Category Archives: Sourcing

“Overqualified” is Just another word for Age Discrimination

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Had a really talented lady reach out to me the other day. 49 years old, college grad, great portfolio of work. She has been interviewing and is being told she is “Overqualified”.

There is some truth about her being called this. She does have more qualifications than the position requires, but she fully understands what the job is and she wants to do that job, with no notion of wanting to do more than that job, unless her performance shows she’s capable of moving up and the company needs her to move up.

“Overqualified” is just another way to say “Hey, I think you’re too old to work for me!”

Tell me I’m wrong! Give me all the reasons someone is “Overqualified” for a job they want to work at and understand what the job specs are?

I’m a Heart Surgeon but it’s a stressful job, so I decided to take a step back and just do some Cardiac Rehab work. Still get to work with heart patients, but it’s a less stressful workload and pays a heck of lot less, you need less education to do that job.

Am I overqualified to do Cardiac Rehab if I have experience as a heart surgeon? Only if you tell me I am! It’s a job I want, and I have the skills and desire to do that job, so I would say I’m quite qualified to do that job, not overqualified.

TA pros and hiring managers say someone is overqualified when they’re too stupid to come up with another reason about why they don’t want to hire someone who has great experience and more years of experience.

“Oh, Tammy, yeah, she’s overqualified to work in that job. I mean she wouldn’t be happy long-term reporting to me, and I mean she has more experience than I have!” Oh, she told you that? “Um, no.”

I constantly run into retired people who aren’t ready to retire and want to keep doing valuable work. They have great skills and knowledge, but 32-year-old Steve won’t hire them because Steve believes they won’t take his direction. That’s a Steve-issue, not the candidate’s issue!

By the way, this isn’t a young-to-middle-aged guy problem, women are just as bad! Turns out we all love to discriminate against old people, equally!

Tech companies are the worse. Creative companies are the second worse.

Tech companies believe only young people know technology. Creative companies think the only people who buy products and services are 26-year-olds on Instagram and Snap.

“Tim, you just don’t get it. I don’t want to hire someone who is going to retire in 5 years!” What’s your average tenure at your company? “4.2 years” Yeah, having someone for 5 years would really suck for you!

I had a hiring manager tell me this once when he interviewed a person who was 52! “I need someone who is going to stay long term!” Um, 13-15 years isn’t long term?! You’re an idiot!

I find telling hiring managers “You’re an idiot!” is super effective in getting through to them, and cutting straight through to their bias. It has worked 100% of the time in my career. It really works across all biases.

So, now tell me, why don’t you hire someone who is ‘overqualified”?

Recruiters – How are you celebrating #GlobalTADay?

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Today is a big day in Talent Acquisition! The Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) is launching Global TA Day to celebrate all the talent acquisition professionals that are working hard every day to ensure their organizations have the talent they need to thrive!

ATAP launched the site ilovetalentacquisition.com, in conjunction with our founding sponsor KRT Marketing and you can follow the action that is happening across the country as events are taking place in major cities throughout the day. On the site, you’ll find some great downloads to help you and your team celebrate!

I’ll be in downtown Detroit today and on Facebook live around 1pm EST, as I’ll be celebrating #GlobalTADay with the over 100 TA Pros on the team at Quicken Loans as they are using today as their annual TA Summit where the team will have development and strategy sessions throughout the day, and some fun and celebration as well!

To check out the Facebook Live feed today just go to the Global TA Day Facebook Page!

So, I’m guessing most of you were caught off guard by this! Like, what is Global, what!?! I get it, but it’s not too late to find ways to celebrate today. Here’s how I would celebrate if I was in the office today:

  1. I would follow along on the Twitter hashtag #GlobalTADay and connect with other TA Pros from around the world!
  2. I would ask another TA Pro on my team to get lunch or go get a drink after work, or I might go buy some sweet treats to share around the office!
  3. I would watch some of the celebrations taking place around the world today on the Facebook Live feed.
  4. I would take some time to reflect on while our profession is extremely difficult, especially right now, I’m so grateful for having found a job and industry that I love working in!
  5. I would go signup to be a member of the only professional association the supports my interests ATAP Global! Today only you get an annual membership for $85! (a $10 discount). TODAY ONLY! By the way, I’m the next President of ATAP, so come help me build something great!
  6. I would go on Amazon and buy the best TA Book on the Planet and #1 Best Seller and 5 Star rated – The Talent Fix! (just kidding, no really I would!)!

