The Staffing Professional’s Guide To Using Indeed.com

Want free, useful data about job postings in your line of business, in your area? Overall trends in specific jobs, year to year or month to month? Average salary for a specific job in a specific place? Who your competitors are looking for, and at what rate? And also, networking opportunities? Did we mention this is all free?

Indeed.com can help you out. This is data posted publicly that you can slice and dice yourself, and can provide you with competitive recruiting intelligence.

Indeed.com is the biggest jobs aggregator in the world, with 50 million unique visitors and 1 billion job searches a month. Its business plan is simple. Job seekers can click on a job they are interested in, and then Indeed takes them to that site. It’s basically a comprehensive link between the job seeker and the hiring company.

Started in 2004, Indeed compiles thousands of job listings from online job boards, corporate websites, associations, newspapers, and more. According to Business Insider, Indeed “just might be the most fabulously successful company that nobody knows.” Many staffing professionals, of course, do know Indeed …..but maybe not all the ways it can help them. Jason Whitman, VP at Indeed, admits that often people think that Indeed’s data is primarily job seeker information, but the fact is that it can be a great tool for recruiters and staffing professionals.

Mining that Data

Perhaps the coolest thing about Indeed, at least for me, is that it now has years of data pertaining to job searches and industry trends, and the company makes that data available, either by Indeed sifting through the data and providing it itself, or by letting users such as you or me use simple tools to find out what we might want to know.

An example of Indeed providing its own data is a top industry trends growth list, based on year-to-year data from October 2010 to October 2011. You will find that the top growth in job listings came from transportation, with a 53% increase. Healthcare, probably of more use to many staffing firms, grew its listings 28 percent.

But say you want to drill down a bit further. Say you are a travel nurse company and you are interested in job trends for registered nurses.

You will immediately see after a quick search that there are 200,000+ postings for RNs – pretty impressive.

And then, if you click on trends, you will see the growth of RN listings provided in graph form from 2006 to now (FYI, listings have never been higher).

And, of course, you can also see job postings by city and state.

Other data mining can also prove useful. For example, Indeed can tell you how tight the job market is in your area by comparing its job postings to BLS data. Here’s one example:

This can be useful on many fronts. For example, what if you are considering expansion to another market? Here’s some practical information that tells you how tough that market may be.

There are other areas that you can mine, and that lead to even more competitive intelligence. Because the site has postings leading directly to the hiring entity, you can plug your competitors in the search engine and see who is hiring, and what types of people.  How many others in your area are recruiting for the same position?

And there’s more that you can do with Indeed.

What’s Your Salary?

You can find the salary tool at the top of the home page.

With this tool you can see what particular jobs are paying in what areas, from, say, to consider our example, a registered nurse in Alabama:

To Mobile, AL:

I realize there are many salary tools out there these days. For example, Salary.com has been around quite a while. I think Indeed may have an advantage just based on the real-time nature of its postings, the breadth of those postings, and the fact that it is integrated with so many other research tools. Indeed’s salary statistics aren’t based on historical data, but on what jobs are paying, where, right now.

Using Forum to Network

This takes us away from the more data-driven tools I have been talking about and more into the realm of networking.  Again, this feature is at the top of the home page.

From here, you can engage in dialogue with many job seekers out there with questions, categorized into the subject’s company, job, city, general, and HR.   For example, once again with regard to registered nurses, here is an overall list.

And of course again, you can narrow this down to a forum for, example, RNs in Texas.

I think one of the best opportunities for staffing professionals, however, is the general feature.

Here is where you can offer career advice, tips about job interviews, and so on. You can get your company brand or personal name out there and become a trusted advisor in your staffing line or, more broadly, in the employment industry.

A Caveat

I’ll be the first to admit that there are potential issues with this data. Obviously, it doesn’t cover all available jobs; as we know many jobs are posted at duplicate sites and then aggregated, resulting in duplicate listings; many recruiters are turning to social media instead of job boards; and many jobs are filled before listings expire.

But I would submit that it’s an excellent snapshot of what’s going on in your market today, as well as an excellent way to map both past and future trends. This is real-time data that you can use.

And again, this is just a sample of what Indeed can do, but I recommend that every staffing professional log on and see what it offers.

Thinking of it beyond a job-seeking tool and instead as a gold mine for information you can use that will provide major dividends. Please experiment and let me know your thoughts at Jeff@Staffingtalk.com.

Tagged as: Data Mining, Indeed, Indeed.com, Reports