Automated Analytics Podcast: Indeed - Healthy Market Update

Mark Taylor: 0:10

Hi and welcome to this special edition podcast from Automate Analytics. My name is Mark Taylor and I'm the CEO of Automate Analytics, and here is my guest, Jason Peecook, who is the Vice President of the USA and runs our USA business. Now, Jason and I have just spent two days with the senior leadership team at Indeed and they've updated us on some changes that they're going to be making to the platform, to both sponsored and organic postings. So I want to take the time just to walk you through what those changes are, so that you're ahead of the game and you know what's coming down the track from Indeed Now, as some of you know, we are an Indeed Alliance partner. Jason, what does that partnership mean with Indeed?

Jason Peecook: 0:48

Yeah, for us. We're one of 12 approved agencies in the Alliance program. It gives us greater access to the Indeed leadership team, both the product and the technical side, and it also gives us insights into upcoming changes.

Mark Taylor: 1:05

And one of those changes is something you're going to hear a lot about. Moving forward is Indeed's push to being, or running, a smart match service. So what Indeed are looking to do is to actually, rather than have a listing or a search functionality, that actually just gives candidates the ability to search. What they're going to try and move towards and that's a really cool layout to be able to do this is to actually match candidates to jobs. So, not only in the search results that each candidate gets, but in some of the other bits and pieces. How do you think that's going to change the candidate experience?

Jason Peecook: 1:38

Well, it's a competitive marketplace and so I think you know, over the last two years, indeed's seen candidate use on the platform. They've been making changes with machine learning that will help the candidate experience and you know, as you said, smart searching or smart matching is their new term. We'll see a candidate experience where they've gone in, created a profile, maybe searched for a couple of jobs, but after that, indeed's platform will start sending them jobs that are what they think are fits for them.

Mark Taylor: 2:15

So we'll see candidates spending less time searching for jobs and more time then reviewing jobs that are being sent more time than reviewing jobs that are being sent, and I think that's one of the fundamental changes is, indeed is a lot of people see it as a search engine on ways to find vacancies. They're now moving towards more of a matching process where they're actually matching, you know, what they think is a good role or a good job with a good candidate. Now, obviously, as a result of this, there are going to be some pretty big changes they're going to make to both sponsored and organic listings. What are those changes going to be?

Jason Peecook: 2:50

So I think the first is we're expecting to see less applications for open jobs and we think now candidates just apply, especially with quick apply, it's easy apply and apply and apply. We think now, with being fed positions, that they will apply for less, but the assumption is that customers will see a higher quality candidate based on that machine learning that they put in. So that's the first piece.

Mark Taylor: 3:23

So, essentially, what Indy is looking to do is to drive fewer applications but a higher, higher ratio. So less candidates. You're going to hire more as a result of that. And so, from a sponsor, organic point of view, where do you see a difference in terms of the way people will generate those applications moving forward?

Jason Peecook: 3:43

Yeah. So I think that what we're anticipating is before you would take a sponsored budget and do a smaller percentage of your open jobs, and I think in the future, in the near future you're going to have to spread that budget across more jobs and likely increase jobs. What we heard from Indeed is that there are a lot of evergreen roles that are posted on the site and are never taken down, and that's not a great candidate experience, and what they realize is that sponsored jobs are engaged companies and those are the jobs that are more likely to get traction and hired, and that's the experience that Indeed wants to present.

Mark Taylor: 4:32

So, from an Indeed point of view, the algorithm essentially is if you're sponsoring a job, it means that you're ready to hire right now, and so therefore, they're going to reward that sponsored job with probably more additional visibility, I guess. Okay, so what new product features are we going to bring out to help clients benefit from this change, from the indeed, kind of smart matching algorithm changes?

Jason Peecook: 4:56

So our dev team has been working on reporting a project that includes several reports but, most importantly, knowing that these changes are coming sooner, you're going to be able to do a recruiting strategy session with our CS team. They can look over the higher cost places that customers have. They can help them make strategic decisions on that. So we'll have reporting. That's on the tool that the customer can use, but then also meet with CS to dig in further. That's probably the biggest one that we'll see.

Mark Taylor: 5:36

And also the initial functionality of giving people the opportunity within our interface to pick the budget they want to spend per job. Because, as we know, in a competitive marketplace you've got some locations where you know 25 bucks a day or 25 pounds a day actually will yield a decent volume of sponsor jobs because the cost per app is a pound or a dollar, whereas there's other locations where it's super competitive. 25 bucks will probably get you one application because it's a small location but there's a lot more competitiveness in there. So do you see that being a benefit to our clients?

Jason Peecook: 6:07

It was, and this is feedback that we've gotten from our own CS team to build this functionality based on what they've seen from customers over the last year. If they can create separate campaigns to help split that budget up, it becomes more effective, definitely, yeah.

Mark Taylor: 6:27

So is this just a USA thing, or are we going to see this in the UK.

Jason Peecook: 6:30

No, you're going to get it, You're going to get it too. So we know the testing is going on right now in the US and the UK. We expect them to, we expect, indeed, to be finished with testing in May, and the US will roll out first, and that would be June and July, and then the UK is probably right after that.

Mark Taylor: 6:53

So I think, in summary, I think, with the change that Google are making, which I think are fantastic, about creating a better candidate journey, so presenting the right role to the right candidates, trying not to drive hundreds of applications but higher quality applications to drive those higher ratios, I think is a great goal for Indeed. And so I think really, hearing from Jason, hearing from the leadership team and Indeed, it really is about optimising your campaign budget and recogn that you know, over the next couple of months you are likely to see less organic listings but more uh, more results or better quality applications coming from your sponsored jobs. Anyway, we just want to take the time out uh, hopefully you found this podcast useful. We just want to take time out to actually update you. There's gonna be a lot more um focus, a lot more communication from us about these changes so that you can take full advantage of them and get a competitive edge using the Talent Track platform. Thanks very much for your time. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. See you soon.