So, have fun with Global TA Day! You deserve it!

The “Real” Man Talent Crisis in America!

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I have to admit, I’m not much of a  “real man”. I don’t know many ‘man’ things. I don’t fix cars. I’m horrible fixing almost anything. I have a lot of tools, but the reality is I usually cost myself more money by trying to fix something myself than just paying to have a ‘real’ man fix it.

That’s hard to admit. I want to be a real man. I want to have something go wrong in my house and instantly know what to do and how to correct it. I usually just go to YouTube and watch a real man show me how to fix it, then I call a real man to come over and fix it.

It seems like there is a huge need for real men right now in the world. It’s a shrinking talent pool for sure!

My mother is at a point in life where she finds herself without a man, real or fake, but she needs the skills of a real man to help her keep up her house. We found her someone and all I can think is I really need this guy for myself, not her! I need her real man for me!

I have three sons and none of them are real men, and unfortunately, I don’t see them becoming real men. I’m teaching them to pay for a real man. It’s cheaper and less frustrating in the long run. I don’t really have a desire to learn to plumb, do electrical work, appliance repair, engine repair, carpentry, etc. I mean I wish I had those skills, but that’s a lot of life experience and it’s almost too late for me to pick those up and be any good at them.

I have some great qualities that most ‘real’ men probably don’t. I’m awesome at gardening. I love to shop. Go to the movies. I love to go to the theater. I can cook up a storm. I do some basic sewing. I’m awesome with children. Just don’t ask me to ‘fix’ the front door when it won’t close properly.

While you might think this is a ‘me’ problem, it’s not. This is an “us” problem. I can foresee a time when ‘real’ men are so scarce we won’t be able to find anyone to fix our stuff! We have a real man talent crisis on our hands and I don’t think people really understand how bad it is, and how bad it’s going to get.

I don’t need someone to show me how to play Fortnite! That is a skill I can live without. But I can’t have the deck falling off my house and just let it dangerously hang there! I don’t need someone to show me how to watch the entire series of The Office on Netflix, but I do need someone to help me fix my garage door when it won’t go up or down!

I’m sure there is a correlation between skilled trades leaving public education and downfall of “real” man skills in the U.S. I’m also sure that there is a correlation between white collar jobs and blue collar jobs and real man skill level. You could probably add in a number of other factors around higher education, income level, etc. But, it’s all really meaningless, I still need have a need for real man skills no matter the reason I lack them!

So, I’m wondering. Is this just me or are others feeling the real man skill pinch as well? Hit me in the comments with how you lack real man skills, or how you got your real man skills, even if you’re a lady with ‘real man’ skills!

Michigan Recruiter’s Conference – November 1st – Detroit, MI! Registration is Now Open!

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The 4th Annual Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on November 1st, 2018 onsite at the GM Headquarters RenCen in downtown Detroit, MI. Registration is now open for this event. There is limited seating because of space constraints. Only 250 registrations will be accepted! This event will SELL OUT, don’t wait!

Okay – all that nonsense is out of the way! Why should you and your corporate recruiting team come? Yes, I specifically said “corporate” recruiting team. No staffing, RPO, or vendors will be allowed to register. Hate me if you want, but it actually works really well. Corporate TA leaders and pros can learn without being pimped constantly!

When Jim and I started this conference 4 years ago we did so that our teams would have world-class recruiting development in our own backyard. National conferences are great, but they are expensive! We couldn’t afford to send our teams, but if we had one local, we could bring our entire team!

Jim and I knew most of the great Talent Acquisition speakers personally, or we knew someone who knew them personally, and we felt pretty confident we could talk them into coming to beautiful Michigan! Okay, they all owe us favors and we just happen to be in Michigan! Either way, the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference has worked out wonderfully!

