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What We Know About Indeed’s Change to Pay-Per-Started Application.

Employees management and human resource

What We Know About Indeed’s Change to Pay-Per-Started Application.

In fall 2022, at its IndeedWorks conference, Indeed announced the change from pay-per-click to charging on applications. That evolved into the pay-per-started application. Indeed started to roll it out to smaller companies at the end of 2022 and the start of 2023. Most of Indeed’s other companies are moving to this platform in Q2 2023.

At Haley Marketing, our clients for whom we manage job spend will be moving to the new platform at the beginning of May. Recently, we met in person with Indeed and learned a lot of information that we wanted to pass along.

If you manually post your jobs to Indeed(this is called hosted jobs):

  • This will be a pay-per-started application format/metric where you can accept/reject candidates. It’s the most common information that has been circulating.
  • If your team manually copies and pastes jobs to your Indeed account, you will have a period of time (I believe 72 hours – NOT business hours) to accept/reject the candidate right inside your Indeed account. That’s the only place you can make that decision (as far as I know). If you accept the candidate or do not reply within the timeframe, you will be charged. If you reject the candidate, you will not be charged.

If your jobs go to Indeed via a feed of jobs (this is called Indexed jobs):

  • This will be a pay-per-started application format/metric where you CANNOT accept/reject candidates. Why aren’t you able to reject/accept candidates in this format? Because your candidates do not live inside the Indeed platform when they apply for your job.
  • The candidates are sent back to your ATS (or via email to the recruiter assigned to the job). Indeed does not have the tech to allow candidates to live inside Indeed when they apply to your jobs if you send them over via an XML feed of jobs. Right now – your candidates aren’t inside your Indeed account, and that won’t change.

A couple of other thoughts:

  • Why is Indeed doing this? Indeed keeps hearing its clients want more quality candidates. Allowing the option to accept/reject candidates is one way of doing this. Instead of charging companies when people are window shopping and just clicking on jobs, they want to make sure a candidate is interested in the job before charging you. Therefore, Indeed is switching charging you when a candidate clicks the “Apply Now” or “Apply on Company Site” button.
  • Will my costs go up? Honestly, I do not know, but here are some more in-depth thoughts as I’ve been giving it a lot of thought:
    • Right now – our team at Haley Marketing manages/optimizes campaigns to cost per application anyway. If your team does the same, then nothing really should change.
    • The only way I can see costs going up is if Indeed artificially inflates/sets a higher price for applications. I have no reason to believe Indeed will do this, but it’s something to keep on our radars. If they say the cost-per-application for a manufacturing worker is going to start at $5 when you have been paying $3, that will increase costs. Again, I do not know if it will happen, but it’s one of those areas that seems like we should watch.
    • Obviously, you could spend more money if you don’t have the correct limits in place (job-level, campaign-level) and/or don’t check the applications within the timeframe (if you have been using the Hosted Jobs method I talked about above). There are a lot of horror stories bouncing around on LinkedIn about companies who use hosted jobs (copy + paste their jobs to Indeed) getting big bills because they didn’t have the right guidelines in place. If you use hosted jobs, please make sure to have spending guidelines in place and (especially at the start) have resources on your team to check applications and get a good process in place.

At Haley Marketing, the recruitment marketing team doesn’t feel it will be a big change, but we are still preparing for when our clients shift to the new pay-per-started application format at the start of May.

Ensure you know your metrics and have the right plan in your place for your company – depending on hosted jobs or indexed jobs.

If you have any questions about the new Indeed pay-per-started application format or anything job advertising, please don’t hesitate to reach out and contact our team!

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