Indeed vs LinkedIn For Employers: Where to find the best candidates to hire
The comprehensive comparison guide for Indeed vs LinkedIn for recruiters
Hiring capable candidates that suit your requirements is tough, but channels like Indeed and LinkedIn help make the process much easier. But for growing businesses like yours, paying for both platforms can burn a hole in your pocket.
By the end of this article, you will have a complete picture of both the job boards and a sure answer on which one to pick. We will dive into a full list of features, advantages, and factors to consider before choosing Indeed or LinkedIn as the go-to hiring platform for your business.
Indeed acts as a job search engine and compiles job postings from multiple websites, company career pages, and recruitment agencies. It’s one of the world’s largest job boards that enables organizations to find candidates that match their business requirements.
This is one of the most important metrics to consider when choosing a job board to post on. How easily can you find the right candidates?
A 2019 survey by TalenNest shows that Indeed delivers 9x more hires than LinkedIn—and 4x more than any other website. With over 250 million candidates from across the world using the platform, you’re bound to find your match!
The best way to ensure that you receive the right quality of applications is by creating a precise, detailed job description to get the relevant candidates to apply. Apart from this, Indeed further aids your efforts. Here’s how:
Set screening questions on Indeed to filter applications (Available on the Free version)
Keep a tab on the number of job postings and candidate applications from a single dashboard (Available on the Free version)
View job performance data and access Indeed’s industry trends and benchmark reports (Available on the Free version)
Create smart filters to invite applications statewide, nationwide, or from multiple locations (Paid version only)
Screen resumes and contact only the candidates that exactly match your requirements (Available for Indeed Resume users - paid)
Indeed can be integrated with the best ATS in the industry, making it easy to screen candidates and hire faster
Though you can post jobs for free, with the amount of traffic that the website receives, it’s hard to stand out—and the site is optimized to bring more visibility to paid job postings. Even so, Indeed’s sponsored job postings are on a pay-per-click model on a daily budget that you can set. This is not such a bad bargain, and with Indeed’s job analytics, you can stop the sponsored post if it isn’t performing up to your expectations.
Indeed offers plenty of customizations even for free accounts, and with Indeed Resume, you only need to pay for candidates that you want to connect with. This helps save time and money, so in our opinion, yes—Indeed is suitable for startups and small businesses that are looking for qualified candidates.
Though Indeed is the number one job site in the US, it is available in over 60 countries and 28 languages, making it easy for you to find global candidates from wherever you are.
Posting a job on Indeed is quick and simple. Here are the steps to follow:
Which brings us to the next important question:
Sponsored jobs on Indeed are charged on a cost-per-click basis—if your posting receives no clicks, you pay nothing. But if it does, you can set your budget on a daily basis and discontinue it anytime you want. There is no limit on how less or how much you can set as your budget. Indeed typically charges anywhere between $0.10 - $5 per click.
In a word, yes. While Indeed asks you to fill up the job description, location, and job title, including salary as part of the posting is optional. However, it is recommended that you include as many precise details about the job as possible to attract the right candidates—this reduces the number of irrelevant applications you have to deal with and helps you hire the best employees faster.
Confidential job postings are ones that don’t appear on your company page and are usually done to reduce the number of candidates applying just for the brand name rather than their eligibility. It could also be a way to replace an employee within the company without tipping them off—and this feature is available on Indeed. You can simply choose “Need to post confidentially” as you post a job. But this feature is only available for sponsored jobs and cannot be applied for free postings.
LinkedIn is more of a social networking platform where job listings are not the main focus. LinkedIn does operate as a job board, the main purpose of the platform is to form professional connections and conversations that may eventually lead to you finding great candidates. But having said that, LinkedIn can be a great platform for hiring passive candidates.
Studies show that there are 6 people hired via LinkedIn every minute, with over 49 million people searching for jobs every week. This is comparatively lesser than Indeed, but LinkedIn remains one of the most sophisticated platforms to hire professional candidates.
LinkedIn being a networking platform, it’s useful to create a great company page that attracts passive and active candidates to take notice of your brand. This page helps people understand the kind of work you do, what your company culture is like, and what positions you’re hiring for. You can create a company page for free on LinkedIn.
By adding your employees as currently working for your company, you can create more awareness of your business and job openings—make sure to write compelling job descriptions for all your open positions.
Use LinkedIn’s search algorithm to your advantage. Use the right keywords and location-based filters to find candidates that match your requirements—and connect with them personally to see if they’re interested.
Let the candidates find you by creating a good company profile with the right keywords. Though it isn’t possible to create official job postings for free on LinkedIn, you can share open positions from your profile and encourage your employees to share it from their end to maximize reach.
Consider LinkedIn’s paid or pay-per-click plans if you’re looking to hire multiple candidates to scale faster. Their paid plans begin at $59.99.
LinkedIn also enables you to screen resumes and access detailed dashboards to see the results of your job postings.
The best part is that you can integrate LinkedIn with a powerful ATS to make your recruitment process smoother, faster, and more accurate to your business needs.
A LinkedIn study claims that LinkedIn helps reduce your cost of hiring by 43% and hire 20% faster. With the industry’s top professional talent on this platform, it’s hard to put a number to the ROI you get through your network as well. So, in our opinion, LinkedIn is well worth your money and time.
Though it’s not possible to hire as many candidates as you would on job boards for free like Indeed, LinkedIn allows you to post jobs for free (only one free open job post at a time). And it also acts as a social media platform through which small businesses and startups can create more brand awareness with the right content, which will drive traffic to your careers page from passive and active candidates. If you have the budget for a paid LinkedIn plan, you can hire as well as network with top professionals in the industry effortlessly.
LinkedIn allows you to post multiple free jobs—but only one active free job at a time. There are multiple other paid plans that you can choose for better options. But here is how you can get started:
Posting a job on LinkedIn is very effective to find the right candidates—but free jobs do not get the same visibility as sponsored ones—so it tends to be ineffective if you don’t sponsor the job posting.
Job slots allow you to rotate multiple positions with each slot. LinkedIn allows you to keep each position open for over 30 days. Job slots cost $1500 for a 30-day post.
LinkedIn Recruiter starts at $8,999 for an annual subscription, while a monthly subscription costs $825 per month.
While this brings you a lot of features, you might want to start with LinkedIn Recruiter Lite which is more suitable for small businesses, starting at $2,399 per year or $119 per month.
|
Feature |
Indeed |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Free job postings (multiple at a time) |
Yes |
No |
|
Pay-per-click sponsored job postings |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Free trial (With sponsored job option) |
No |
Yes |
|
Billing and invoicing* |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Phone support available |
No |
No |
|
ATS integration |
Yes |
Yes |
Our Verdict
Each platform has its pros and cons depending on the size, nature, and location of your business. For small and medium businesses, it might be easier and more cost-effective to hire via Indeed. But if you’re hiring for senior positions or your core team members, LinkedIn would be a better platform to get to know your target audience more and reach out to them personally.
If you need to scale really quickly and hire as many employees as possible, Indeed is a better bet as it gives you access to more resumes at a much lower cost.
Hiring at an even pace over a period of time becomes much easier on LinkedIn—Because this platform also enables candidates to explore your company page, connect with your existing employees, and approach you for opportunities.
But our question is…
Post your jobs on Indeed, LinkedIn, and multiple other job boards in one shot and save up to 88% of your recruitment costs
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