it to exclude staffing agencies (not that it’s foolproof as I still see temp agencies slip by), I get it down to 1063.

    If I get it to exclude staffing agencies and show only employer websites, I get it down to 1007.

    Now, here’s the kicker, if I get it to go to no staffing agencies (supposedly), only employer websites, and within the last 15 days, it drops down to only 231 jobs. So it appears that the vast majority of the job postings, at least in my area anyway, are over 15 days old!

    If I reduce it to within just 7 days with the other stuff as before, I get it down to just 144 jobs!

    • I did a similar winnowing down by specifics for my area. I kept it to within 5 miles of my zip code because I didn’t want to commute to the nearby big city and I still received over one thousand job postings of similar variety to yours, Paul.

      My 70K population town is noted in finance news media as being the second fastest growing city in the nation but that’s mostly from those buying houses in surrounding newly built subdivisions in order to commute to the nearby big city. So I’m wondering where they’re going to get qualified applicants since most of the available workforce are native residents that work close to minimum wage as support service personnel the tourist/hotel/restaurant industry.

      And just to add to my previous post about the local company my skill set would be a good match for, the Indeed page posted by someone not with the company with the two photos showing “Now Hiring” signs on their front fence instructs that anyone interested in being hired should walk in and apply.

      So that indicates it’s not being posted by a staffing agency, but then who could it be. Pretty shady if you ask me.

  180. I recently applied for one company at the same exact position I used the same resume also. One resume was sent through indeed and the other resume through a different site. Oddly enough I received very opposite emails from both postings. I’m just curious how this is possible?

  181. Indeed website is always full of job potentials, and if your job isn’t available, it gives plenty of other similar options. . Indeed is the most optimal newsletter distribution system for https://www.hecmo.com. That are related to our requirement and our eligibility. This site was probably the first website that gave a full description of not only the job, but the needed requirements, so you won’t have to leave its website to visit another and then have to search for that information. It also gives great information about the company and the company’s reviews. Also, if the jobs are rare, you can always add other job alerts easily.

  182. We used Indeed to hire office executives and as per our personal experience, we can say with full confidence that it is one of the best Job Portal for Startups to find a right talent from the pool of talented candidates. Our https://www.hecmo.com is a new e-commerce startup and we found suitable candidates on Indeed as per our business needs.

  183. Just got a notice from Indeed’s Terms Of Service agreement and it pretty much makes them as responsible as Craig’s List on vetting job postings. Here’s a snippet…

    1. The Indeed Services

    Indeed may make available certain job listings and other job-related contents, including links to third-party websites (such listings and other contents, (“Job Listings” or “Job Ads”), through Indeed’s search results or otherwise through the Site. Job Listings are created and provided by third parties over whom Indeed exercises no control; you acknowledge and understand that we have no control over Job Listings. Except for certain sponsored, featured or paid placements, the Job Listings contained on, or linked from, the Site are indexed or posted in an automated manner. Indeed does not have any obligation to screen any Job Listing, or to include any Job Listing in its search results or other listings, and may exclude or remove any Job Listing from the Site for any or no reason. We cannot confirm the accuracy or completeness of any Job Listing or other information submitted by any employer or other user, including the identity of such employer or other user. Indeed assumes no responsibility, and disclaims all liability, for the content, accuracy, completeness, legality, reliability, or availability of any Job Listing. You agree that Indeed may also provide search options to narrow down Job Listing search results by job type (i.e. full-time, part-time, etc.), and such job types are created independently and entirely by Indeed, and are not a direct reflection of the actual Job Listing.

    That’s so comforting. Isn’t it?

    • Indeed and most job boards are merely web aggregators. They cannot possibly vet that a company is lying about a job or it is a real job. What the heck do you expect?
      i’ve had worse from some of these so-called recruiters who really ARE supposed to be vetting the jobs.

      • @MissD: I expect job aggregators and boards to vet the jobs they post. If they did, recruiters and employers would change their behavior. But I’ll tell you why they don’t vet jobs: Because job seekers don’t pay to use these services. Employers do.

        Job seekers don’t have the resources to waste while playing a massive numbers game. Employers do, though I wonder what a board of directors would say if it knew how its money was being spent. Employers can dump billions into this poorly performing system and escape unscathed because they can cry “talent shortage” and no one’s the wiser.

        Who’s getting screwed are job seekers. Employers lose, too, but they can afford the costs and losses and write them off. The damage is to the economy.

  184. indeed is just a scam, they tell you to sponsor job ads to get more leads…. you get zero leads… my average cost per sponsored lead right now is 15$ which is 5x the average in my industry.

    its just a bot-click sponsored ad scam, why do you think they get all the traffic, this has already been went over years back, ALL sponsored ad formats are a scam to rob employers and produce zero results.

  185. I’m moving to Knoxville, and I got on Indeed and found lots of jobs up there, and I have no less than three interview offers to good places. I’m not sure what you’re fussing about, but you seem to just want to find fault. Why get on the web and just hurt companies for no reason? What did Indeed do to you, because they truly helped me with no problems at all.

    • @Ayn: Who’s hurting Indeed? But read the comments above to see how Indeed hurt the people who posted them.

      I’m happy for you if Indeed led you to jobs.

  186. Indeed is a brilliant and useful website for job seekers and employers. I have used it as a job seeker because it’s a one-stop shop for finding job postings, which saves job seekers time. Whether applicants get a phone call or hire from using Indeed, CareerBuilder or any other site depends upon how successfully they were able to articulate how their skills, knowledge and experience meet the requirements of the job for which they applied.