The 2018 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference lineup is Awesome!

– Torin Ellis – Diversity Strategist speaking on “Conversation to Commitment”

– Angie Verros – Sourcing/TA Expert speaking on getting more candidate replies

– Michael Arena, Ph.D. – Chief Talent Officer at GM speaking on TA Transformation

– Dawn Burke – HR and Talent Expert speaking on getting more out of your hiring managers

– Holly Fawcett – Sourcing Ninja at Social Talent sharing the latest and greatest Sourcing magic!

– Plus, additional sessions on DIversity Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing!

I want to thank this year’s sponsors: General Motors (just exceptional automobiles), Greenhouse (just an exceptional ATS) and Smashfly (just an exceptional Recruitment Marketing platform). They allow us to keep the cost of the entire conference down to just $89 per person, that includes, coffee, breakfast, drinks, lunch, snacks, oh yeah, and all that great freaking TA development and thought leadership!

Register Today! (over 100 tickets have already been sold in the 1st week!)

The Talent Fix Now Approved for @SHRM CP & SCP Recertification Credit!

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By now I hope you know I wrote a book! If not, guess what I wrote a book! The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent is a top-rated Talent Acquisition book on Amazon and the best selling book at SHRM’s Talent Conference (Top 8 at SHRM National, which was really cool!).

Also, it was recently approved for SHRM CP and SCP recertification credit!

So, you buy the book. You read the book. And SHRM and I will approve you for recertification credit of your SHRM CP or SCP! Okay, I have really have nothing to do with approving your SHRM CP and SCP! 😉

One Big Takeaway

I had a reader reach out to me last week. They just got done reading the book and they shared one of the big takeaways they got from the book, and it wasn’t one I would have expected!

When you think of Employment Branding and Recruitment Marketing (Chapter 7) we tend to think that it’s first Employment Branding (EB) and then it’s Recruitment Marketing (RM). In fact, these two functions within Talent Acquisition are really completely separate!

This reader, like most us, believed these two were attached at the hip. You first created your EB, you then used RM to get your EB shared to the audience you were going after.

After reading my book she realized these two functions really have nothing to do with each other. Both can live without the other. You can use a great RM strategy to promote your jobs and organization and get very good results.

You can create an awesome EB and share that with candidates without any type of RM strategy or technology and it can be great. There is no need to have both, but both working together create a synergy that one does not have without the other!

Create a great EB and create a great RM machine and you will see results that are far better than anything else you’ve done. Far too often I see organizations that focus most of their effort and resources on one side and not the other.

I naturally put these two together within the chapter because I would never do one without the other. It doesn’t make sense to me, but you can. In reality, we all have an employment brand within the market, whether you actually created it or not.

Many times we internally think way higher of our EB than the actual market in which we are hiring gives us credit. Most of us will have an EB that the majority of our hiring audience has no idea about. Which is why a great RM strategy is critical to finishing off great EB work.

You can do one without the other, but rarely will it ever make sense.

Okay – that’s like 1/16th of a SHRM CP or SCP credit – go buy the book and get the rest!

The Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes!

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One of my awesome recruiting managers at HRU (the technical staffing company I run) is in the process of making his first hire! It’s pretty exciting. Do you remember the first hire you ever got to make on your own?

You get nervous! You don’t want to make a mistake, because you know how awful it is to have a bad employee working for you, so the last thing you want to do is make a wrong decision. You want this first hire to be a rock star!

All of our managers who are going through the hiring process for the first time all face the same issues. They are unsure of what to really do. If you’re a parent, the best analogy I can give is when the hospital lets you leave with your newborn! Do you remember that?

You get to the lobby. You have your baby strapped into that car seat like they are about to enter a crash test site! When you reach the doors, they slide open, and you kind of look around. You’re waiting, for just a second, for someone to stop you! You can’t believe anyone would just allow you to walk out of the hospital with a baby! Did you guys even check who I am! I have a hard time throwing my clothes all the way into the hamper, and you’re just letting me leave with a baby!?!

