Everything You Need to Know About Indeed’s Organic Job Listings

Indeed is the world’s largest job site, with over 200 million visitors each month. Indeed popularized the “pay for performance” or “pay-per-click” business model for job boards.

Historically, job boards have either been free or charged a fixed rate for posting a job. For example, Monster charges $399 for a single listing, which you pay up front. In contrast, with Indeed’s sponsored listings, you set a budget and you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This can be very cost effective if you luck out and find someone quickly as you may only have to pay for a handful of clicks.

Indeed also supports a free option that they call “organic jobs”. To post a job for free on Indeed, you follow the same Indeed posting process as a sponsored listing, but when creating your job you do not select the sponsorship option.

This is a fantastic option, but there are some things you should be aware of in order for your job to actually benefit from this free traffic option.

But, don’t worry, we have you covered…

Follow our tips below to maximize your likelihood of success.

Observe Indeed’s Job Posting Guidelines

Before trying the free organic option, make sure you take a look at Indeed’s job posting guidelines. If you don’t think you can follow their guidelines, then your job is not likely to get accepted by their Search Quality Team.

A rejection here may also hurt any future postings you want to list. So be careful and follow their directions.

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Indeed Job Review Process

Each job that is posted for free is manually reviewed by Indeed, so it can take a few days for a listing you post to start to show up in their search.

If you’re in a rush, you may want to just sponsor the listing. You’ll still be eligible for organic traffic, but your job will be visible immediately and have guaranteed traffic.

One Job Per Listing

To have your job ad considered for the organic feed, the title and description must be specific to a single position. This is good practice in general for any jobs you list on line and is necessary for Indeed’s organic option.

Job Title Guidelines

Be concise with your title, keep it under 60 characters, 3 to 5 words at most. The name of the position is probably your best bet.

Also, do not put salary information in the title. Although this can increase click-through rates with sponsored listings, Indeed will now allow this in their organic jobs.

Job Description Guidelines

Similar to the title guidelines, just keep it simple. Stick to a short description, requirements, perks and company information. Indeed only wants to give free traffic to quality real jobs, so make sure this is you before you try this option.

Avoid the Cattle Call

Any type of job fair, training opportunity or multi-level marketing position is going to be rejected. If this is what you are hiring for, your best bet is to simply pay for sponsorship.

Indeed’s free organic option is a great way to leverage the world’s largest job board for free. However, it will only work if you adhere to the tips discussed here. If you are a real company offering a legitimate opportunity than there should be no reason you can’t try this as a hiring option for you.

It’s important to remember that there is a delay on how quickly these jobs start to show up on Indeed. Also, the organic listings disappear from the search results much faster than a sponsored listing.

You can learn more about how Indeed’s search quality works here. Happy hiring!