    I’m also a seasoned recruiter and can tell you that employers love Indeed because Indeed posts their jobs for free, it has a large audience of job seekers, and employers are getting qualified applicants from their postings. Are there other ways to find jobs and job seekers? Of course. But Indeed is the best site at this time for getting the word out about a job opening to a large pool of job seekers. So as long as its popularity grows and job postings for employers are free, Indeed will continue to be a win-win situation for me. It may not be the same experience for a headhunter.

  187. Indeed is the biggest scam and terrible waste of people searching for work. They are not free. I and another person tested out our theory and the three interviews I went on (which I was overqualified for) was just a person the office set up to hold interviews all day to make money to pay off the charges. Every time a job seeker clicks on the “Apply” button the employer is charged. Job posters are even starting to act out on the site by making statements like; “I quit! You lied and said this would be free.” So an employer tested the theory and it is correct. Every time the apply button is hit the employer is charged. Then employers will pull your resume and say they held an interview = for money; they never even spoke to the hireree. Then they promise to pay $5000 per hire. Now they even have recruiters who we tested, and they ask for all your personal info and say they have a direct hire position right now for you. Then after they get all your information they tell you the employer is holding off on the job and give a dumb reason. People have had their bank accounts and personal info tampered with as well. Any legal, dental, medical, etc…. professionals do not belong on this scam of a site. Law firms and medical corporations have been notified after recruiters called and I think we’ll be seeing Indeed taking a different route. Working with legislatures to make it illegal for reputable employment to even advertise on the site. Many say they never posted when recruiters step in and fumble around. SCAM One employer even came out and admitted they had one person in the office doing nothing but holding interviews all day to collect money for the money charged. That is time and gas that job seekers do not need to put up with. Anytime you see an email that your resume was pulled by an employer, they are saying they held an interview. Watch and see for yourself. I was getting emails asking how my interview went after a company would pull my resume. BS is what it is.

  188. Well, I disagree. I literally AM the proof that job boards can work quite well.
    I have found almost all of my jobs in the last 15 years via job boards such as Monster, LinkedIn, HigherEdJobs, Indeed and yes even Craigslist.

    Recently, I’ve been using Indeed, and after applying for 15 jobs on a weekend, I received calls from over half of them. True, sometimes this didn’t move beyond the phone screen (of the 9 calls only 4 went to in-person interviews) but I still count that as a win, and it tells me my resume is working. Usually with the calls, the screen-outs are due to vastly different salary ranges, so I’m glad not to waste too much time, and I sure they are as well.

    But of course, a job board should never be your ONLY source of job hunting (duh!), and this also varies greatly by industry.
    I happen to work in a very tech-savvy field where Internet-anything is the norm. Yes, I have found scams. Yes, some jobs are ghost jobs. Yes, it can be time-consuming. But I have also found REAL jobs! GOOD jobs! So, don’t be completely put off by Indeed or any other job board and let people tell you it’s all about who you know in the magic world of “networking.” Rarely, have I found a jobs by the magic of “networking.”

    • @MissD: You offer interesting logic in comparing job boards to networking. Job boards don’t suck because you’re proof they work. But networking isn’t a good solution because it doesn’t work for you.

  189. I do agree that indeed is full of hype only. You create a profile and upload a resume. The site jams your email account with thousands of job offers but when you contact employers, no offers are forthcoming. Not even for the lowest, no experience needed, entry level positions. You close your account with indeed for a while, then when you search for jobs, all the search returns is indeed job offers. Again, after months or years the experience is the same no matter how much experience or skills you have. I purposed never to search or trust them again. I think they’re all fake.

  190. I used indeed and got a few leads. I constantly got adds listed for jobs in Chester, Ohio . The jobs were always in West Chester, Ohio. Not only are they about 200 miles from each, how can Indeed continiously keep listing the wrong town in the job search business?. When i contacted them, all my info disappeared and no more emails came.This site is one big joke that is not funny.

    • @Dennis: While the job-board industry touts its “incredible” technology, your experience reveals that all we get from these systems is simple database string searches. They can’t even distinguish towns. If the federal government were to look closely, it would find that our country’s employment market and economy are being sabotaged by “technology” that’s not worthy of a grade-school coder.

  191. My wife runs a popular retail chain store and recently took to Indeed to find qualified applicants. In Los Angeles, at a high profile new location opening, it’s in the news, she received 3 applicants, all three of which had simply uploaded their resume and clicked any title that closely matched their interests. None of the three even knew who the company was, or what the details of the job posted were, they simply clicked “send resume.” Two didn’t speak high school level English, the third had never heard of the company and wasn’t sure where it was located, but applied just the same.

    I’m sure there are people really looking for work. Are they using the potential of Indeed? Doesn’t seem so. Has Indeed ever brought me a job offer or listing that is close to my experience or qualifications? In well over five years … no. I have never been approached by anyone but temp agency spammers and lead generators for low quality insurance sales scams.

    Indeed, you are not doing what you claim. Indeed, I have to look elsewhere. Glassdoor? Maybe. Monster? Probably not. Consolidation loan from BOA? Most likely. Losing my home in Los Angeles in the next two years due to the lack of employment. Indeed.

    • I don’t remember anyone ever putting it so clearly and compellingly. Indeed and other job boards are so EASY to use that they promote junk recruiting and junk job hunting.

