The Indeed whisperer best practices and expert guidance - Avoid costly mistakes!

The Indeed whisperer best practices and expert guidance

Where to find Jim Drubin:

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimdurbin/

Key Take Aways:

1. Understand your budget. How much are you willing to spend? What's the most you could spend and not get any results?
2. ake sure you have your process in place. Are you prepared to hire 2-5 people?
3. Understand how locations work. Focus on one job, one location.

Interview Transcript:

We're excited to have our very own Indeed Whisperer on board! With his help, we'll identify common mistakes and ensure our Indeed campaigns maximize returns.

He'll share best practices and provide expert guidance to take our campaigns to the next level.

Juan:
All right. So welcome, guys. Have today Jim Durbin here.

They call him the Indeed Whisperer, and I brought him here to help us with Indeed best practices, common mistakes, how to avoid those, and really how to get the most return of our money we all spend on Indeed.

So thank you, Jim.

Jim Durbin:
Yeah. Happy to be here.

Juan:
All right. So I just wanna get started first with why they, how you got this Indeed Whisper nickname, how that came about.

Jim Durbin:
I'm a big fan of branding, and I've been working in RPO for the last five years, so a background in staffing, headhunt recruiting, and then RPO high volume.

And we used Indeed a lot. It's the largest job board that's out there.

Yeah. For some people, it's the only place to get traffic.

It's definitely the cheapest, but as they make changes and expand, as we have issues with demographics and such, people have to learn how to use it correctly.

I've been fortunate enough to test it across all kinds of industries.

Everything from housekeepers to developers, and you get good at understanding the campaigns over time.

You start, Yeah. Digging into it.

It's kind of like understanding SEO in the last 20 years.

There's no one right answer, but what works for each individual person.

I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of companies and get really good at it and you know, there's a community of people sit around and talk about it.

So really, really geeky stuff like s-curves and algorithms.

Not good for the average small business person to figure out, but the more we do share, the more people get to work, which is the overall point of it for all of us.

How do we get more people to work faster and, you know, the right people at the right place at the right time.

That's an old, old industry saying.

Juan:
Totally. Definitely. Awesome. So what are the common mistakes people are making today on Indeed when posting their jobs that you see constantly happening?

Jim Durbin:
Well, the biggest is, is not understanding.

You can't just go in line and search because you have to understand what you're using it for.

So like all software, you need to start with the end in mind, and the end can't be; I want a lot of people quickly and then not think about it.

It is software. It has a user interface that you have to learn. There are responsibilities.

You are signing up to pay what they say that you need to pay.

You are picking and choosing what your campaigns are. So if you're going to utilize it, you must have somebody curious who looks through it and understands it.

There's just; there's no way around that. The good news is it's not terribly hard to do. It does take time and testing, and you can't just turn it on like a spigot.

There's a lot of things that impact, like, people always wanna know how much will it cost to do this.

And how many people can I expect each day? Right. And that's not how advertising works.

You can say, Hey, I wanna do a television ad and I expect 50 people to call my auto dealership and buy a car tomorrow without haggling about the price.

You could say that all day long. It's not going to happen that way. And unfortunately, because people are so used to thinking of it like an Amazon or a Google where you just, you type in something, hey, I typed in black shoes and I found black shoes.

How come I can't find workers from home that want my salary?

It's because it's, it's not a spigot. So you have to think of it as a marketplace.

You are going in, and you are competing against every other person, not just the people in your field.

Not just the people doing what you do, but anybody who wants the kind of worker that you have.

So whenever you're using an online board like this, the first is to recognize that it is a competition.

So how much you pay matters. If you were paying well above, it's kinda like the joke about we don't have a paid problem in the country, or we don't have a worker problem in the country.

If they were paying a hundred thousand dollars to work the grill at McDonald's, you would have plenty of people to work for you.

Which is true. Same business, but if you're way overpaying, you don't have a problem.

Indeed, it's when you're trying to find people at the right one.

So the first is make sure that your processes are in place.

Understand what the board actually is. It's gonna give you people who have expressed an interest in that job.

