Indeed’s tried and tested aggregation and search engine model is so seamless candidates often forget it’s how they found the job in the first place. But Indeed’s ubiquity means it often gets blamed for employers’ failings and seldom gets praised for the service it offers.

For employers, targeting jobseekers couldn’t be easier. They post a job on their website with minimal effort and receive applications within minutes without spending a penny, congratulating themselves on the campaign success and none the wiser about how word reached the wider world.

This can be usually attributed to Indeed or a similar job aggregator or search engine. Indeed gets its vacancy listings from a feed of employers’ job pages. It’s legal to do this without the owner’s permission as it is in the public domain, but employers can request to have it turned off, in the same way you can request Google Search not to include your website in their search results and not to index it.

Victim of its own success

The problem Indeed is experiencing, is when you become successful at something you tend to get the blame for everything bad. I read an article – actually it was more of an ill-informed rant from a recruiter – about how Indeed was the root of all evil and was the reason for lack of quality applications, and they used underhand tactics in gaining jobs on their system. Such words as “scraping websites” and “mirroring websites” were used, when in fact these are five- year-old black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics that Google pretty much have a made a thing of the past.

Applying for jobs has never been easier, and whereas as people would have thought twice before applying for a job, there seems to be a trend of “I am probably not suitable but let’s give it a go and see what happens” attitude.

Quality applicants, or the lack thereof, has been an issue since well before the launch of Indeed, or the invention of the internet for that matter. I understand the frustrations recruiters are experiencing; and like with most things in employer marketing there is no silver bullet.

Better response needs better posts

Most recruiters rely on candidates telling them where they saw the advert or heard about the job, which is about reliable as a chocolate fireguard. We recently ran a test where we asked candidates applying for a role where they saw the advert. Interestingly 90% selected the top choice on the dropdown which was a press advert and, yes you guessed it, there was no press advert.

To improve candidate quantity and quality, recruiters need to write better job postings and use technology to filter out unsuitable applicants via their own digital assets. After all if you think switching off Indeed will stop you getting unsuitable job applications, you are very much mistaken.

Jim Bloor