  192. I’ve been applying for jobs through indeed for ten months and have yet to even land an interview.

  193. Just got the blue/white screen of: ‘you are denied access’ from Indeed. Having used it for years,as I recruit within specific industries, my postings are very stable in description. The first rejection was because they couldn’t verify my postings to an ‘actual’ company. As required as proof: a utility bill. So a telephone bill (listing the company name, address, and phones) was sent and was rejected; can’t send an electric, water or heat as included in rent and explained.
    Business license: don’t really have one, so I sent information from my state’s corporations list. Rejected. Sent a copy of my insurance coverage/941 which had all company information listed on them: rejected.
    In the REAL world, a conversation would be had to discuss the SPECIFIC issue (we now have about three) but NO can discuss anything at that company.
    I haven’t had spectacular results from postings, but some are good and the price makes it palatable.

  194. Really….? You people are going to believe a Head Hunter, who uses LinkedIn and Indeed Resume Database to place people for 18%-15% of their salary…

    I sold for Indeed and I cant count on my hands and toes how many hires I made for my clients…

    Report: Indeed Delivers 65% of Hires and 72% of Interviews from Job Sites
    http://blog.indeed.com/2017/05/31/indeed-delivers-65-percent-online-hires/

  195. Employer here: looking for reasons why candidates that apply for my jobs either a)Don’t respond when I reach out to schedule an interview or b) Don’t show up for an interview. It appears that there’s some fishiness happening on both sides of this.

    • Rebecca: If you’re using job boards to solicit applicants, most of them are probably applying blindly, just because they saw the posting, not because it’s a job they really want. They apply to so many this way that they just can’t keep up — or, by the time you get in touch, they’ve moved on. That’s why many are ignoring you.

      The problem is that when employers solicit so broadly from the pool of “everyone out there,” the rate of failure is virtually guaranteed to be huge. My suggestion is, don’t solicit widely by using job boards. Figure out where the best potential candidates hang out, the people you’d really like to interview — and go look for them in those narrow hangouts. I think your hit rate will go up dramatically.

      I know that posting on job boards is what employers do. LinkedIn, Indeed, Zip make it seem so easy and they promise they will take care of everything. That’s nonsense. Please consider this: Job boards make money only when job seekers KEEP job hunting and when employers DO NOT fill jobs. Everyone keeps spinning the roulette wheel.

      People who respond to cattle calls are not likely to actually show up.

    • Hi Rebecca,

      Indeed’s business model is to get your job posting as many clicks as possible. For them it is all about quantity and not quality.

      Indeed’s Easy Apply makes it very simple for these candidates to apply for a ton of positions in one sitting. I would bet if you had an applicant who is going to take the time to fill out individual applications and forms to apply, they would show up to the interview because they are serious about the position.

      Hope this helps. I work for Career Center that focuses more on quality of the candidates and works to maximize your PPC budget instead of draining it as soon as possible. I have listed my E-mail below. Please reach out, I would love to discuss how we can help!
      ( mattmcguire1010@gmail.com )

  196. As someone who spent years looking on Indeed for jobs I can say the site is a pile of crap. I hate all the lies they spur in their commercials.

  197. This is first hand information on indeed … as of 01-01-2018 and today 01-28-2018

    I have sent out a resume for Kia dealer in Texas. They sent me a rejection email saying I don’t fit to what they are looking for and they have found another suitable candidate and thanking me for applying. There days later the same job opportunity is back on indeed looking for the same vacancy . I applied again . Same thing happened . Rejection letter and they say the vacancy is filled . Two days later the same vacancy is back on indeed. Then I drive down to the location and ask if there is a such vacancy . They reply by saying not at the moment but they might have in the future.

    This is not only with the Kia dealer but Mercedes Benz of Austin , Honda of San Marcus , Toyota of Dallas , etc

    The HR departments are constantly
    Advertising for jobs they don’t have . This is done to make them selfs look busy to management . Don’t be disheartened by this use the good old method.. go knock on the door and talk to a manager or higher person .

    This crap is not right and impacts a job seeker negatively . Somebody need to do somthing about this . Never again will I use online applications or send out resumes again …

    Wish u all the very best !!!!

  198. I’ve gotten precisely ONE phone interview as a response to positions posted on Indeed to which I’ve applied. Anyone who reached out to me when I was foolish enough to upload my resume there (I’ve since taken it down) was nothing other than Indian recruiters who never bothered to actually read my resume but instead tried to pigeonhole me on the basis of my work history – and it was for PT work at that.

    Indeed is absolutely, thoroughly, unequivocally less than worthless. Add to the mix all the shenanigans regarding fake job postings, and you really have to wonder, Dear Lord are there THAT many gullible people in the world to keep Indeed in business all these years?

    • you are so right – are the indians with strong Hini accents local or in India?

  199. I had my resume on Careerbuilder and Monster for over a decade. Only staffing agencies contacted me from these job boards. I was constantly going to staffing agency offices, talking to a recruiter, taking the Prove It tests, being sent to interviews, only to get a temp position with an employer that terminates my contract just before I am eligible to become an actual employee with the company.

    One staffing agency sent me to an employer twice for the same position within 4 months. Apparently, they had agreement with each other to test how candidates would interview.

    I eventually realized that the recruiters were only trying increase the number of candidates they could sign up. Unfortunately, I had to take what was offered so I could survive. I was extremely let down with these (and several other) job boards. I also figured out that these job boards were giving out my contact info and it was a job in itself just to delete all the scam messages.

    7 months ago I took a chance on Indeed. Within a week, I was contacted directly by a company (not a staffing agency!)for an interview. One week later, I had another company call me for an interview and they hired me on the spot. I am now employed with a growing company and working in a field that I have always enjoyed.