That’s the feeling all of our managers get when they hire for the first time! Wait, you’re letting me choose!? Are you sure you’re okay with this?!

To help our new managers I put together the Top 7 Rookie Hiring Mistakes for managers to avoid. Here they are:

1. You wait for HR and/or Talent Acquisition to control the process. This is your hire, that you’ll have to manage, live with, and fire if they suck! Get involved! Immediately!

2. You fall into the trap of wanting to hire someone who is perfect. You’re not perfect. Your CEO is not perfect. No one is perfect. Hire someone who can succeed in your job, your organization, under your leadership. Don’t hire perfect.

3. You try and hire someone who is just like you! You were successful in the job, which is why you are now the leader. So, it makes sense that someone just like you will also be successful. This tactic fails more times then it succeeds because we actually suck at managing ourselves! Find someone who compliments your weaknesses, and has the skills to do the job and you’ll have a better chance to find success. You’ll also add more diversity to your team!

4. You don’t move fast enough. If you interview a very talented person, there is a good chance someone else is also interviewing this very talented person. Pull the trigger and get them before someone else steals them from you!

5. You wait too long to fire a miss-hire. First-time leaders are the worse with this. They feel like they can make anyone work! Plus, they feel more ownership since it was their first time. Stop it! This won’t be the last time you make a bad hire. Give yourself the best leadership gift ever and fire a bad hire quickly!

6. You don’t believe it’s your job to recruit and source talent. Guess what, champ? The organization gave you the keys to run a department. They believe in you. If I’m given the keys to run anything, I’m running the whole thing! It’s my department, which means I own the talent, which means I’m going to help find the right talent for my team. I know what is needed better than anyone! TA can help me, that’s great! But I own this!

7. You believe that leadership will judge you based on this hire. Leadership won’t judge you based on one hire. Leadership will judge you based on a pattern of hiring success, or lack thereof. One hire will not define you. Many hires will. R.E.L.A.X.

So, what do you think, HR and Talent Pros? What are the biggest mistakes you see Rookie managers making when it comes to hiring? Hit me in the comments!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Filtered_ The 1st Objective Tech Interview Platform

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review the technical interview platform Filtered. Filtered is not the first technical interview platform on the market, but they might be the most advanced interviewing platform for IT talent that I’ve seen on the market.

Filtered was built by engineers who turned into Recruiters, but decided to turn back into engineers because the tech interview world was so broken they felt compelled to do something about it! What they did was build an IT interview platform that stops all of the cheating that is currently going on in the industry!

If you hire IT talent and you use some kind of coding test, etc., you already know how the game is played and won. There are massive corruption and cheating going on in IT hiring, because the current interview platforms allow for one person to log on and take an interview for another, pass it, and then the person who can’t do the work shows up, or shows up at a much higher pay rate then they should because they tested higher then what they are really capable of.

Filtered puts a stop to this in a number of ways using technology that constantly scans works, takes facial snapshots every few seconds, and utilizes machine learning to raise red flags of potential cheaters in progress of assessment.

What do I like about Filtered? 

– Filtered security is groundbreaking when it comes to stopping the cheating that is going on with your IT hiring. Filtered doesn’t allow cutting and pasting of code, it doesn’t allow the person who starts the test to get up and someone else to sit in and finish, it shows you exact GPS data of where a person is taking the test.

Why is this important? When Filtered ran a recent test for a client they were able to show one IT Contingent company the client was working with had 20+ IT assessments take place for 20+ different candidates from the exact same house in New Jersey! Cheating is going on, you are either ignoring it or don’t care!

– The Filtered team works with your IT team to create the right assessments and challenges that are needed to not just find qualified candidates but to actually find candidates that are the best that are applying.

– Recorded video interviews explaining why they did an assessment or challenge in the way they completed the task.

– Real-time data ranking so corporations can see which recruiters or which contingent firms are providing the best talent for your organization.

– Filtered shows verified skills being assessed, but also allows candidates to show other skills they might have as well, which can be verified within the system.

