If I told you Google’s foray into job postings had very little to do with job postings, would you believe me? Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Indeed’s latest partnership even helps support my thinking.
Announced earlier this week, Indeed is partnering with Ceridian to provide Indeed Apply to all its job postings. This one-click ability to apply to a job opening is similar to Facebook Connect or LinkedIn’s apply button. The benefit to job seekers is that it makes applying much easier, taking your resume data plugging into an employer’s application process. This proves much easier and convenient than filling out an application from scratch.
“Ceridian’s integration with Indeed helps organizations to achieve their hiring goals in a way that saves time and money, and creates productivity,” says Eric Schuster, VP product management, Ceridian. “Connecting Dayforce Recruiting with Indeed maintains the advantage of our single HCM solution — including the elimination of redundant effort, inflexible workflows and error-prone manual steps — while providing users access to a much broader applicant pool.”
OK, that’s what Ceridian gets. But what about Indeed? It gets — wait for it — people. Human beings with profiles. And therein lies the counteroffensive. Indeed knows Google getting into the jobs category has everything to do with people, way more than it does job postings.
In a recent post, I made my opinion known that Indeed needs to have its apply button everywhere, because Google’s apply button was soon going to be commonplace throughout the job search landscape. Doing so means lots of professional profiles flooding Google’s database to eventually monetize.
Google isn’t going to sit idle while Microsoft and its $26.2 billion toadie gobble up all the opportunity to monetize the word’s workforce. Billions of job searches on Google means traffic to its job postings means fresh users applying to jobs via Google’s apply button.
For Indeed, jumping into bed with Ceridian is a good start. The HCM solutions provider has more than 4,000 employees, providing HR and payroll software to job seekers and companies in more than 50 countries, including Australia, Canada, and Mauritius. Indeed already enjoys having its apply button on other partner sites as well, although I couldn’t locate a list of said partners. A quick glance at a few popular applicant tracking solutions, however, failed to show much real estate dedicated to Indeed Apply.
I suspect, however, job seekers will start seeing more and more Indeed Apply buttons while conducting their job search in light of this latest partnership. Unfortunately for Indeed, the bridges it has burned over the years ticking off job boards will make this a bigger challenge than it would otherwise be.
Money, however, has a way of mending broken hearts.
If Indeed isn’t writing checks to get its Apply button visibility anywhere and everywhere, it should be. Google is coming to take its traffic. Indeed should do everything it can to keep it from taking its user data too. Because the money is in people, not postings.