    I removed my resume from Careerbuilder, Monster, and the other job boards, but kept it on Indeed to see if I would still get scam calls. Over the last 6 months, the scam calls and emails diminished and have now completely stopped. Indeed is the only job board that I refer to anyone.

  200. indeed says “your resume is a match” it is NOT their search engines is CRAP

  201. This article is bogus, not Indeed.
    How can any job board guarantee success?
    You post a job, then wait for applicants to view and apply for you job.
    If you suck at creating a job description, you will get mostly morons that do not qualify for your job. Is that the fault of job boards? NO.
    Most great hires come from recruiter; not job boards.
    Job boards are mainly used by recruiters to fill their pipeline with applicants.
    If I am looking for a job, I call recruiters; not apply online for jobs. Most of my IT contracts came from recruiters who had a good relationship with hiring managers, not job boards.
    Indeed is a job aggregator. They make their money from pay per click from recruiters, who are willing to pay more to have their results always on top.
    The only issue I have with Indeed, if I post too many free jobs, they cut you off, without notice. But, it is their site and they can do what they want. There is no law saying they need to keep giving me free job postings. There are workarounds to their free job posting limits. Use your imagination to figure that out.
    Overall, I am very happy with Indeed. Talk to an account executive (salesperson) there. They will fid a way to accommodate you, so you become a paying customer. They, like all smart businesses, love paying customers.

  202. @Tom P: Let’s follow your logic, which I agree with. It’s better to go directly to the employer or recruiter than to apply online.

    1. “If I am looking for a job, I call recruiters; not apply online for jobs.”
    2. “Job boards are mainly used by recruiters to fill their pipeline with applicants.”
    3. “Most great hires come from recruiter; not job boards.”

    So, if you go direct to recruiters rather than job boards because that’s the better approach, shouldn’t recruiters go direct to job seekers rather than “apply online for” job applicants?

    It’s pretty clear from your logic: Job boards are nowhere near a good way to apply for jobs. You don’t do it that way yourself. My compliments.

    So why are you defending a job board like Indeed? Your argument is bogus because it makes exactly the opposite point of your conclusion.

  203. indeed engine is a piece of crap

  204. 1) Indeed makes money off pay for click. So it is in their interest to post fake/out dated non active jobs. Every time someone clicks on an outdated non active job postings they get paid. This is why in my estimate about %80 of the posted jobs are fake.

    2) There is another layer–recruiting companies. I do not know the exact number of course but I have more then a strong feeling that third party recruiting companies have exploded over the last few years–especially in big cites. And they are all competing with one another. So when you apply to a job on Indeed or LinkedIn, or Glassdoor, a fair amount of the time it is going to a third party recruiting company hired by the company you are applying to and the recruiting company are a buffer or middleman.

    In addition it is NOT the company you are applying to that are posting the inactive jobs it is the third party recruiting companies that are posting these inactive jobs. Why would they do this? Much like Indeed they are mining your data. They are competing with one another and want to approach potential clients with the biggest database of candidates.

    I have been laid off 8 times in my work life in three different industries on two different coasts so I have seen it all. Just one example I have had literally the same job come to my inbox as in open job from all the job boards at least once a week if not twice a week. It is going on ten months now, obviously not an active job. I also have applied to company A and then get an email a few weeks later from recruiting company B welcoming me to their database.

    3) All the good news they are reporting on the news is BS. The economy is NOT doing well at all. If it is doing so well, why does the average REAL job posting get thousands of responses? I call BS. The data they get from the government is flawed, it is based on the illusion of real active jobs when in reality they are not. And I am also beginning to believe that there is some intentional manipulation of this data from the government.

  205. anm hit nail on head several times

    indeed sucks

  206. 150+ resumes submitted, two crappy calls. I am not a fan and don’t recommend.

  207. Agree

  208. Indeed is a horrible place to place job ads, even for free.
    Instead, they should charge $5, rather than load their site with jobs, most of which are over 30 days old, wasting everyone’s time.
    I was told posting ads was free, so I posted 7 jobs. Two days later, after I received 230 applications, they cut me off suddenly, giving me a bogus reason for the cutoff.
    I should sue them, since they claim you can post free ads. They should disclose, in easy to understand print, what their terms of free means. Is there a limit of applicants?
    I will not pay for pay per click, because I have no control of what I pay for.
    Instead, they should let me view the applicant resume and let me pay for the ones I want. Depending on the pay I would pay the applicant, I would pay $5 per resume for $100K jobs and $1 or $2 per resume for under $100K jobs.
    Now, they would have a booming business. I would charge $5 to post a job to get rid of the bogus jobs and spammers.
    That is what we are planning to do on wetcrow.com.
    All Indeed.com is doing is cluttering the Internet with old jobs that are mainly filled already.

  209. I have been looking for a job for 3 years now on Indeed.ca. I have applied to hundreds of jobs. I AGREE I THINK INDEED IS INDEED BOGUS. THE JOBS ARE NOT REAL. IT IS A SCAM.

    The only time I heard from anything through Indeed.ca was a direct marketing job.

    INDEED ISN’T WORKING FOR ME!!!!!!!!!!!

    • ‘Looking for a job for 3 years,’ suggests you are applying for jobs for which you have no experience or not to the employer LOOKING for your experience. With the job market being ‘hot,’ qualified people don’t last long.

      It appears that Indeed treats both job seekers and employers the exact same: BAD.

