Indeed’s Two Masters
Jonathan Duarte asks, “If Indeed is getting most of the content from ATS’s directly, why would they continue accepting content from a duplicate source that is not adding to their brand?”
Ever felt like you were suckered into a post? Awe, what the heck…
You can’t be surprised when I say Money is the answer, isn’t it usually? Indeed has smartly positioned themselves as a top traffic provider, and now find themselves in an unenviable predicament.
Master #1 (Job Boards)
Indeed is taking hundreds of thousands (maybe a million+) of duplicate content from job boards, although along with the duplication comes a handsome payday and without the cash Indeed wouldn’t have such a well known brand.
Master #2 (Hiring Companies)
The original content comes directly from corporate sites (Jonathan’s argument) and Indeed truly wants to work with companies to help them channel more traffic into their Applicant Tracking Systems, although the dollars spent by the boards (duplicate content) and having hiring company jobs already in Indeed’s search engine doesn’t make it an easy sell.
Indeed’s revenue decision
Indeed had a decision to make early on with regard to their direction of monetization. The direction, as with many companies, was to attack the low hanging fruit fast, which was the job board side. Why was it low hanging fruit? It’s simple really, many boards were already paying Google for PPC traffic and didn’t need educated on the success of SEM. It’s a much easier sales process for the guys and gals over at Indeed and I don’t blame them a bit.
Indeed’s master conflict
Now that Indeed is answering directly to the job boards, how would this affect their dealings with perspective clients who are hiring companies? Hiring companies want only their pure job content on Indeed, which will drive job seekers directly into their Applicant Tracking Systems, not to the boards. Now that’s a big problem because the lion’s share of Indeed’s revenue is coming from the job board’s and Indeed wouldn’t want to anger their biggest clients right? How does this hurt a job board? If you start taking down job board content (jobs) that would equal less organic content on Indeed, aka less FREE traffic.
Okay I’ll stop here for you to gather notes and your composure, moving on….
(conflict to be continued…)
Comments(4)
hi Chad, great to see you writing again! are you back from your duty?
– Eric
Thanks Eric. I’m still in Benning doing the Drill Sergeant gig and training infantry troops. I am hoping to be back in February but until then I will try to get a little something out every now and again..
It’s been great to see other aggregators move to feed exclusivity such as Simply Hired. This is so important for companies, especially those that don’t want to appear desperate online, with 8 versions of the same job posted on the aggregation site from different boards.
Employers needs will become Master #1 if you want to sell directly to them, because they don’t want to double pay to post a job on a paid board, and pay to have it posted 2X on the job aggregators.
If any job aggregator hopes to be a long term solution to any employer, they will have meet their needs (including having a single feed) because companies are growing in concern with sending their candidates through the job boards to apply – because they are in essence sending their applicants to thousands of other recruiters when they apply via most job boards.
Also, without an exclusive feed for an employer (or job board), the aggregator is even diluting their own value proposition (to employers and job boards) because candidates could click on any of the multiple job links from the multiple sources which means that many will get limited results, versus one getting a majority of the results.
It also has to be confusing to candidates who will click on the same job from multiple sources – wondering if they already saw it (or applied to it)…
Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
Great post Chad!! Thanks for the simplicity in a complex issue.