Q&A Wednesday: Indeed.com

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Rony Kahan, co-founder of Indeed.com. We’re slightly biased towards Indeed because it powers our job widget here on the blog, and they’re based in Austin.

Q: How did you first get the idea for Indeed.com?

Indeed.com is the second online recruitment firm that Paul Forster and I founded; the first was a job board dedicated to finance professionals. Job boards are great businesses, but the model puts the interests of recruiters ahead of job seekers. That’s because the only jobs you can find on job boards are those posted there by the job boards’ clients. Before Indeed, no proper search engine for jobs existed – no website enabled job seekers to conduct a comprehensive job search. So, we created Indeed.com to provide that service. It’s a search engine for jobs that lets you search millions of jobs from thousands of websites. We’re putting the job seeker first, giving them the best possible job search experience.

Q: Give us the elevator pitch for your website and services?

OK, here it goes: Indeed is the most comprehensive search engine for jobs, giving job seekers free access – instantly, in a single search – to millions of jobs from thousands of company websites, job boards, newspapers, blogs and associations. With millions of job searches every day, Indeed is by far the leading vertical search engine for jobs. Indeed has been selected by Time magazine as one of the "50 Coolest Websites" and by PC World as one of the best 50 websites.

Q: You power the job search functions of many major web properties. Tell us about your publishers.

Yes. We want Indeed job search to be ubiquitous – for as many people as possible to benefit from Indeed’s comprehensive and relevant job search results wherever they are on the web. Some of our partners include About.com and Zoominfo.com, but there are hundreds of other websites and blogs using Indeed’s publisher products, including our Jobroll, a custom feed of jobs like the one placed on the right margin of this blog, and our Instant Job Site, a turnkey job search solution that let’s you sell job postings on your blog. You get to earn money from all our publisher products.

Q: What’s in it for recruiters and employers? Are there ways they can give their jobs more visibility?

We drive millions of targeted job seeker visitors to jobs on job boards and company websites, and traffic from our natural search results is completely free. Anyone can sponsor their jobs on a pay-per-click basis to increase their exposure and drive more targeted traffic to their jobs. Our pay for performance ad system is really simple. Advertisers just have to specify a maximum price per click and a budget. We’ve got several hundred advertising clients, all getting great quality candidates at a relatively low cost.

Q: Do you have any other tools for jobseekers?

We launched Salary Search and Job Trends about two years ago and they tend to be the crowd favorites even today. Being able to create custom salary reports and job trends by skill has proven very popular. Aggregating tens of millions of jobs each year allows us to play with some pretty interesting data. We’ve also had an open API from the very beginning so others have created some interesting tools with our data. One developer created an Excel spreadsheet plugin that allows you to search jobs from within Excel so your boss won’t know you’re job hunting.

Q: What can we expect to see in the future from Indeed.com?

We’ll continue to make our job search results more comprehensive and more relevant. We are adding new sources of jobs every day and improving our search results in numerous ways, such as de-duplication and filtering out spam jobs. We recently launched a Canadian job search and UK job search with more on the way. We’ll also be adding new tools that enhance the job search experience similar to our salary search tool.  Overall, our goal is to be the best starting point for job search on the web.

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