  210. I’m no fan of Indeed, Career Builder, Zip Recruiter or any other job boards. IMO, employers use this for researching the job market more than actually hiring. I’ve been at a toxic job for 5 years, and I’m looking to get out. Going out in industrial parks and handing out resumes door-door worked for me back in the day, but not today. I’ve used Indeed for about 2 years. I’ve had about 10 calls, which I ghosted. I’ve had 4 interviews. One came back with a low ball offer, one reneged on an offer (thankfully, and wisely, hadn’t turned in my notice yet), and two flat out ghosted me. Indeed is a black hole, but is indicative of a deeper underlying cultural problem, that of multitudes of inhuman and unethical employers looking to hire (youngsters) cheap!

    • You are generalizing against employers. I am a small business owner who is attempting to hire on Indeed by offering top compensation packages. I have been ghosted by three applicants thus far and 95% of the applicants claiming to be state licensed in our industry, are not licensed. So, while you say “inhuman (I think you meant inhumane) and unethical employers, I say flip that coin. A bunch of bs jobless welfare sucking twits with nothing better to do than waste an employer’s time

  211. Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter, Simply Hired have all been selling my personal information to a Department of Defense contractor called “The ILLUMINATI”. Who in turn, have launched a vicious organized GANG Cyber STALKING campaign against me, black balling me from the employment industry and rendering me homeless. And I have 3 COLLEGE degrees.

    • :O
      How do you know they sold your information? It’s definitely possible. I don’t believe they even claim to keep information private. I just deleted my own account thanks to the great info on this website and the comments.

  212. Nick, I totally agree with your assessment. It’s like dating sites: sure, lots of people are on them browsing, but how many interactions lead to in-person dates? Further, if you do a longitudinal analysis of successful in-person meetings, how many of those lead to relationships lasting a year or longer? Anecdotes != data, but most of the people I know who have been successfully coupled for 10+ years met their mates conventionally: at the gym, grocery, church, &c. In other words, old-fashioned networking.

  213. I’ve found job boards to be nothing more than “fishing expeditions” and scams. Problem is, pounding the pavement handing out paper resumes, calling hiring managers, LinkedIn, and the over-rated networking is not acceptable with many employers. Its all this pajama blogging on job boards now. Seems to me to be a tool for lazy HR and hiring managers to vet and reject candidates, plus experienced a reneged job offer (hadn’t turned in notice at current job yet), and low-ball offers after agreeing to a salary range.

  214. Out of work for almost a year and cant find anything. I am highly skilled in a lot of areas and even factory certified in the mechanical field. I have over 20 years background in management and every thing that goes along with it. I am posted on all the fake sites like indeed,monster,linkedin as well as anyplace I can find to put any one of my resumes. I cant even get a reply from Walmart. I have been told by some companies that they will not hire anyone from my last employer. the state unemployment office even told me my last employer was nothing but problems and good luck finding a job. I just want some stupid part time job to bring in a few dollars. The whole system is a mess.

  215. Disruptors, I’m in the UK and run a couple of niche recruitment businesses, I’m generally sceptical about all job boards, in honesty always have been but played their game of “ look at what your competitors are doing” and handed over significant chunks of our bottom line to several of the old school boards and hoped that the monthly outgoings across several boards (usually in the region of £500 a month for 10 to 20 jobs plus database access times say 3 or 4 boards) would garner at least the placement or two that would break even on the deal. Then, over the last 3 or 4 years, the likes of Indeed, Zip, Careerbase etc have insidiously snuck in, their initial target, the whole market who were reluctant to use either an agency or a paid job board, effectively damaged their local printed press, next they sucked up the burgeoning “one man bander” recruitment agency that had a low margin, low quality, low ethical methodology and loved the free advertising and access to a growing database of Early adopters who were often qualified but miles away… simultaneously a growing dissatisfaction with the old boards arrogant pricing policies and diminishing returns of quality candidates was starting to bite, there were bigger hits on the aggregators that the old boards had naively got into bed with irretrievably damaging their job boards individuality – why go to Monster or Reed when you can go to indeed and see all of the jobs?! Fine, you might think, im still getting applications.., but indeed we’re getting candidate details, and giving them away for free! And, charging Employers or job boatds by the click no matter where or which route they came by…. so, cheap, massive volumes of traffic and a growing domination of traffic (which we are all told and believe now is what its all about) allows the free indeed board to move into their endgame, recruiters suddenly get told “this job has to be sponsored to be posted to maintain our candidate experience” meanwhile, said recruiter gets bombarded with dog shit quality candidates… the old boards are disappearing, can’t keep up with the volume of jobs which give primacy in google searches (though google has latterly commenced its jobs project) and gradually the disruption reaches its goal, monopoly.

  216. Therr are some geniuses out there now offering free recruitment software and multi posting to (surprise surprise) the aggregator sites in return for ppc (tiny returns in isolation but multiplied by millions of candidates looking for a job, significant) commissions paid by the likes of indeed from their fees to employers and recruitment companies… eventually, and I’m not talking in years much further than one hand, they will come for the recruitment industry, low charge, AI driven products backed up by their already omnipotent network will suck up the bulk of the jobs most recruiters fill as their bread and butter. For me, the future is niche, very human and high quality recruitment for a select and discerning client base who still value quality over quantity. But these guys are here to stay. Disruption, if it can destroy truck drivers, it probably should take out recruiters too!

    • Richard Kelly: My comment is not about Indeed per se (I read this article to find out if the major job boards are legitimate any longer. I previously (2004 to 2014) had moderate success with boards, but they appear to have become much worse after 2014).

