Indeed Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons (2024)

• Indeed at a Glance
• Other Benefits
• Fine Print
• How Indeed Stacks Up
• Is Indeed Right for You or Your Business?
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Indeed has been an industry-leading job board solution for quite some time so, naturally, the product is well-built-out with plenty of features for both the job seeker and the employer. Posting a job is very easy, and it can be done for free. However, to reach an audience big enough to get you a large applicant pool, you’ll have to sponsor your Indeed job postings, which can get expensive fast.

While Indeed is considered a job board for professionals, you won’t find a lot of executive roles on the platform. There are jobs from all walks of life but lower-tiered roles and applicants tend to be most prevalent. Indeed is also very popular in the healthcare industry, frequently filling roles across offices and hospitals from top to bottom.

Indeed offers job alerts and all job seekers have the opportunity to take skills assessments so that you know before you interview each candidate if their skills match the words on their résumé. The job posts themselves are easy to navigate and enabling the one-click apply option means more applicants are likely to submit their information to you.

Indeed has a great internal team that helps employers who are sponsoring job ads. They’ll help you improve your ads and improve the overall spend on your account with location suggestions and even the copy of the job ad itself. This is a huge value-add for larger businesses that are going to spend a lot of money on a single job platform and can be an extension of your internal hiring team.

Indeed also offers products that let you take a more active role in hiring talent. Indeed Resume allows you to search through job seekers’ credentials and invite them to apply to your open roles, while the Indeed Hiring Platform service will screen candidates for you and schedule interviews with your team. If you are casting a wide net, this can be a helpful tool to narrow down the number of candidates.

One thing that employers need to be aware of is the costs of sponsoring job posts. Not everyone is eligible to post free job posts, and after the first 30 days, free posts perform much worse. Employers who have consistent needs for one particular job role are almost required to sponsor that post to see long-term traction.

Unfortunately, the costs can get out of control pretty quickly if you don’t monitor your spend or set up a budget. The system works similarly to pay-per-click ads where you’ll get charged per each of your posts that an applicant clicks on. While you only have to start at $5 per day when sponsoring a job ad, that will get you very few clicks and possibly less than one applicant per day, depending on your location and the popularity of your job type.

Budgeting $25 to $50 per day on a single job ad can add up and be expensive, especially for smaller businesses. Some healthcare companies can spend thousands of dollars per month trying to fill nurses and nursing assistants because they pay every time someone clicks on the ad and not by the number of qualified applicants they receive.

These costs can be mitigated by setting up a daily budget but, once your spending threshold is reached, the job listing drops down in search results. It may take some experimentation to find the right balance for each role you post.

Indeed is a strong option if the location and types of jobs align with what you need. You can control the costs when sponsoring an ad, which you can also do with LinkedIn. ZipRecruiter, on the other hand, requires a steep monthly price and gives you a certain number of credits to use for job ads. If you have a lot of jobs to post, then Indeed is tough to beat.

If you only have a single job you need to advertise, and it’s a professional job, then LinkedIn might be a better choice. You can post your first job for free for 30 days, and the audience might be a better match for middle management or sales-related careers anyway.

ZipRecruiter is a better fit for more manual labor positions such as warehouse or restaurant workers. The pricing is difficult to understand when you first start, and the platform itself isn’t as easy to use as either LinkedIn or Indeed.

Overall, you are mostly in control of how much you spend on these platforms and the one that is right for you will depend on where you need to hire and in what industry.

Whether or not Indeed is right for you will depend on the type of business you have and what your hiring budget is going to be. If you’re in the healthcare space and have many needs for non-physician support roles, then Indeed is a great match. However, if you’re trying to fill a single COO role in Montana, then Indeed may or may not net you a single qualified applicant.

If you’re going to post job openings on an online job board, Indeed should be considered as one of the leaders for this type of hiring practice. It’s important to do some research for your specific location and the types of jobs you’re wanting to hire for before posting a job. You’ll want to make sure that the platform will net the amount of applicants you’re craving to make it worth the money for your needs.