Bob J.

My experience with this site is as an employer, not a job seeker. This site works like a typical organic search - the more relevant your position description is to the search terms entered by candidates, the higher your job ad shows in the results. Sounds good in theory, doesn't work well in practice. The problem here is that job seekers are generally not very discerning and will click on almost any an ad that looks like a possibility. Any experienced hiring manager knows that when you advertise a position, you always get a bunch of junk resumes from folks who are just taking a flyer. The problem here is that you pay for those resumes. I will give them some credit in that their staff will work with you to try to help, but they really have very few technical tools to work with and in the end their advice is always to focus on increasing the volume of resumes and thus increase your odds of getting the right person. But following that advice drastically raises your costs. Their reps have no problem suggesting that your budget should be something like $2,000 per month for a single position. That is ridiculous.

They will tell you that the site works like Google Adwords. I have extensive experience with that system and Indeed.com does NOT work like Adwords at all. Their internal search engine works on relevancy, not bidding on keywords. Yes, you pay for each click, but you don't bid on keywords. The positioning of your ad in the results in more akin to getting a high position in the Google organic search results, then paying when someone clicks on it.

Until Indeed invests in some controls for employers to prevent useless clicks, I don't see where this site will ever be of value to a small business.