      Specific to your posted reply, I am curious as to how your candidates (the ones who simply did not show for interviews and did not call to cancel) remained anonymous. I have NEVER cancelled in interview in my life, but the usual procedure has always been that the potential employer contacted me by phone or email to setup a phone or onsite interview. So IF I were to be rude and not show up for an interview – the employer could contact me to at least ask why this occurred.

      I realize employers do not have the time to constantly take this approach, but if an employer is getting many candidates exhibiting this behavior – it might help to single out one or two and contact them with a simple question: “Why did you not appear for the scheduled interview, or at least call us about cancellation?”

  217. Indeed lets companies post job reviews of current employees. I sifted through a few companies job related in my field and can totally see that these reviews are mostly fake. In some cases there are dozens of 4/5 star ratings. Why would anyone working there ever write a review? Not possible. Indeed is a gigantic fraud like Monster, etc… Don’t waste you time people apply directly to the company. Warning sign if the company doesn’t do this.

  218. Linked-in is also a horrid social media site don’t do it, you broadcast all your personal information to the world.

  219. I’ve received atleast half a dozen calls feom headhunters that found me on indeed. I’ve also been called by 1 or 2 companies directly. My last 2 jobs were through indeed. I may be 1 in a million though.

  220. Indeed.com – what a joke! The first time we used indeed.com was for an accounting position. We received scads of resumes and scheduled 8 interviews. 1 (one) showed up and the rest were no call no show. Fortunately, we got really lucky and hired the one person who showed up. Just recently we posted another job with indeed.com. Again we got scads of resumes and this time we scheduled 10 interviews. Not one person (zero) showed up and not one person (zero) called to cancel. This is the problem with job boards. They are completely anonymous with no accountability – as a result their “applicants” are free to be flakey without recourse. This is the last time we will use indeed.com

    • @Paul: Yours is one of the most compelling critiques of Indeed that I’ve seen from an employer. Thanks for sharing it. Most telling is the stunning no-show rate. What it reveals is that Indeed is essentially promoting drive-by job applications.

    • I’m getting Indeed emails late in my inbox. They show up well after the time that it says they were sent. I didn’t blame this on Indeed, since it could be multiple issues. However, if this many candidates are just giving up the job search, that would be unusual. I saw this complaint on Consumer Affairs in May and now I’m seeing it here. If you think about the cause of the situation, it’s probably not that people deciding they all of a sudden don’t want a job anymore…

    • So…you’re blaming a website for people flaking on their interviews? And you booked them in for interviews but you don’t know their name/phone number/email to follow up with them? How are they anonymous? This isn’t adding up.

      BTW, there is a way to track hires with Indeed. You have to take the step to mark the candidate you hired as “hired” in their system. If you don’t, Indeed can’t track it.

      So Nick, you’re right in saying that it’s not accurate due to the number of people that don’t go back into the system to mark the person as hired.

      If anything, the numbers they present are probably higher in success.

      Job boards are marketing websites. That’s it. It’s the same as a radio or newspaper ad. If you define advertising/marketing as a “scam”, then I guess Coca Cola should stop running commercials.

      • @A: “Job boards are marketing websites”?

        This marketing website claims it delivers 65% of hires from websites:
        https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/12900/indeed-delivers-65-percent-of-hires

        Show me one radio or newspaper ad that claims it delivers X% of sales of a certain product, then we can talk about bogus-ness.

        Show me a radio station or newspaper that wants you to fill out forms with your personal information so you can “access” the products it advertises, then we can talk about bogus-ness.

        Gimme a break.

  221. I was disappointed today when taking an assessment for something I was doing well in when the test skipped forward questions… There is no way to retake it for the position, or likely at all, even though it is advertised this way. The only thing it does is move forward with blank choices after skipping forward. Previous to this, I get an email from an Indeed address requesting “my real resume.” I don’t know if this is a scam outside of Indeed or a mix of crappy employees and or crappy policies and crappy technology. What I do know is that the faulty assessment record holds me back and the person trying to hire a fit person for that position. Getting suspect emails from people who are clearly messing with candidates doesn’t help the job search either. The test seemed unusually challenging for a retail person who would use a POS device anyway, but was simple for me up until the point that it started skipping questions, which is another reason I’m feeling extra suspicious of the Indeed process as a whole and what their intention is for tests, record keeping, candidates, and impeding the progress of people just looking to sustain themselves by finding work.

  222. Indeed makes it money by charging recruiters and employers per click. They are nothing more than a click bait company that really does nothing to promote the matching of job seekers with real jobs. Actually a worthless site.

  223. So many jobs are fake and so many scam repetitions of the same ad by people like door canvass research companies and Care companies don’t believe their ad figures on jobs and they don’t vet advertisers so many companies that don’t exist but they don’t care they get paid on traffic my ex I was relocared from from domestic violence put baited ads on to try to trap me into applying to fin my whereabouts and then reported me to Indeed for no reason one he made up to hassle me in job applying

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  225. The only jobs posted on the internet are the one’s that nobody wants, low pay, high turnover, problem employers.
    Good jobs are found by word of mouth or friends or internal hiring.
    The truth is job boards and recruiters can ruin you, some recruiters are vindictive people and if you don’t go with them they’ll pan you to everyone they can.
    Human resources is the number one problem for finding jobs these days and for companies finding people. The lack of qualified people is a myth, bungling ignorant rude HR staff ruin things all too often. People don’t want to take the risk of jumping from a job to that kind of situation.