They're not gonna be perfect. Some are just gonna be click, click clicking their way. Some are desperately needing it right now.

So the challenge really is before you jump on any of these boards, are you quick and efficient and know what you want?

Are you thinking that you can just select that there's gonna be this giant group of people out there just begging for your call?

If you approach it like that, you're gonna spend a lot being happy.

So the first thing is understand that you're, you are competing with people with a board, so how are you presenting yourself?

And that's probably the biggest one, is the expectation that this is easy.

There's plenty of people. I don't have to learn it. That's probably the first one.

The second one's a little harder though. So it depends on if you're if you're a small business and you're posting on the applications, are you doing an indeed hosted job?

So there's a huge difference between someone like me who has a, career site and a database in the background.

We've spent tens of thousands of dollars integrating what we're doing directly into Indeed.

So when someone applies, it goes right into my database and we're calling them.

There's a big difference between that and someone going and creating a job on Indeed.

So there's different levels of performance based on what you're doing. So if you're using their system to post, you're gonna have a different strategy than if they're scraping jobs off of your site and then reusing those jobs off of your site to create a campaign.

So you have to know the difference between those two.

If you are posting jobs on your career site, are they posted correctly? Do you have the right titles in place?

It, it's, I think it was everybody picks on Subway for it, but if you think about a sandwich artist, right? If you go and you post that, you're looking for a sandwich artist on a job board today, you would know what that is.

But imagine the first day they did that, no one's searching for Sandwich Artist, and so what Indeed has tried to do is simplify your title.

So we like to get really fancy with their titles and I think about something like a housekeeper. So housekeeper, what's the difference between a housekeeper and a housekeeping aid?

Do you know the difference between it?

Juan:
No.

Jim Durbin:
It's about a buck 30 for hotels because the housekeeping aid works in the lobby.

Exact same skillset just slight difference. How would any of this know that is housekeeper one word or two?

Jim Durbin:
Do you know if it's one word or is it two?

Juan:
I've seen it written b  oth ways, but I think it's one.

Jim Durbin:
That's the important. It doesn't matter what we think, it doesn't matter what we call it.

It matters what they call themselves. Sure. So if they're gonna search the title, we all search by titles. If they're gonna search the title housekeeper and you only have it as one word, you're only gonna find the people searching it as one word.

So if you're using the resume database and you're posting your title, you want to pick the title. It depends. Sometimes you wanna pick the title that everybody else has to get the most number of applicants.

And sometimes you wanna make a little weird because those people don't get called as much, my favorite is House Keppers. I wouldn't suggest pointing that out, but there's significant number of house Keppers out there that just made a typo and weren't thinking about it.

And you think, well, I don't want somebody who doesn't write the right thing on a resume, but is that why you're hiring them?

Because the beauty of those people is no one calls them cuz no one knows to search for a house. Kepper.

Jim Durbin:
You have to think of this is user generated information, so what is it that your population is looking for?

And the three things that people look for are title, location, and salary.

So understanding what the job really is. It would help to go into Indeed and search like you're a candidate.

What is the experience everybody else is having? Like we have this issue with signing bonuses. Bonuses, there were, God, the bonuses a couple years ago for like Disney in Orlando or $2000 or $3,000. They were insane.

If you didn't have that as a signing bonus and you were looking, you weren't finding anybody.

So it's like you, you need to do some research and say, what is everybody else posting? And then decide, Do you wanna do the same generic things other people do, which is not bad, or do you wanna try to be a little different and just to be a bit more selective, you're gonna get a lot less people.

You may pay a little more, but are those the right people for you?

And the final thing is making sure when you're posting it that you're aware of what happens when somebody applies; you should always apply to your own jobs.

Are you sending them to a website and asking them to complete 40 minutes of paperwork? Are you asking them to go to a site and meet?

Do you have a recruiter that calls them, and they don't talk to them for the next 14 days?

If you're looking for hourly workers, non-exempt workers making less than $30 an hour if you're not getting ahold of them of that first day, you're gonna have a 90% drop rate.