I love interview technology that helps organizations make better selections. One problem we’ve found out within the industry is that if people can cheat, they’ll find a way to cheat, so the technology has to stay out in front of the cheaters! Filtered is at the forefront of stopping the corruption that is taking place in the contingent IT industry.

There’s a great chance your contingent providers of IT talent are cheating your system. It’s rampant coast to coast. The most common is having someone else take the assessment, which gives you the belief you’re getting senior talent and paying for senior talent, and in reality, a junior/entry level IT person shows up to work.

I would encourage you all to demo Filtered and compare them to other technical interview platforms you are using. Filtered also has built a Data Science specific assessment as well, which is the only one I’ve seen in the industry. In a growing field like data science, it’s easy to make bad hires, so this is one more reason to look at the platform!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

What’s the difference between Recruiting and Sourcing?

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I’m on the road this week at SHRM National and at The Sourcing Summit UK. Two very different groups. The SHRMies will be more traditional HR and Recruiter types that wear a lot of hats. The SOSUites will be very specialized in sourcing.

I get asked a lot about what’s really the difference between Recruiting and Sourcing? Or, where does Sourcing end and Recruiting begin? Or something similar to these questions.

The answer is it doesn’t matter.

The organization has a need for talent.

The organization has to find or grow talent.

You and others in the organization need to figure this out.

So, figure it out!

Everyone is going to design and process this differently. Some will have Sourcers take it all the way until the candidate is screened, then the Recruiter will come into finish the process. Some will have the Sourcers just find the talent, then have the Recruiter work to contact, screen, etc.

It doesn’t matter how you design it if it works for your organization, and, this is key, it’s replicable no matter who you have in the role.

Stop. Think. Let that process for a second.

One of the biggest mistakes I see really good organizations make is they build and design process around the talent they have right now. One piece of that talent changes and all of a sudden it no longer works.

“Well, Tim, did all the sourcing and just handed me great talent!” Great, Tim quit because he was doing most of the work and you took all the credit. How is that process working now?

Talent Acquisition is really hard when you have to make it up new each time you have an opening! Talent Acquisition becomes sustainable when you can plug in skill sets you need and the machine keeps spitting out talent no matter who it is.

Is it Sourcing? Is it Recruiting? It doesn’t freaking matter. Make it work for your organization.

What I find with the most innovative TA shops on the planet is they didn’t look at what everyone else was doing. They looked at what their organization needed and they solved for that problem. Many times the solution was doing something no one else was doing.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Job_Adx Smarter Programmatic Job Ad Spend

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the programmatic job ad platform JobAdx. JobAdx is one of a handful of new platforms on the market that talent acquisition teams can utilize to run their own digital job advertising.

So, first I probably need to explain a little about what the heck is ‘programmatic’ advertising.“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

Traditionally, you probably did very little with your own job advertising. You might have actually did some old school newspaper advertising, posted your jobs on job boards, or more than likely you used an agency, who charges a fee/premium, who would advertise your ads on various sites.

JobAdX is an advanced digital advertising technology with Pay Per Applicant model. Instead of running ads where you pay-per-click (each time someone clicks on your ad), this new programmatic technology actually only charges you for those who apply. So, ultimately, this pay-per-applicant will be more expensive than pay-per-click on a per event basis, but cheaper overall because you’re only paying for what you want, applicants.

So, what the heck does it really do? 

That’s really the big question, isn’t it! Basically, a programmatic ad platform puts your job ad in front of candidates where they are all over the internet. Traditionally, you would put one ad on one site (a professional association site, let’s say). Some potential candidates might go to that site, but many would not. But, almost all potential candidates are somewhere on the internet searching and doing things.

The programmatic ad technology finds the individuals you are looking for and puts the ad, in real-time, in front of them at whatever site they happen to be at. A great example is buying shoes. I love shoes. I bought 3 pairs of shoes this week! So, I go to a site to look at shoes. I find a pair I like, but I know my wife will kill me if I buy one more pair of shoes!

So, I leave that site and go to another site like Facebook. And what do you know there is an ad for those same stupid shoes on Facebook! How did Facebook know!?! Facebook didn’t know, the programmatic ad engine did know! Welcome to the future of job advertising!