  226. I have been using indeed for years to look for jobs for various members of my family,using the same email address….. I do not create accounts. I do not want my resume posted publicly with our name address email phone number etc. I am careful of the sneaky way they try to get you to create an account after I press submit.
    Today I filled in the preliminary information name email…. and an @indeedemail pop up in place of my email. It was in my husbands name and we have never seen it before. So I guess he has an account and goodness know what is now being publicly displayed.
    This happened without our knowledge or consent and it has happened to many other people:

    https://www.indeed.com/community/indeed-feedback/email/td-p/55661

    I this illegal? Identity theft?

    I’m frustrated and will never use Indeed again

    • Hey, this also happened to me! I never create an account and this time it assigned an email address for indeed (something like craigslist would assign you a temporary masked email address). I am also questioning what does “URGENTLY HIRING” on their ads mean? Knowing Indeed, they probably mean they are sponsored. I stopped applying to ‘sponsored’ ads long ago as it meant employers were just wanting more job applications and meant I was competing with more people. Rather not work for a company that needs more job applicants… they probably have bad reviews and that is the reason they are having to pay extra hahaha. Also true what STEVE said in Nov 2019 – there is no lack of employees but HR people are the problem. I have gotten job offers or call back from companies like InnoSource where I was yelled at by the Russian employee by Elyse Macejko because she was stressed? She kept cutting me off as I was answering her question and then just plain twisted my words while yelling. That is why I am not working for you InnoSource, thanks for the job offer but I’m not about to get yelled at like a child. InnoSource you should look at hiring people that are Indian – they are respectful and get rid of your call center, speaking to a million people for your stupid jobs.

  227. I TOO HAVE BEEN CRUISING INDEED FOR OVER THREE YEARS NOW TRYING TO LAND MYSELF A JOB.
    I HAVE APPLIED OVER AND OVER AND HAVE A HUGE SUPPLY OF REFUSALS SO I AM CONSIDERING HAVING A DIGITAL FIRE TO GET RID OF THEM ALL.!
    The truth of the matter is that I see over and over again ,the same jobs being posted by the same companies ,and some even have the”urgently hiring”tag on their posts YET i have applied many times to the companies but either get absolutely NO response or I get the proverbial “REFUSAL TO HIRE” emails in return. but I still see those same posts from the same URGENTLY HIRING companies and this is right after they refuse to hire . However there is NO ability on the INDEED site to ASK THE EMPLOYER WHY THEY HAVE REFUSED TO HIRE ME ,YET WE ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO ASK WHY NOT? I HAVE BEEN HIT WITH THE OTHER COMMON REFUSAL “YOU ARE OVER QUALIFIED” I DO HAVE TWO TICKETS ,ONE IS RED SEAL MILLWRIGHT AND THE OTHER IS 4th CLASS POWER ENGINEER. WHEN I WAS GROWING UP WE WERE TOLD MANY MANY TIMES “GET YOURSELF A GOOD EDUCATION AND YOU WILL GET A GOOD JOB! WELL IT SEEMS MORE AND MORE THAT IF YOU HAVE EDUCATIONAL TRAINING OR EXPERTISE IN AN SECTOR THAT THE EDUCATION WORKS AGAINST YOU!!!. WOULD IT NOT BE BETTER FOR THE COMPANIES TO HAVE HIGHLY EDUCATED PEOPLE RATHER THAN UNEDUCATED PEOPLE TO FILL THEIR JOB VACANCIES?
    I AM BEGINNING TO THINK THAT MAYBE THE RESPONSES ARE BEING CREATED BY THE INDEED STAFF TO KEEP THE JOB SEEKERS UNEMPLOYED SO THAT IT LOOKS TO THE EMPLOYERS LIKE THEY HAVE MANY APPLICANTS TO CHOOSE FROM ,THE LURE TO GET THE COMPANIES TO BUY INTO THE INDEED SCAM.
    THE GOVERNMENTS SHOULD BE GOING AFTER THESE FRAUDULENT JOB MATCHING COMPANIES AS THEY ARE KEEPING PEOPLE FROM ACHIEVING EMPLOYMENT ,IT WOULD BE IN THE GOVERNMENTS BEST INTEREST TO HAVE THESE UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE ACTUALLY WORKING AND CONTRIBUTING TO THE LOCAL TAX BASES AROUND THE COUNTRY RATHER THAN JUST THE COMPANIES SUCH AS INDEED MAKING THE MONEY AND AVOIDING THE LOCAL TAX BASES, THE UNEMPLOYMENT RATES WOULD DIMINISH TOO! STILL HERE THREE YEARS LATER AND UNEMPLOYED,IN BC CANADA, I GUESS ALL THE JOBS THE GOVERNMENT KEEPS SAYING THEY CREATED ARE BACK IN ONTARIO OR QUEBEC!

    • I have been unemployed for 1.5 years. I cannot pay my property taxes this year. I don’t eat anything except rice and bread to save money to make it another month (no, I never applied for unemployment). I asked the cashier what she was talking about with the previous customer and she said jobs. My ears perk up and she said they were hiring housekeepers at some hospital so my ears perk up. She said she is moving so she didn’t pay attention to the hospital name and then she says it is part time and “easy” to get a lot of call backs from employers…from $9 cashier jobs which are part time… which means never having health insurance bc I can’t afford it… So is the government going to support me? I want food stamps. I have applied to hundreds of jobs and they don’t call back. I am exhausted and tired. Now I understand why people do some crazy things. You break them.