If you're sending them to ask them to do more, like I, I need them to fill this out, you know, whether it's OFCCP rules, I just, I want them, I want them to be conscientious.

options do they have? I would say make sure that you're researching what other people are doing and then making sure that you don't have those gaps in your hiring process.

Cuz you're paying per applicant, you're paying for each one of these.

Why would you let them slip through your fingers because you decided that whatever you wanted is different than what they want. If that makes sense.

Juan:
Total sense. How important is the jobs or career pages landing page per se versus or sending people there outside of Indeed to apply versus having them apply directly on Indeed.

What do you say about that?

Jim Durbin:
Well, the thing is, it's very fast to apply in Indeed.

If you haven't easily applied, which allows you to just click that on and then because they have the resume, they don't have to think about it.

And if you ask job seekers or if you ask consultants, they'll say, this is great. It's all about the speed of application, right?

The problem is, is that how much time did they actually put into it?

So it's a, it's a spectrum of use, right? If I can just click, I can also click 30 other jobs, a nd I'm not thinking about them.

So it does provide volume and if you can move fast and you have a good brand and a good salary, you can get ahold of those people.

The problem that people run into is they're not thinking of it in those terms. You send it to your website, this is the scary part.

A good website like industry leading is only converting 20% of the traffic that's getting there. Most are between 92 and 96% of that traffic is just not applying.

So you're paying to drive people to your website and nothing is happening because your application process looks wrong.

So you have to decide, it's basically if you had to get into a club, do you have a doorman? Do you not have a doorman?

How many doorman are you gonna put? How many levels are you gonna charge a cover charge?

Are you gonna decide what people, you've got all these different rules that are useful when you have a lot of traffic, right?

There's less traffic you have to decide. But if you don't have any kind of rules on there, if you don't have your questions on there and such, anybody can walk in the door.

So if it really becomes, this is why it's important to know it's no different if you're using a Indeed or anything else or just if you put up a sign in your window that says, come work for me, you don't really have barriers,  If you put up a sign that says text here to apply, you're basically saying you have to have a mobile phone.

But how many people have their resumes on their mobile phone? So if you're truly doing text to apply, are you just trying to get ahold of someone or do you need them to have their resume saved and uploaded?

Then they have to look through that tiny screen and then look at the number of applications. This goes back to tracking your, what you're doing yourself look at the number of applications that you can't even read on the screen.    

And people see that and they're like, that's not worth the trouble. That they don't care about my experience. Why would I? And so it really does become that that mix.

It, it sounds really hard. It's not, it's pretty simple. We make it hard because this kind of thing, it doesn't feel like something we should all be doing.

Because recruiting seems really easy until you actually get into it and then you realize it's not like purchasing a product online, it's talking a new human being and they have, they have their needs and you have yours.

So it, it really does come down to that what, what happens when you go to your current site.

Juan:
Yeah. I've seen that, you know, people in our industry, in home, home cleaning, housekeeping, they do get better qual less applicants but better quality because again, those people have to read through a website, have to go through a longer application and really think about what they're answering.

And the issue with Indeed applies is that yeah, many people can just click, click, click and you know, they but, and indeed sells us applicants at a rate.

So the easier for Indeed is indeed apply cuz they can sell us as many names of people as they can.

So I see that for indeed it's a perfect business model. But for the, you know, the small business owner normally has to go through a lot of names that are unqualified.

Jim Durbin:
Well that's what they try to fix. So moving over into what just literally happened in May it has been happening for a lot of small business owners for the last year, is they moved into the pay per applicant performance right before it was per click per, so it had to do with you were paying whenever somebody clicked on an ad and now they're moving it to either going to your website if you have a, an integrated campaign and a larger company.

But if you're using their hosted jobs, they pay for application. So they're trying to move to quality and everybody lost their mind when this happened because how do, how do you define quality?

How would they possibly be able to find what you determine as quality? So we had to set those standards and they've rolled it back a little bit, but this is why it's so important to really spend some time inside that platform.

The new system, depending on it, you, you, you have your choice on it, but if you're picking per applicant, you list the, the amount of budget you're willing to spend, the number of cost of that applicant and then you have to review those people within 72 hours.

