Indeed is stopping free job visibility for recruitment agencies- Why and what to do now?

Indeed has announced, that from Thursday, May 2, 2024, jobs sent to Indeed from staffing agencies & recruitment-based companies will no longer be eligible for organic visibility.

This update will require recruitment agencies to sponsor all of their jobs to be visible on the platform. 

Why have Indeed removed free visibility?

Indeed have said they have done this due to the amount of poor quality and duplicate roles that have flooded the platform. By requiring all roles to be sponsored, they expect the quality of the adverts to improve and reduce the number of fake and scam jobs, improving the job seeker’s experience.

I don’t post directly onto Indeed, Will this still make an impact?

Some larger recruitment agencies had their organic (free) jobs turned off several years ago, the sudden drop in website traffic and application numbers overnight resulted in these agencies having to instantly increase the number of jobs sponsored to hit the same level of application numbers.

Now many agencies will be getting applications and traffic to their website from Indeed without posting on the platform.

This is because Indeed indexes jobs from websites all over the internet and displays them on their site.

Indeed works in a similar way to a search engine. By working like this Indeed is know as a job aggregator.

It is expected that application numbers and traffic to your website will drop overnight.

Will all recruitment agencies really be affected? Even smaller ones?

In Indeed’s announcement they stated:

‘all recruitment-based companies or entities, are required to sponsor their jobs in order to receive visibility.’

‘Companies and accounts affected by this policy may include but are not limited to, businesses whose core operations are focused on placing job seekers in specific roles for other businesses or entities’

Their statement can be read here:

No matter what size of the recruitment agency or the sector it operates in, organic visibility will stop.

What are my next steps?

We would suggest making sure all your job adverts are on your website and your website is correctly set up for Google jobs. This will give you free organic exposure on Google when candidates are searching for roles.

Unfortunately, you should expect and plan for your advertising budget to increase.

You can help limit the increase by improving and optimising the roles that you currently have advertised. Digital Momentum is an Indeed agency partner and we can work with you to improve the quality of your roles and depending on your levels of spend, provide a discount on the platform.

Outside of Indeed, additional job boards can be looked at and we’ll work with you to select the best ones for your sector and we can provide a discount.

For agencies with larger advertising budgets, we can look at Programmatic advertising. Your roles are posted across all major job boards and some smaller boards without the need for contracts. Your ad spend ROI is improved by putting your budget towards the best-performing sources and slashing spend on underperforming ones.

If you’d like to find out more how we could help support your recruitment advertising please get in touch.