Overview
Jobs. They get a lot of political attention during an election, and it seems everyone either wants one, or wants a better one. For several years now Monster has been king of the hill, acquiring and shutting down its rival HotJobs. But several competitors have risen to take it on, and one in particular has managed to surpass it as the jobs site with the most visits. It will be interesting to see how long Indeed can maintain its top spot, and even more interesting to see if it can help you land your next job.
The Claim
The slogan for Indeed.com is “One search, all jobs.” Clearly their goal is to provide you with all of the jobs you’d find by searching on your own, without having to leave the comfort of their site. At first we were a bit concerned, because you don’t really want to go through all of the jobs that are out there, especially the ones posted by spammers and scammers, or the ones that are already filled, or that don’t apply to you. But their algorithm must do a good job of weeding out the bogus jobs, and their filters can make it so you’re only looking at relevant results.
The Hype
Indeed is now the most visited job search website on the Internet, which is a combination of user satisfaction and positive word of mouth. There’s no way a site can get this popular unless it has some merit, so it’s gotten the social validation of having millions of visitors use it, much the same way that Facebook reached its phenomenal growth. Sometimes a site reaches the tipping point where everyone starts to use it, which causes employers to start to use it, which makes more people use it, and it’s a positive upward spiral.
The Cost
It’s free for job seekers to use Indeed.com, and they make their money in the form of paid advertisements by employers. Employers are now able to run ads similar to the ones that you can put on Google using AdSense. They pay each time someone clicks their ad to look at the details of a job.
The Commitment
The point of the site is to save you time and streamline your job search into one website. What’s nice is that you can search for these jobs without having to log in and register for an account. If you click on a result you’re taken to the job listing at the site where they pulled the info from. If the job is hosted by Indeed they don’t force you to sign up just to see if you’re qualified for it. They don’t even want you to sign up if you want to apply for the job. The only time you need an account is to post your resume, which is fair enough.
Evaluation
The results you get look similar to the search results from Google, and that’s basically how Indeed.com started off. At first what it did was scour the Internet for all available jobs and organize it into one page so you could browse them all without having to visit dozens or even hundreds of sites. Now employers can post directly to the site, and job seekers can post their resumes to it as well, increasing the likelihood of being found.
One thing that’s been noted by users is that Indeed might not be the best choice if you’re in a specialized field and looking to find a job in that field. For example, if your job is highly technical, you might be better off using a site like Dice.com that is focused primarily on tech jobs. But you might also have some luck using the advanced search at Indeed, which lets you drill down to your hearts content by adding things like exact phrase match, and have your search results contain at least one of a specific word.
Our Recommendation
Depending on the job you want you should exhaust all options. It could be that the best site to use would be craigslist if you want an hourly job, or something located in your local area. But as far as searching all of the other places like Monster, Career Builder, and Snagajob, you’re better off starting with Indeed and then going to each one individually if you don’t turn up enough results.
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There are already several studies that confirm the US has a grave age discrimination problem exacerbated by online job boards like Indeed.com. Several studies even show Indeed and another of the most popular online jobs networking sites are statistically a detriment to older applicants. Indeed makes it easy for recruiters to hide age discrimination behind technology. Recently, I came upon an ad on Indeed.com that, as often happens, requires the applicant who just finished applying on Indeed.com to access the company's external hiring site. On the first such page, the company stated their full-time positions are available "only for college students." You had to be enrolled currently as a college student to be eligible to work. There was no reason offered that a recent or longtime graduate couldn't have excelled at the position. Perhaps these companies are emboldened by the US 7th Circuit Court's recent age discrimination case in which the court ruled age discrimination laws do NOT protect older applicants but rather only older current employees. So more companies will feel entitled to discriminate against older job applicants--and this is especially easy on a service like Indeed where companies can hide behind so many impersonal technology layers.
But beyond the rampant age discrimination problem, there are other serious problems with Indeed. For one, there are too many job scams that make it through whatever filtering process Indeed MIGHT use.
Companies request applicants fulfill insulting prescreening--like answering insipid questionnaires changing fonts and colors and numbers of sentences in given paragraphs... Or the jobs that aren't jobs at all. They're 100% commission sales1099 independent contractor positions. Or the "jobs" that first require YOU to pay a fee to onboard. On and on. Too many of these scams to take Indeed.com seriously anymore.
And if you escape the above trials, you find yourself competing with THOUSANDS of other applicants for jobs that are hiring one or two candidates. Too many of these supposedly legitimate jobs require you, after having already submitted your resume and a cover letter you wasted hours researching the company and role to write, to manually re-enter all your information AGAIN on the company's own application site. A massive waste of time, especially given the absurdly low odds you'll hear anything back for your troubles.
Indeed is a big part of what's wrong with today's job application process. Worst of all, despite thousands (tens+ of thousands?) of people complaining to Indeed about these problems, Indeed has done nothing substantive to address any of them.
The system is intentionally designed to NOT protect your privacy, as so many job sites are. Every time you apply to a job, the system automatically stores your resume without telling you, and sets it to PUBLIC view without telling you. You have to then go into the profile and change it back to Private, or just remove your resume from the site. Contacting their customer service about it does nothing. Just use Glassdoor instead
50 years plus i get get it to old to hire
I totally agree because im going through the same thing. Its very discriminating and makes me feel like something is wrong with my resume smh.
Indeed jobs is bullshit. I submitted applications for almost 3 months, no replies from any company. I have abundant work experience in my major, it's fxxxing weird. I would even suspect that the stupid recruiters on indeed don't even take a glance at your resume. Do not go to indeed.
My last 2 jobs and my husbands last 3 came from indeed. If you aren't lazy and actually want to get a job then indeed will work. You have to put some time into it but if you aren't working you have nothing but time to find a job. We have always had several places to choose from when it comes time to decide which job to take. I think the people having a hard time getting a job need to look at themselves to find the problem. If you're a crap worker with crap experience of course you can't find a job. Care more about what you do and good jobs are out there. Step up your game to make yourself worth hiring, have good work ethic and drive. Finding work is simple if you really want it and are ready to be a good worker
Well, the concept is awesome. I like having one place to look for jobs. I use indeed and LinkedIn (although LinkedIn is much more complicated) and at one point I was using, those plus the ladders, craigslist, resume rabbit, and glassdoor, but everything seems to be on indeed. I've gotten phone calls and emails for sales jobs, even though I'm not interested in (or qualified for ) sales. After 5 months I've gotten one (bad) job from an Indeed job posting I applied to, one recruiter recently contacted me about a legitimate job with a great company after seeing my resume on indeed and one contact about a legitimate job interview from resume rabbit.... It's hard to say though... I'm still job searching.
Well, indeed.com indeed won't help you get a job :P, but at least it'll make the job searching process much easier. It's nice to have these websites that aggregate information from the web and put it in one space for easy access. The same technology was of course applied to music, movies, and shopping, and they work very well. I haven't used it yet, but I really like the idea and I'm gonna start using it for my job search from now on.