Interview: Indeed.com Founder Discusses Online Recruitment

January 14, 2010 – Paul Forster is the co-founder of Indeed.com. Along with Rony Kahan, Mr. Forster launched Indeed in 2005 as a search engine for jobs, allowing job seekers to find positions posted on thousands of company career sites and job boards. He previously founded and managed Jobsinthemoney, a leading jobsite dedicated to finance professionals. In the following interview, Mr. Forster discusses his company’s services and the impact the current economic state has had on Indeed.com.
Explain how Indeed.com scours the web for job postings?
Indeed includes millions of jobs from thousands of job boards and corporate career sites, making it the most comprehensive search engine for jobs. Job seekers can access these jobs for free – instantly, in a single search. Indeed's search engine for jobs is now a global destination in many languages.
What kind of accolades has Indeed received?
Indeed was selected by Time Magazine as one of the Top 10 Websites, by PC Magazine as one of the Top 100 Classic Web Sites and by PC World as one of the Best 50 Websites.
How does Indeed.com make money?
Companies and job boards can drive additional targeted job seeker traffic to jobs on their websites by sponsoring them on Indeed. Sponsored jobs appear above our organic search results and advertisers only pay each time a job seeker clicks on an advertisement. Sponsored jobs are visible on Indeed.com but also throughout our partner network of millions of unique visitors, including on Facebook, MySpace, About.com and Ask.com.
Have recent poor economic conditions affected your business in a negative or positive way?
Job seeker traffic to Indeed has grown to over 23 million unique visitors and over one billion job searches per month worldwide. This is in part due to the difficult economic environment but is also a testament to Indeed being the best starting point for people’s job searches. Despite the weak recruitment advertising market, Indeed’s revenue has continued to grow profitably quarter-over-quarter.
Since launching the business five years ago, how has the online recruiting sector changed or evolved?
One of the biggest changes is the growth of pay-per-click recruitment advertising. The benefits of performance-based advertising are now much better understood in the recruitment and HR communities than it was a few years ago. We expect to see a continued migration of recruitment advertising dollars to pay-per-click (PPC), particularly on search engines. A related trend is that companies increasingly understand the importance of tracking the source of their candidates, enabling them to measure the return on investment of their recruitment advertising campaigns.
Moving forward, how does Indeed.com look to improve it services and visibility?
Indeed will continue to be the most comprehensive and relevant search engine for jobs. We’ll continue to improve our product with the aim of becoming the starting point for everyone’s job searches. We currently have sites in 19 countries and 10 languages and intend to expand our worldwide footprint further.

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