Hamra Enterprises, a large restaurant franchise operator with more than 7,500 employees, needed to hire 50 associates for the grand opening of a new Panera in Spring, Texas. The company paid Indeed for Sponsored Jobs to maximize visibility. But when Sonja Breuer, Hamra’s senior vice president of human resources, searched for the openings, she saw jobs at Panda Express, McDonald’s, and other restaurants while Hamra’s sponsored jobs did not consistently appear.
“They’re putting in ‘Panera, Spring Texas,’” Breuer said. “You can’t get any more specific than that.”
After weeks of back-and-forth about how Indeed’s search system worked, Breuer’s frustration came down to a simpler point.
“I just want the search tool to work as it should.”
Breuer’s experience, which I first heard about via the Chad & Cheese podcast, highlights the dilemma facing Indeed right now. As the company places more emphasis on paid posts and a personalized search experience, it is making its search results less intuitive.
“To help job seekers find the most relevant opportunities, we combine exact search terms (specific employer, job title, or location) with additional context, including a person’s skills, experience, preferences, qualifications, and real-time search and application behavior on Indeed. As a result, two people searching for the same employer, role, or location may see different results,” an Indeed spokesperson wrote when asked for comment.
There’s a legitimate opportunity to tailor search results to each candidate’s needs and improve relevance. And as agents play a larger role in job discovery, those customized results may ultimately become more important than a traditional search page.
That opportunity is very much at odds with Indeed’s monetization strategy.
“Premium Sponsored Jobs appear in the top three search results 2x more often than Standard Sponsored Jobs,” an Indeed representative wrote to Breuer, while also noting that premium sponsorship does not guarantee visibility in any particular search.
Charging employers to reach more candidates has long been Indeed’s business model, and Sponsored Jobs are not new. What’s changed is that Indeed is selling employers different probabilities of appearing in the most valuable positions within an algorithmic system they cannot reliably test or reproduce.
Indeed built its dominance on simple search results. Those results are now a black box, increasingly shaped by what employers pay.
“Where the hell is the competition?” Chris Russell asked a few weeks ago, questioning why Indeed’s established rivals have not challenged it more aggressively. Part of the answer is that many have reached the stage where monetizing their audience and employer relationships has taken priority over the job-search experience.
The more interesting challenges are coming from startups and founders that are still focused on building a better experience. Role and Dreamwork are two of them.
“Let’s start at the top of the funnel with building a better search,” Deven Patel said of the idea behind Role.
Patel’s frustration began during his own job search, when he kept finding duplicate openings sourced from other job boards and intermediaries. He would encounter the same job more than once or follow a listing to a third party rather than the employer.
Patel’s initial objective is to remove that clutter: duplicate jobs, third-party reposts, scams, and listings that redirect candidates through unnecessary intermediaries.
Role is designed more like a search engine than a traditional job board, and employers do not pay to have their jobs included in Role’s index. It pulls openings directly from company career sites rather than limiting its inventory to jobs submitted by paying customers.
“What I’m trying to build is basically like Google for jobs,” said Patel, “not necessarily a job board but a job-search engine.”
It sounds a lot like the old Indeed.
Dreamwork founder Colin Johnson began developing the site after his wife, who was then a product manager at Indeed, was laid off while pregnant. What began as a project built out of spite has become a full pivot for his investor-backed three-person team.
Instead of asking users to search through a general results page, Dreamwork asks them to upload a resume. It compares the resume with the jobs in its database and ranks opportunities by estimated fit.
Johnson described his ideal experience as receiving the strongest matches with “no ads, no sponsor.”
Dreamwork does not so much clean Indeed-style search results as bypass them. The candidate receives a personalized list organized around the platform’s assessment of relevance rather than an assortment influenced by employer spending.
The product can also generate a tailored resume, cover letter, and answers to application questions. Paying users can have an automated agent submit the application through the employer’s applicant tracking system after reviewing the materials.
Indeed became dominant by making job search simpler. The current system is more sophisticated, more personalized, and more heavily monetized. It is not clearer.
Role and Dreamwork have both identified real weaknesses in the experience. Role is trying to clean up the job inventory. Dreamwork is trying to replace search with personalized matching and application support.
Both companies are still in the early stages, driven by their founders’ frustration with the existing job-search experience. To be successful, they will need to attract enough candidates to prove that their approaches matter.
Role and Dreamwork are not close to replacing Indeed. But they are paying attention to a part of the experience that established competitors have largely stopped trying to reinvent.