A nurse has certain behaviors when searching online that will tell the technology, most likely this person in a nurse, which then allows the programmatic job ad platform (JobAdx) to put your nurse job opening in front of this person multiple times, across multiple sites, not just traditional job search sites.

What I like about JobAdx:

– Programmatic job advertising should be used by every TA shop, regardless of your number of hires, especially if you’re struggling to get results via traditional means. The JobAdx platform is simple to use and allows you to control your spend and budget with an “auto-pilot” feature to make it somewhat idiot-proof (which I definitely need!).

– The JobAdx platform has a great dashboard for you to actually see which jobs are performing really well, and which ones are not performing, so you can increase your spend on those you need, and decrease or stop completely on the jobs you no longer need traffic on.

– Advanced technology within JobAdx will ensure that once a candidate applies that candidate will stop seeing your job ads, which is a much better candidate experience.

– There is frequency capping within JobAdx as well, which is basically an automatic set of rules which will stop showing your job ad to a person after so many times. The theory is once someone sees your ad, let’s say six times, they’ve shown you they aren’t interested, so let’s not show them that same ad again, but go show it to others.

The goal of the JobAdx is to empower employers to advertise jobs more dynamically using the power of Real-Time Job Delivery. I’m completely enthralled by the technology and I truly believe every TA shop should be testing programmatic in their own shops. Go check out JobAdx and get a demo, then put a few hundred or thousand dollars you spend on traditional advertising and try it using programmatic.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

I’m in Indeed Jail! Help me!!! #FreeTimSackett

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Do you remember when getting stuck in LinkedIn Jail was all the rage!? I do! It was awful! There you were stuck on the outside looking in not being able to use a valuable tool you used every day to help you do your job.

I’m in Indeed Jail!

It’s somewhat like being in LinkedIn Jail, but different. When you got put into LinkedIn Jail, LinkedIn decided that that right thing to do was to let us know why we were in jail, and then, specifically, how do you get yourself out of LinkedIn Jail. Seems like a good business strategy.

How does Indeed get you all of those great candidates?

The Indeed model built a decade ago was freaking brilliant! Basically, the idea was scrap all the jobs from all the career sites so candidates will have one place to go to search for jobs. No one understood Google SEO at the time, so they scraped the jobs, then bought all the SEO and owned the space.

So, any candidate who was searching for a job on Google the first thing that would come up, always, was an Indeed link. They trained entire generations to search for jobs by going to Indeed. Brilliant!

Now, Google came along eventually and woke up to this and said, “Hey, wait, candidates are searching on Google for things like “Jobs near me” and we are sending them to Indeed for things that aren’t even what they are truly looking for. We can do this better!” Hello, Google for Jobs!

Google for Jobs decided “candidates are the most important thing”. Your Indeed sales rep will tell you this as well, although, they didn’t ever say this until Google for Jobs came along! So, Google changes the game, stops indexing Indeed (which is like a death sentence to companies that rely on Google search traffic), and says we can deliver a better job search for candidates.

So, Indeed is basically a dead man walking, but they have this window of time when we still have the entire world trained to go to Indeed and not Google. So, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon? INDEED JAIL!!! Cut off the non-suspecting companies of their free traffic and charge them money before they realize they don’t really need to do this because Google will give them the traffic they need.

So, what’s Indeed Jail?

Indeed Jail is when Indeed makes the decision to stop scrapping your career site and posting your jobs on Indeed. Almost every company at some point in the past decade has enjoyed a lot of free, organic traffic from having their job posting on Indeed. It was an AWESOME business strategy. It basically followed LinkedIn’s strategy, who followed basic drug dealing strategy.

Get people hooked on your product, then take it away and make them pay if they want it. I don’t say that to be mean! It freaking works really, really well! LinkedIn is a multi-Billion dollar company that got bought by Microsoft.

