Indeed continues to diversify its employment offerings with the recent release of Indeed Career Pages. Just add it to Crowd, Prime, and Job Spotter, all which have launched in the last year. Indeed Career Pages target small business owners, giving them an alternative solution to powering their own career site.
“There’s no doubt that having a career page on your site is a good idea,” Indeed said in a blog post. “But there’s also no doubt that for many employers it’s easy to file that idea away as a “nice to have” or something you’ll get around to eventually — like buying that professional quality Italian espresso maker you’ve always wanted for your office.
“Just the thought of setting up a career page can be daunting. First, you’d need to hire a web designer to build a page for your site, but that would cost money and you would still need to supervise their work. If you know how to write code, then you could build the site yourself. But that also takes time.”
Rumors of the career pages starting showing up in March, but became official last month. Here are a few examples of companies currently using the solution: Mint Pharmaceuticals, Fiasco, and Brainwerx.
They all look pretty standard and humdrum, but if you’re looking to appeal to tech luddites, that’s probably a good thing. Logos can be customized, but default to straight text if uploading a logo isn’t an option. A hero image or video can be added to the header and social media links can be included. Custom URLs, however, don’t seem to be an option. Customers will have to settle for companyname.indeedjobs.com instead of jobs.companyname.com or companyname.com/jobs.
Not surprisingly, everything runs via Indeed. “Applicants are managed through the dashboard, regardless of whether they have a saved resume,” said Tara Lambropoulos, senior manager, PR and communications at Indeed. “Career Pages is branded channel to jobs that are already available on Indeed. Screening questions are available through Indeed, but are not part of Career Pages.”
The sites are also optimized for mobile.
“Indeed data shows that the majority of job search now takes place on mobile devices, regardless of which generation is doing the searching,” the company said. “The numbers are highest in the younger generation — 78 percent of millennials searched for work on a mobile device in 2016. However, 57.2 percent of Boomers also searched for work on mobile during the same period. Mobile job search cuts across occupations, and is especially dominant in work which requires people to be on their feet all day.”
Indeed Career Pages are also free.
The catch? If you want your job postings to show-up on Google for Jobs search results, you’re out of luck. Indeed is not participating in Google’s new solution, and an Indeed spokesperson has confirmed Career Pages content will be excluded. Job postings on the Career Pages platform, however, are currently being indexed in Google’s web search. These jobs are being hosted on a www.indeedjobs.com domain, as opposed to www.indeed.com.
So, why is Indeed doing this? It’s easy to argue that it’s good for customers and represents a new opportunity to tap into small businesses. And that’s all true. But another reason to dive into SMB career sites is the launching of Google Hire, Google’s own career site solution that’s being aimed at the smaller end of the employer scale, with the opportunity to move upstream over time.
“While we expect Career Pages will appeal mostly to small businesses,” says Lambropoulos, “it is available to any company with an employer account.”
Like an Apple strategy to fend off Android, it’s all about the platform. If everything is hosted in one place, there’s significant incentive to stick. And nothing has proved to be as sticky in the employment space as hosting the corporate career center. Indeed knows if Google has an ATS and it doen’t, the road ahead gets even bumpier than it already is.