Juan:
Yep. I've seen that.

Jim Durbin:
So they've set these new, so the problem is people who were used to doing it the old way would post a job, they'd get a bunch of applicants and you know, for a hundred bucks they get everything they need to hire.

Well now they went back, they didn't make any changes and now all of a sudden it was a thousand dollars and they didn't hire anybody. It was far less.

Now technically that's your fault. You looked at the system and didn't make changes and did not go over well with most of the people that were doing it. So it's why it's important to know as you're going through and and looking at that software it's like anything else that you're signing.

You know, if you don't look at the reviews on Amazon and you get a bad product. If you thought you were buying an expensive car and you'd get a Hot Wheels, that's on you, right?

Juan:
Yeah.

Jim Durbin:
So you have to take that time. And again, these aren't difficult, but it does take time and curiosity. It's not 15 minutes and you throw it up there.

But yeah, the application review is important. So let's say you and I posted a job this afternoon at two o'clock in the afternoon.

And then we set a big budget cuz we, I want a lot of people.

In the past I haven't gotten, so I want a lot of people, so 50 people come on over the weekend if we, by Monday, cuz it's 72 hours.

So by Monday at 2:00 PM we have to have reviewed every person that came through or we will be charged for it,

If we get there Monday because we decided not to look at it, we weren't thinking through it or it's too many cuz we call the first five and we're waiting for them to call back.

We don't know if they're good applicants or not. So that we go through and dump 45 of those people out. Well and Indeed's gonna shut your account off because you didn't really go through and review them.

So it's important to understand that we, we just said we, we don't want unqualified applicants. They give them to me and said, but you have to do it correctly cuz you can't sit on these applicants so we can't give them to other people.

It is your responsibility to call through them. We gave you what you wanted so you have to be on top of it. And it's very hard for owners to do this cuz they're usually handing it off to somebody else and then they get busy.

So maybe you just set it for 10 and those costs are much higher. Are you willing to pay $20 per applicant if you don't know they're any good?

So there is a cost to quality and really it's your time and your attention to detail that you have to play. If you wanna do it the other way. You can set it up just by pay per click.

But now there's other rules in place of minimum budgets. How many people you're willing to go through are you're driving it to career side.

So the options are there, but you have to be mindful in the way that you're approaching it.

Juan:
Yeah, I see that the paper the cost per application takes a lot of time for business owners to really review and approve because, you know, if you got 50, 60 people, I mean just, if you take basically two minutes per person, you know, that's, that's a lot of time in a day just reviewing people.

Jim Durbin:
How you know, they're good

Juan:
If they're good, correct

Jim Durbin:
That's the problem. If you're small, if you don't have a giant recruiting team, how would you handle that?

But if you got a hundred people, you couldn't either. And so that was the issue is how do we get the truth is we are getting less and less people.

Just in general. There's less people applying. As the market tightens up, there's, there's less business and you know, the, the solution is who, who's gonna not blink first, but who's gonna take that time to be successful?

What is more expensive to your business spending that money, cash going out the door or the time. And so we hear this a lot just in recruiting.

A lot of people say, I have to hire right now. So you spin up your recruiting team, it doesn't matter if it's an executive, a developer or housekeeper, I need to hire 50 people tomorrow.

And then when you call, you can't get ahold of 'em for two weeks. So you did all this work, they didn't really need to hire their urgency was in their head and then something else replace that urgency and then they'll call back in two weeks and say, what do you have? And you're like, nothing. No one's gonna sit there for two weeks.

Juan:
Waiting.

Jim Durbin:
Waiting. So I mean there, there are people that hire and do well in these markets. It really is, is how, and we just have, we have to learn to change.

Software's not gonna solve all of her problems. And thank goodness, because if it could then none of us would have jobs. It would be very easy, right?

And that's what some people want. They want that one click to one higher experience, but then you have a retention problem.

If you could take the same job with no impact tomorrow, why wouldn't you? They give you 10 cents more, why wouldn't you do it?

So be careful what you wish for. Be careful what you wish for. Ultimately it just comes down to you have good practices or bad ones. I just, okay. Don't think there's an easy button is what it comes down to.

