You will probably have heard that Indeed.com are understood to be turning off ‘organic’ (free) candidate traffic soon. This is set to be the most significant change for the industry since GDPR, and yet we’ve found that most recruitment consultancies haven’t yet considered the effect on their business.
The impact on some staffing firms will be massive. Three of the agencies we’ve recently spoken to currently receive over 80% of their website applications organically from Indeed. And worse, these candidates are significantly more likely to go on to generate placements than candidates from other marketing sources.
We want to help understand how prepared the UK market is – please take two minutes to complete this five question survey
Be aware that you can accidentally trigger this process. Many agencies who have tried to change their Indeed jobs feed, or submit a new feed, have seen their feeds being declined with an immediate drop-off in candidate applications. (Tip: DO NOT change the feed of jobs you currently submit to Indeed or you are likely to lose your organic traffic!)
What should you do now?
Whilst we don’t know exactly when Indeed.com will roll out this change, most guesses range from now to January 2020. Here are your first steps:
- Understand how many candidates you receive from organic Indeed traffic, and how much placement revenue they generate. This is the money you stand to lose.
- Look at how you would replace those candidates. Indeed.com are one of around 30 mainstream aggregators in the marketplace, so when you start paying for traffic you have plenty of options to consider. A programmatic recruitment ad agency can help you understand how much you need to invest to ‘make up’ for the loss of candidates.
- Be ready EARLY. When Indeed.com turned off organic traffic for recruitment consultancies in the US, it led to a market-wide stampede as agencies clamoured to sign up with programmatic recruitment agencies. In the UK there are a relatively small number of agencies who specialise in this field, and you want to get setup before they get inundated.
If you’d like some support, we are currently partnering with Talent Nexus, the largest programmatic recruitment ad agency in the UK. They can help you assess the impact and plan for the change. Speak with thomas.prince@talentnexus.com (co-founder).
At UKRecruiter we are keen to understand how prepared the market is for this change so please do complete the survey. We will make sure we share the results with everyone that takes part!
If you’ve already been affected we’d love to hear from you – please get in touch at @louise
