Indeed Resume Search Review

You all know about Indeed.com ; it’s the most popular job search engine/job aggregation tool on the market and now one of the most popular job sites on the web. They have been around for about eight years and until recently, they have loyally stuck to their core business model of presenting job seekers with millions of jobs from company websites and job sites all over the world.

Until recently –  last September 2011 that is, when Indeed ventured into the resume search market with its own open search engine for resume profiles, called Indeed Resume.

If this is the first you have heard of Indeed Resume, the bad news is that the beta launch, which provided you with free access to resumes ran from September 2011 until March of this year. The good news is that  the full launch of Indeed Resume happened in March and in order to break into an already crowded resume search market, Indeed has come up with an innovative and flexible pricing model, designed to remove the barrier to entry and draw in new customers. This attractive pricing model includes ‘no sign-up fees, no subscriptions and no contract required’. As well as this they have a slick pay-as-you-go fee model, where employers pay ‘$1 for the first message they send to each candidate’. This seems to be great value for money, for example, if you managed to get 1 hire from contacting  50 people, the total direct cost per hire would be $50, a nominal sum.

And just in case that was not enough to draw employers in they currently have a risk free sign up model where employers will receive their first 50 contacts for free, (as of a March 2012 press release ).

In conclusion, employers and recruiters should give Indeed Resume a trial run. If you are still making up your mind, I thought I’d give you a run down of the capabilities of Indeed Resume search to help illustrate its potential to be a cost effective component of your hiring strategy.

Candidates

A resume search engine would be nothing without resumes. We don’t know how many resumes that Indeed has, but with April traffic figures of 18,000,000 (Compete.com) Indeed has more visitors than Monster, CareerBuilder and SimplyHired, so one can expect that their resume database is both significant in size and growing extremely quickly.

Search Facility

This does what it needs to do. It is a reasonably powerful advanced search, including the standard Boolean keyword search interface, very much like their job search tool. You can also search based on job title, company, years of experience, school name, degree, field of study and location.

Resume results page with preview function

The search result page is very user friendly. You can roll over the name of any of the candidates in the search result and a preview box appears on the right side of the page displaying the first half page of the resume. You can scroll down the list and speed read 10 resumes without even clicking on another page. This preview functionality is excellent and enables users to scan a lot of resumes in a short space of time.

In the left side column, you have refinement criteria so you can narrow down your search. These criteria include education level, years of experience, job titles, companies and locations.

Resume Page

Having clicked on a candidate’s resume, you are then presented with a well formatted resume, and clean, simple functionality enabling you to save, share, download the resume or contact the candidates subject to joining. You can also sign up to alerts from this screen too.

In short, Indeed.com seems cost effective, risk free (for the first 50 contacts), and was obviously made with simplicity in mind. It has the potential to be a strong part of your hiring strategy, if used appropriately. I recommend giving it a try.