LinkedIn Goes Head To Head With Indeed

The boxing/professional fighting world seems to have been in the news almost on a daily basis recently, but are we about to see a heavyweight match-up in the recruitment world?

Job Aggregation

Right back in the May 2014 (ok only 1.5 years ago) LinkedIn announced they were going to begin testing job aggregation in the US. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, job aggregation is simply a process of crawling through specific job hosting pages (i.e. your careers site) on the internet and then centralising all the crawled jobs in one place (my laymen’s definition!). You see this in action everyday but may not be aware of what it is, every time you get a candidate from indeed SimplyHired or in Australia Adzuna this is because of job aggregation. These sites have found your job on your careers or recruitment site and then aggregated (grouped) it with other crawled vacancies on their site. The applicant has then found your advert on one of these aggregation sites, generally after arriving there as the result of a Google search.

In countries like the US this approach has been around for some time, but in others such as Asia Pacific it is still relatively new, but is very quickly gaining market presence. We’ve been told that globally indeed is actually Google’s largest client. We’ve got no way to verify if this is true, but they definitely must be spending huge amounts of money to ensure their jobs are shown at the top of the results whenever a job title is searched from Google.

Two Heavyweights

Therefore in the current marketplace it’s safe to say the two biggest recruitment focused technology companies are LinkedIn and indeed. Up until now these two powerhouses have stayed clear of each other, with LinkedIn focused on networking and indeed on job aggregation. LinkedIn has had a job slots feature for some time, but this previously relied on employers or recruiters posting a paid job in the same way that they would on a traditional job board.

Head to Head

For the first time this week we’ve noticed LinkedIn aggregating in New Zealand, taking a large volume of one our client’s jobs and pulling them through to LinkedIn Jobs, so they now sit alongside the existing paid vacancies/job slots.

If you’re currently paying for jobs packages on LinkedIn don’t feel too hard done by, there is still potential value in this, because LinkedIn promotes these paid vacancies throughout its user network, a service that aggregated jobs won’t be exposed to.

It’s important to remember that limited listings are only visible to candidates in job search on LinkedIn—and only ~25% of professionals are actively looking for jobs. This means that engagement with limited listings – just as with your career site and traditional job boards – is a one-way street, where active candidates search to view. And limited listings will appear below any relevant Job Slots in their search, too. – LinkedIn

As the title of this blog suggests this change does however manoeuvre LinkedIn into direct competition with indeed. With US giant Monster also moving into this market, aggregation is obviously hot property at the moment, perhaps LinkedIn is hoping that by having an increased number of vacancies it will give people more reason to access the platform, or perhaps there is another reason. Whatever the situation there is a fight brewing and this extends to traditional job boards who are definitely also under siege from the aggregation goliaths.

This blog post first appeared on Prominence Blog on December 10, 2015