Juan:
There, there is none. Cool. What about, tell me about, I don't know, the three most important best practices or tips or hacks that a small business owner has to make sure they do in their Indeed account or the job post?

Jim Durbin:
Sure. The first probably most important one is to understand your budget. You can set your budget in place. You needed to figure it's a risk factor.

How much are you willing to spend? because you are advertising at an auction, you have to keep that in mind.

What's the most you could spend and not get any results?

You need to think about that. It's not, you're not just buying somebody and you have, so what would you be mad at if you lost money?

Because it comes down to that, and then what do you really need to weigh it out? If you have, if you, if you were making, so if you're looking at your, workers and you're thinking, okay, I make $10 an hour every time they're out in the field, that's $80 a day.

If it takes me two weeks to hire and then another a week for someone to start, okay that's $80 you know, it's $80 a day times 10.

Yeah. Times the three weeks. So you have to look at and say, how much am I losing? So it really does come to a risk model, right?

So you, you can't just, you have to look at it and what does that cost me and, and lost income and what does it cost me to not have somebody? But then if I spend this money and I can't find somebody, how much it really does come knowing your cashflow and what you're spending.

So I'm planning that budget out carefully.

The second is having in place knowing do I know who to call?

Am I asking people to, am I asking for their phone numbers and are calling them because no one answers their phone anymore.

Are you willing to text them? Who's going to text them? Who's responsible for checking them? What do you really want in a resume?

Do you have someone who I like to look someone in the eye and shake their hand and I can instantly tell if they're a good worker?

Well what's in it for that worker? It's not just a job cuz there's plenty of other ones.

So that making sure the hack is making sure you have your process in place.

So it starts with your budget, knowing how much your cost you, and then are you prepped if you did get, if I handed you or if Indeed handed you 10 perfect people, would you be able to hire them?

Cuz the problem is, is that if you can't hire perfect people, the problem is not them. You're still paying, but the problem was you. Right?

And then the third one probably comes down to understanding how locations work. So when you post a job it's the number of jobs you're pacing, especially if you're doing with multiple locations and multiple jobs.

I would focus on one job, one location. If you've never done it before, when you try to get more complex, not only do you spend more, but you can't really track what's going on.

So really you're trying to figure out, if I post this job in this location, what will it cost me? And how long will it take to generate these?

Now they have they have guesses. They tell you what they expect based on what other people have done. Mm-Hmm. and you need to really pay attention to this.

They're not always right. But it kinda gives you a level. If I, if I need to talk to 10 people to hire one, then how many people do I need to go through the application and actually answer the phone?

So it's, it's understanding it's following the instructions on that on their wizard that tells you how to build stuff right.

And making those plans. Just remember your urgency isn't your candidate's urgency and vice versa. So it's being clear enough to know is this working or not working?

If I'm posting, I'm not getting anything, is it cuz I, I don't have a good salary rate, you know, salaries now you can go search them by looking at other people on Indeed or on ZipRecruiter.

Just looking around what other advertisements because it will estimate, that job title for you and how much you're spending. So if you can't get applications and you've got 15 jobs posted, now you have a mess and don't know what happened.

If you start off with one and then build it and build some competence over time you have a reasonable expectation of how many people will apply, how much it's going to cost you, that will vary.

The first day of the month is the best day for applicants and then the first day of the week people get into a job in general on Monday and that's when they apply.

So you have this big spike on the first day and then a series of valleys and spikes down through the rest of the month. But that's not true. Always though. People also start looking if they lose their job cuz they have to pay rent on the first of the month.

So it's understanding that it's a market that changes over time, but the more you do, the better you get at it. So start simple. Don't try to boil ocean, don't try to solve all your problems.

Get really good one job, one location branch out at better. And what you'll find is your performance actually is faster and, and then you don't have the risk problem.

You're not spending a bunch for something that you can't do.

Juan:
Awesome. I do have a question here. Also I've seen people that constantly are, they have the free ads, right? And they're refer refreshing the ad every two weeks or every three, four days. Is that a good practice?

