Indeed, the job board we love to hate.
Indeed’s ability to drive candidates is unmatched in the US market, but for every good candidate, you often get too many unqualified ones.
For most businesses your relationship with Indeed is a bit of a pendulum – use the click-off feature to your ATS and you can’t get enough candidates, at all. Move to Easy Apply, and get flooded with the wrong candidates. It’s too hot or too cold, but never just right.
Why is this so f***ing difficult?
Indeed’s philosophy is simple – get jobs in front of candidates and get them to click on them (it’s how they make money), but then they want (no they need) those candidates to apply, and then get hired (it’s how they make money from you a second time, as you won’t renew if they don’t deliver hires).
But qualified candidates – it’s a tricky proposition. The definition, bar, and expectations vary wildly industry by industry, job by job, and more importantly between and among companies.
Companies are experts at hiring to their definition of qualified. Sometimes that is as simple as being in the right location and a willingness to do the job, for other’s it’s a complex set of skills, degrees, and licenses. That wild variability is every internet companies’ worst nightmare – it means no matter what they build that is static, is not scalable. What works for Amazon won’t work for the Cleveland Clinic. Qualified isn’t one-size-fits-all.
How can candidates have a better easy apply experience?
Typically companies that have their application process refined on their corporate career site will have Indeed send those candidates to the career site. Applications will trickle in (especially in the current market), hiring managers will yell at the recruiters and the recruiters will, in turn, yell at their Indeed rep. The porridge is too cold!
So the Indeed rep taps into their bag of tricks and suggests Indeed’s Easy Apply – a skinny apply function that allows the candidate to apply quickly to a job on Indeed. The candidate never leaves Indeed, no jumping to a new site, and gets through the process quickly because there are few questions or requirements. The job gets shown to candidates who are on their mobile devices and the candidate flood gates open. Recruiters quickly find out they have more candidates than they know what to do with, most of which are wholly unqualified. The porridge is too hot!
The answer is straightforward – take the good parts of the onsite ATS application, the customized questions, requirements, and data points but within the Indeed Easy Apply experience. The result is more qualified candidates completing the application with less unqualified candidates making it through the process.
Creating a Native Apply experience where the candidate can easily apply for the job no matter what device (and more than 60% of jobs are browsed on a mobile device) will bolster those jobs that need more candidates without creating a situation where your recruiters are drowning in busy work, dispositioning candidates that should never have finished the application process.
The porridge is just right and gets gobbled right up.
Happy sourcing.