Indeed Jail is when Indeed stops giving you those free hits! Now, they just don’t take it away for no reason. My reason to be cut off, I was told, was because of a magical, mythical division within Indeed called “Search Quality”. My Indeed Rep didn’t shut me off, no! It was “Search Quality” who shut me off, and my Indeed Rep has absolutely nothing to do with Search Quality. In fact, they run almost as a separate company, locked away in an undisclosed, secret location!

My “Search Quality” issue was I’m a staffing company. An example of my issue is we work with a major employer to fill contract positions, not a position they would hire direct. The company gave us a job description for the contract position, which was basically the exact same JD they use to hire direct. Because the direct employer has priority at Indeed, and my posting was ‘too similar” my ‘search quality’ was bad.

Okay, I’m in Jail, Ouch, that hurts! Help me fix it! 

Let me say, I’m paying and have paid money to Indeed for various products, so it’s not like I’m not a customer. So, when you ask someone you’re paying for help, you expect help. But Indeed has no interest in helping you fix your search quality issue because that would mean you would get the product for free again!

I would love to tell you this is a staffing industry only issue, but it’s not. Little by little, and I have specific examples, corporate Talent Acquisition is also getting hit with ‘search quality’ issues and losing their free traffic from Indeed.

How can that be!?

Believe me, the corporate TA leaders I’m talking to are wondering the same thing. In one example, an Ohio-based employer is hiring hundreds of sales-related positions per year. They don’t use any staffing or RPO vendors, all the work is done in-house for direct positions. They have a big growth initiative so they went from maybe 50 openings to 200 openings, and Indeed cut them off! Because of ‘search quality’, and again, their rep would/could not help them.

I have a feeling this isn’t going to end well for Indeed. Right now they’re flying high! Going to hire thousands of more employees, which makes complete sense, because if you shut everyone off of free traffic, you’ll have a lot of TA pros panicking and buying Indeed products. At least until they discover it continues to cost more for less and less traffic as Google no longer indexes Indeed.

I’ve sent emails to the highest reaches of Indeed, pleading for help, and the only response I got back was from my rep offering to sell me more products!

I explained that I want this to be positive! Show me how to fix me, and I’ll show others how to fix themselves! Along the way, it’s a win/win since the more we understand about the Indeed products and services and feel like a vendor is truly helping us, we (as an industry) will support them!

Crickets!!! Crickets, I say, Chris Hyams!!!

So, what should you do to NOT get yourself in Indeed Jail?  

1. Never pay one dime to Indeed!!!

  • So one thing that has been pretty consistent with everyone I’ve spoken to that got put into Indeed Jail is that they were all (100%) paying customers of Indeed. Almost, like Indeed knew we were willing to pay for traffic, so they put us into jail on purpose! Up until the point of becoming a paid Indeed customer, none of the people I spoke ever had issues with being put in Indeed Jail!

2. Make sure you understand what is ‘bad’ search quality for Indeed. Good luck with this!

3. Enjoy the free traffic while you have it because eventually everyone will be shut off. Drug dealing works because we get addicted. You’re currently addicted to free Indeed traffic. That isn’t a sustainable model for a business.

So, what do you do if you’re already in Indeed Jail? 

1. Understand you’re not alone.

2. Understand that your true reality is you can live without Indeed traffic, and slowly but surely the traffic you get from Google will be greater. So, focus on ensuring your ATS and Jobs are as aligned as possible with the Google Job Schema – it’s super important!

3. Understand if you want more Indeed hits, you better get ready to pay for them from Indeed.

4. Understand Indeed has no vested interested in helping you fix your search quality issue, even if you’re a paid customer because it costs them money.

5. Look at Programmatic Job Advertising tools like: JobAdX, Talroo, Appcast, etc. Increase your posting strategy with sites like ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.  Invest in your own database with some talent rediscovery tools, use CRM technology, build and nurture your pipelines of talent.

My Offer Still Stands!

Chris Hyams, the President of Indeed, get your team to help fix my stuff and I’ll be your biggest fan in advocating and teaching others how to do right by candidates and by Indeed to make the world a better place. That’s all I ever wanted, for you to just help me. Help a paying customer fix their stuff. But you refused.

#FreeTimSackett