Jim Durbin:
You can't refresh jobs anymore. You haven't been able to do so for some 15 years. It is something that's in the back of your head. Because they always know why isn't job showing up anymore.

That doesn't work. Every time you do that, it forces indeed to start over.

They have an algorithm that bids, and it starts at about 72 hours.

So when you post a job, it's trying to decide where it's going to put that. Think of it as if you went into a grocery store and you, you always know where to go to get your favorite cheese.

What if right when you walked into the grocery store, the only things on the shelves were the things you wanted? But if I walk in, it's an entirely different selection.

So it's not just listed there. It literally changes for each person because they're trying to figure out what ad does this person need?

Which means your job's not showing all the time.

That is important, people don't realize that. Or why can't I see my job?

You don't want to see it unless you're, because you're not the one looking for the job. You're gonna get totally different jobs, right?

The so the free stuff is important cuz they will post your jobs for free.

And a lot of people are like, well it was great when I was doing 'em for free. Now that I'm paying, I'm getting less of. Of course you do.

That's the bait. Get 'em in. It's called organic traffic, right? Yeah. And again, if nobody else has organic traffic, then you're doing great. You end up doing this wonderful thing when you really start needing it.

So there it's, it's called an incrementality curve and basically what it comes down to is the faster you need to hire, the more urgent, the less pay, the more needs you have, the more it's going to cost.

Because that's what an auction site works at. So you should post your jobs to free to see what you get, but you just can't depend on that.

If you really need it, you have to pay. No, it's like your friend, if your friend's a plumber and he has time, he's busy, but he can get to you in four months.

If you have a leak, you can't do anything. But of course you're going to pay Right.

If you want free work, then you don't get a complaint about that work. Oh, many people do. So look at it like that.

The more urgent you need, the more you're gonna pay, the more you have to pay attention to detail.

That's so, but don't be afraid to post your job for free and not sponsor it. You do get traffic. You just have to know some of the rules that are behind that.

And the only, the only big one that you post is it's one job. You can't tell people to go to a job fair. You can't say we're hiring lots of jobs because if you do that, something called the trust and safety council will actually go through and pull your job down and not tell you.

So if you're gonna post a job in organic, if you're gonna put lots of weird stuff like urgent urgently hiring today or we do a bonus or something that can't be free traffic because Right. You, you asked me one, I have one job for you. Here's a simple title.

So if you're doing free traffic, the simpler the better. If you're paying for it, you can add stuff like, you know, hiring next Thursday flexible pay. You can add stuff into the title that aren't necessarily there.

But yeah, the more you put into a title or if you try to use plurals, like house hiring housekeepers, that will come down because that's not a job, that's an advertisement and they're there for a job.

They don't want someone to apply and then call and say this is just someone looking for a bunch of people. That's an important one. Oh wow. It's probably the most important one. We should flip that in the, in the podcast.

Juan:
There you go. Awesome. Well Jim I really appreciate this moment that we have. How can people find you and reach out to you?

Jim Durbin:
Well if they're looking for individual consulting, that's probably not a good place to go. I work for what's called an RPO.

So we have a team of 4,000 recruiters in the Philippines that call folks. But it's when you're hiring 2, 3, 4, 500 people at a time and you're trying to hire extra recruiters. So we do high volume if you think of hotel chains or airlines or contact centers you know, nurse hiring where you're hiring a bunch.

Those are the kinds of things that, that we do individually. But if they just wanna read about it, they can go and find me on LinkedIn.

It's under Jim Durbin, J i m D U R B I N. Or you can just search the Indeed Whisper on LinkedIn and you can read what we talk about. Just be aware that what I'm talking about could be talking about enterprise or corporate and might not individually deal with you as a small business.
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Juan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But definitely what you share is super valuable cuz a lot of people are really just don't know all these things and it's, you know, impacting their account tremendously.

Jim Durbin:
We just wanna get people to work.

Juan:
Yeah. All right Jim, thank you for your time. And we'll see you in the next one.

Jim Durbin:
Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks Juan.

Juan:
Thank you, sir. God bless. Have a good one,

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