  228. I am cleaning houses for $7.00 in California because I couldn’t even get a low wage job. Working 50 hours and 4.2 hours in traffic. I lost weight bc I don’t eat since I am busy working. No call backs from the low wage jobs but I get calls from the higher end jobs. Idiotic right? I am not worthy of minimum wage job is what employers are telling me. This is very sad. I get suicidal at times.

  229. Indeed gains valuable informaton from candidates who volunteer to provide resumes or who participate in other Indeed activities. Note that the primary mechanism (or modus operandi) is not necessarily to bring candidates an actual job offer. I used the word volunteer to describe what users are doing for free by posting resumes that provide Indeed with valuable information for little cost. It is interesting that most of the general public probably suspects this and doesn’t have the impression of anything insidios. Even after decades of use and exposure to web based job boards the thought must be that repeat users will “get lucky” somehow and get a great job if they keep trying. We’re always told to keep trying to not give up right? The same thought pattern perhaps with those who buy lottery tickets.

  230. Indeed makes it very easy for companies to edit their own reviews. This means the company review feature of Indeed isn’t transparent and lacks credibility.

    Indeed used to show testimonials from workers who have obviously been terminated or quit (but fortunately still have an internet connection) offering honest or at least reasonable sounding testimonials of abuse only to have those censored. These aren’t belligerent or angry comments from former workers. Some of these otherwise politically correct entries are written by well educated professionals who sound at the most frustrated or sad.

    I’ve noticed that Indeed has become much worse with this type of censorship at this date and time. “Negative” reviews are aggressively removed.

    If we ask ourselves why (and agree) that the American workplace has become turbulent and toxic we might consider the role of job boards in creating a false reality of what it is “like out there”. I’d argue that Indeed bares some of the blame for hiding this toxic work culture and preventing positive change from happening that would benefit everybody. The problem for Indeed is how to get people to continue to use their service regardless of how harmful it might be. That sounds familiar doesn’t it?

  231. @Matthew: “If we ask ourselves why (and agree) that the American workplace has become turbulent and toxic we might consider the role of job boards in creating a false reality of what it is “like out there.”

    You’ve said it very clearly and compellingly. The job-board industry is long overdue for an investigation by the FTC into deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud.

  232. I spent thirty-six years working for a relatively prominent municipality. I mean at the start, programs were loaded via eighty-column cards, on a Honeywell H-200 “44 Bootstrap run”. I came up through the ranks, from operator to finally Network Administrator. I’ve basically seen it all, and we were well funded. I recall Headhunters constantly calling, recruiting all the time. I retired approximately six years ago, but find I’m still restless and hungry, for myself this go-around. My question deals my desire to reenter IT in some capacity, and I ask, If not a “Job Board”, what are my alternatives? Do Headhunters still exist, in the same capacity I remember?

    PS. I interviewed, with many offers, but I loved where I was, and the folks I worked with. I guess a situation like that is a one-off, these days. Any suggestions, or comments, would be warmly welcomed.

  233. And this doesn’t even address those wretched, bogus “assessments” on Indeed. IMHO: All they do is provide misleading results that have no relationship to a candidates probability for success in any position that I have tested for. It takes half the test to get used to the method of question presentation. By that time (if you are not familiar with the format of the test ahead of time) you have “blown” the assessment with no opportunity to improve. A permanent black mark!

  234. Security clearances are more important than education, skills, knowledge and ability. One glance at Indeed verifies this. Most of the cutting edge technology jobs are reserved for people who pass this obscure vetting process. I say obscure because most of the public have no idea how this process works past some nebulous idea of security. Rest assured it’s not racist at all, instead it’s something much worse than racism. It is a concious decision that many citizens of a country are not useful to corporations bottom lines and will never join an increasingly smaller class of wealthy people.

    I believe that most people, whether they are job seekers or the gainfully employed but terrified have some intuition about the US job market for what it really is. This is not a meritocracy at all. Indeed and the advertising employers would make you believe it’s all down to what you know, your skills and education. That’s false. One of the most profitable industries in the US today is defense contracting, some of the wealthiest Americans are directly involved in providing goods and services to the US Government. More honestly we would say these folks write their own checks because they are the US Government! These corporations advertise heavily on Indeed. I already know what some job applicants are thinking, they will do anything to get a job with these corporations.

    • @Kenneth: Thanks for this alternate view of government contracting jobs. Security clearances sometimes do seem to be worth more than education and skills.

  235. No. I am getting QUITE flustered because these “job boards” keep popping up on the side of the screens so I can’t see the page I NEED to see, up at the top of the page, OR, this last one just took over the entire link while almost finished applying to be able to talk to a professor in Louisville, KY! When the screen said “Continue”, I tapped on the blue surrounting “Continue” at the word, itself, and the next screen is that stopid page about “Jobs” in general, using white with blue patches and some cartoon guy sitting at his computer. I now HATE that add because I really want to discuss some issues with this professor but must join, first. I AM a senior and there was no Macintosh until I was around 37-9? I am technically “challenged” but did use the computer all thru 9 years at UC Davis, finishing in top 2% in a class of over 5,000. I went on to grad school, nailing my GRE in the top 1%, 100% in the logic section – which explains wy anything illogical is a bit of a challenge. Psychopaths are illogical. Greedy peopl;e who go out of their way – like this company is doing to me ON THE INtERNET where I am not well-skilled, already, is illogical. I’d go to the damned page, myself, if I was interested. At 73, fully disabled, I DO NOT NEED A F…ING JOB. Now I feel much more rellieved. Thanks for letting me exhale. Now, can you help me make these jerks permanently go away? Have a beauataiful day and week. Hope all is well with you and yours.
    Most Sincerely,
    Kathileen