Indeed Hosted Jobs – No More Free Lunch. 

Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends!

Today, I start on a personal note of thanks to my gorgeous husband for a perfect birthday this week.

He gave me exactly what I asked for, all in one swoop: Hamilton tickets and more time with our beautiful, almost 16-year-old niece, Taylor. He took us to a fab dinner and then to Hamilton in Indianapolis on Tuesday.

It is one of our family favorites, and it was my first time getting to experience it live with her. For me, it will be a lifelong memory that means an immeasurable amount. Thanks, Tiger. <3

This week, we continue our Indeed end-of-the-year, pre-whatever-may-be-coming-because-no-one-really-knows January launch series….or not, enter the Indeed Hosted jobs policy change.

let the market manipulation begin.

As I was nearly finished writing the commentary and updates on information received this week about Indeed’s new client contracts, updated agency contracts, and the elusive AI products, they threw a wrench in my evening with the announcement of an immediate policy change.

Let’s start with the policy changes, but wrap on what we are seeing as the newest set of actions by Indeed to manipulate the market.

Today, we see the first threads being pulled related to the promise Recruit Holdings made to its investors and shareholders to increase their shiny new KPI, Average Revenue per Posted Job (ARPJ).

Indeed Hosted Jobs Policy Update

On December 11th, Indeed announced a policy change to organic job posting and traffic parameters for hosted jobs, effective immediately.

I want to summarize the technical changes and ensure everyone is working off the same definitions. Indeed uses so many terms interchangeably, confusion is rampant.

Limits to Free Indeed Hosted Jobs

Change: Free HOSTED jobs are now limited to three per employer per calendar month. Prior policy allowed employers to post free Indeed hosted jobs as their needs dictated.

Impacted regions: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands.

When: Effective YESTERDAY, December 11th, for client companies serviced by the Scaled Business Success team.

According to Indeed, “The SBS team is part of our Client Success team, and supports all clients in our small business segment at different points in their life cycle with Indeed.”

For everyone else, the update goes into effect on December 17th. Maybe. Unless you are a company Indeed deems as deserving of advanced notice.

What are Indeed Hosted jobs?

A hosted job can be either sponsored or free. Hosted jobs are jobs that have been created and posted on Indeed directly by an employer. Hosted jobs allow a company, particularly small to mid-tier businesses that do not have an ATS integration or do not have an ATS at all, to reach Indeed’s large candidate pool.

What are Indeed Indexed jobs?

Indexed jobs are jobs created and posted on a career site or an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Indeed scans these career and job sites. Indeed aggregates those jobs and shows them to relevant job seekers in job seeker search results. ATS partners can also push jobs onto Indeed via an XML feed or by using ATS Sync. These are all defined as indexed jobs by Indeed.

Organic Visibility Changes For FREE Hosted Jobs

In addition to changes to the number of free hosted jobs a company can manually post on Indeed, free hosted jobs will now also be limited to organic visibility for 30 days. The prior policy allowed organic visibility for 120 days.

Companies will have the option to sponsor the job following the 30-day free post, or they can close the post and reopen the job, if the role is still available, with some caveats.

Let’s get to the brass tacks

The Good

There are some clear advantages to this policy change.

Agencies: There is a sales opportunity, especially for former agency clients who were wooed away by Indeed reps who promised the companies they could do all their hiring directly on Indeed for free, without paying an agency for services.

There will be increased opportunity to grow wallet share with existing clients using sponsored or premium job content for companies who have been hesitant to increase spend when organic postings were perceived to be sufficient.

Job boards: This will impact many small to medium-sized businesses. If you are a niche board with a strong community, target sales conversations for companies and jobs in your niche, then do the work to deliver candidates.

Job seekers: The positive impact for job seekers is they will be less likely to apply to jobs that have already been filled and simply not closed by a busy TA team. This also reduces job seekers being lost in evergreen requisitions for high-volume, high-turnover roles.

The Bad

Agencies: Increased workload and resource demand. High-touch agencies may need to implement additional tech, notifications and remain diligent for clients with ongoing hiring needs.

Job boards: Indeed is effectively hoarding more market share by forcing employers into sponsored content, and capturing one-off job posts becomes an even more challenging endeavor.

Employers:

• Increased workload for small, under-resourced teams.
• For high-volume, high-turnover employers, the reduced posting visibility also increases the likelihood of triggering Indeed’s Reposted Content Policy, ultimately forcing these companies into sponsored jobs or to find alternative solutions to meet candidate quality and quantity demands.
• No more free lunch. Look, I am not in support of corporate welfare. Companies should pay for the products they consume, including job posts on Indeed. However, yesterday the rug was pulled out from under companies that discarded trusted relationships and built budgets and practices based on Indeed’s long-term commitment to be the jobs marketplace. That ended yesterday.

Job seekers: Decreasing job volume will reduce the value of Indeed to job seekers. They will no longer have access to the job content Indeed has delivered for more than a decade. Potential of repetitive job content will increase applicant frustration, especially for blue-collar workers.

The Ugly

For the ugly, let’s talk about how this policy update is yet another reflection of exactly why companies, and their trusted advisors, should be actively identifying what comes after Indeed instead of waiting for it to magically appear.

Indeed cannot manage the content already entrusted to them. According to the announcement, despite all of Indeed’s efforts to reduce bad actors and policy violations, there are still 1.5MM free hosted jobs posted every day.

By Indeed’s own admission, many of these jobs originate from a small set of employers. Instead of actively managing these undefined bad actors, Indeed is ending exactly what made them the market queen: a marketplace where job seekers have access to all jobs.

Indeed must meet the mystical ARPJ metric promised to investors. Could Indeed cut off bad actors and better control the content they already have? Yes, if they chose to. They have not.

So can we just cut the bullshit already? This is the first step down the road of limiting visibility of all free job content, except when Indeed chooses to use the content, which they want full access to through forced ATS integrations, to their advantage.

• Do they need to pump up job volume? They can do that with the unsponsored ATS job content. Will the company see applicants, or will Indeed use those employer brands to freely acquire new and updated job seeker data?
• Do they need to increase ARPJ to meet investor commitments? They can limit content to increase ARPJ.
• Do they want to raise prices? Less jobs equals higher ARPJ creating a justification to increase prices. Not a justification that is reflective of market conditions, but of Indeed manipulating ARPJ to create the case.

I could go on all day, but I am guessing you, like me, are ready to start the weekend.

Next week, inshallah, I will share contract and product updates or maybe I should say unless Indeed decides to launch another sloppy policy update again next week.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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