Indeed – it’s not as confusing as some people make out.

July 9, 2019
indeed sponsored postings.

It’s not a Job board, you can’t buy credits, you don’t post for a fixed number of days.  If you want to manage your advertising budget and get the best return on your spend you shouldn’t just post your job and leave it there. Other than that, it’s easy to attract Candidates you aren’t getting from elsewhere (the big job boards and Google for Jobs don’t play with Indeed and therefore Indeed are attracting their own audience).

So, how do you get the best out of Indeed?

Get yourself the free stuff:

  • Create yourself an account on Indeed, without this you can’t do anything.
  • Set up your Company page. This allows you to build your brand by attaching all your live vacancies to a central hub. Ask Candidates to review your page;  Indeed rewards you with stars and the more positive reviews you receive, the higher your visibility.  Once you have received 3 reviews your company page will become visible.
  • Ask Indeed to index your Company website. Every job you put on your website will then appear on Indeed without you having to do anything. If you don’t advertise jobs on your own website you can use your Indeed account to directly put your vacancies on but you can’t do both, you have to choose between index or manual posting.
  • Jobs aren’t visible immediately on Indeed so just be patient, depending on which of the above methods you use it can take up to 6 hours. If your job doesn’t show after 6 hours it’s because it’s been classed as a “nowhere job” meaning it’s broken Indeed’s advertising rules – they won’t tell you it’s been classified as such, it just won’t show.   So, don’t advertise the same job repeatedly with multiple locations (and you can only use a town or city, not nationwide or region), it can’t be discriminative, you can’t be charging the candidate for finding them work & there must be a job at the end (so not a Graduate job that’s just to gain experience).  Just because it’s free doesn’t mean you can do what you want, Indeed want to offer the best service to the Candidate and as such, will monitor the jobs you advertise.
  • Your job will be fully searchable and receive organic traffic (rather than the paid for stuff). The jobs are listed based on relevancy, taking into account the age of the job, location, keywords and salary.  Your job will fall back and lose visibility as other free jobs are added.

And when you are ready to spend some money on advertising…

In a similar way to Google, Indeed is a pay for click model or what they refer to as “sponsoring a job”.  Sponsored Jobs are displayed to the Candidates in the top 4 slots and last 2 on each job search results page. The position of your job depends on the amount you have paid “per click” compared to other Recruiters who are advertising similar jobs.  How much you pay “per click” is determined by your bid amount (we’ll come onto how much that is further down) & is deducted from your budget (again, we’ll come onto that) each time a candidate clicks on your job.

Your Sponsored job needs to be written in a certain way so that it conforms with Indeed’s DALT criteria.  Basically, to comply you need to follow the below –

  1. Descriptions – ensure all adverts are written well, follow a good structure and include bullet points, benefits, competitive salary and avoid too short or too long in length.
  2. Application Method – ensure application process for all jobs is quick and easy for applicants – consider Indeed Apply and avoid time-consuming website re-direct application pages.
  3. Location – if one isn’t provided on the source site then there needs to be a location that all jobs from the feed can be forced to).
  4. Title – Ensure searchable and clear job titles are used to help drive presence on site.

If you do follow the above not only will your job be found by more Candidates when searching but they will also be sent out through Indeed’s “Email Job Alerts”.

If you have a Sponsored Job account you can use your job multi-poster to send the vacancies to Indeed (saves time) but you will still have to log into your Indeed account to set your bid amount.

So, how much does Indeed job advertising cost?

In short – as much or as little as you want to spend.  If you are buying direct with Indeed you have to sign a minimum contract amount but with us, you don’t.  Either way, you only get invoiced each month for the amount you have spent (but with us you get a 10% discount off your bill).

For each job you sponsor there is a minimum budget spend of £30 but you can:

  • Withdraw the job from sponsorship at any time, stopping any further charges, once you have enough candidates you can pull the job and pay no more (which could be less than £30)
  • Group similar jobs together as a campaign and allocate the minimum £30 to the group of jobs, rather just one. You can remove jobs from the group at any time, ensuring once you have enough candidates for that role, the remainder of the advertising budget is diverted to the harder to fill jobs.
  • Make sure the £30 lasts by setting a maximum daily amount, ensuring your job has visibility over a set period. However, most recruiters want the Candidates ASAP & therefore don’t worry too much about spreading the response over a longer period of time.

And then all you do is say how much is the maximum amount you want to spend each time a Candidate clicks on your job, the “bid amount”.

There are no set rules on how much, there are no guidelines to help you decide and you certainly don’t want to go with Indeed’s suggested amounts – it’s a case of trial and error and using your own historical data to see which jobs worked & how much it cost you.   Indeed have some great reports that provide you with all this data BUT only on your own jobs, and for that, you need to have used the site to have the data.

If you are a new user Indeed have an automatic bidding system that you can use, which is based on the last 3 years performance of all jobs (which they won’t share with you) of similar salary, location and keywords.  The automatic bid level is reviewed twice a day to ensure that your bid reflects current activity.  To be fair to Indeed, they do use historical data to make sure the automatic bidding is fair.

Use the automatic bidding to start with and then once you have sponsored a few jobs use your own data to decide your own bid levels.  The higher your bid, in relation to other bids, the higher up the pages your vacancy will appear. Lower bids drive traffic but not applications as the jobs are more likely to be shown on lower pages and non peak times.

As I said, with Indeed you have to work at it but with a bit of patience, and some trial and error the feedback from our Clients is that they get a great response.

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