What US recruitment companies can teach the UK Recruitment market about the shut-off of organic traffic?
‘Indeed Armageddon’ Is back, and this time it’s the UK. After Indeed stopped providing US Staffing and Recruiting companies with organic traffic in January 2019, the term ‘Indeed Amrmegeddon‘ was coined. With little to no warning, many staffing companies faced the prospect of losing up to 50% of their job applications or paying costs as high as $10K per month to maintain existing traffic volumes. For companies that relied heavily on job postings and had no backup plan or poorly optimized candidate flow, the impact felt like Armageddon.
Five years later, The UK is on the firing line. What can UK companies learn from the experience of their US counterparts?
Take a step back and run reports.
The immediate urge is to increase budgets in the short term to accommodate the loss in candidate flow, but do you truly understand the impact? How much of it is panic and noise? You need to understand the gaps within your current activity. How does this stack up with other sources? What’s the time impact of reviewing these free candidates, and how can that be used? If you don’t have this reporting, there is more reason to pause, as after you spend a load of money, you still won’t have the answer. Start here.
Quality over quantity
It seems obvious, but remember that the gap is the quality of prospective candidates you can submit to your clients. Clicks are not placements. Exact placement volume may not always tell the whole story, but you are looking to replace the quality of candidate flow, not clicks or volume of CV’s. While more applications in the database aren’t horrible, reviewing them wastes time and resources, and some candidates will never be relevant. What is the revenue and submissions gap from Indeed Organic over the previous quarter?
Optimise your conversion
Are you running paid campaigns with Indeed or buying programmatic or other advertising clicks? One of the best ways to increase candidate flow without increasing spend is to look at your candidate journey and optimize the funnel for conversion. At Staffing Future, we’ve seen the Top 10 national companies increase paid traffic conversion by over 40% by simply improving their UX and rolling out ease-of-use features.
Examples include things like adding Dropbox or Google Drive to your website to allow users to upload resumes from mobile. Adding apply with LinkedIn or Indeed buttons to allow users to apply using an existing profile. Offering a logged-in experience to one-click apply with the data already in your ATS or bypassing the website altogether and using a provider with an Indeed Quick Apply integration to deliver candidates directly from Indeed into your ATS. (Staffing Future can help with all of the above, but systems like multi posters can help with parts of it)
Spread your risk with new sources, Ideas, and Testing.
See the opportunity in every risk. Once your reporting and conversion are optimized, you can experiment with programmatic or different PPC sources. Should you use the extra time saved screening organic candidates to focus on sourcing and sourcing tools? Is now the time to explore what AI can do for candidate flow? Do we want to get off the CPA and CPC train and focus on SEO? Your hand has been forced, but opportunity is everywhere.
In summary
Consider the idea that Indeed may have done you an uncomfortable favor, if any of the above elements resonate there are gaps in your talent attraction plan that already need to be addressed, and Indeed Organic has been papering over them. In the same way, It’s risky to have major revenue concentration, it’s risky to be over-reliant on one or two sources of candidates… and if you can’t do or have already done all of the above, you may have to face up to writing that check. Many people ended up swallowing it stateside as the value was there, and we wouldn’t be here if it didn’t work out well for Indeed last time.