To celebrate this milestone, we’re looking back on Indeed’s evolution, how the hiring landscape has changed over two decades and where the company – and the industry – is going from here.
Key Takeaways
- Indeed has evolved from a comprehensive job search engine to an AI-powered two-sided marketplace, connecting job seekers and employers with simplicity and speed.
- Indeed’s efforts go far beyond hiring. Over two decades it has focused its expertise and resources on breaking down barriers in hiring, producing world-class global labour market research and improving work wellbeing.
- Looking ahead to the next 20 years, Indeed intends to continue using AI to make the hiring process simpler, faster and more human, including with Pathfinder, a forthcoming tool that serves as a personal talent agent for every job seeker.
When the Indeed site launched on 26 November 2004, it featured 1.5 million job listings. Now that number is around 30 million. When CEO Chris Hyams joined 13 years ago, the company had 130 employees. Now it has nearly 11,000. And what began as a straightforward job search engine in 2004 is today a sophisticated two-sided matching and hiring platform that collects 320 terabytes of data daily to help power its AI products and improve every aspect of the hiring process.
In recognition of Indeed’s 20th anniversary, let’s look back on the company’s journey to make hiring simpler, faster and more human – and look forward to where Indeed’s innovative technology will lead the future of hiring over the next 20 years.
Better Hiring
Today, more people find jobs on Indeed than anywhere else. With 580 million job seeker profiles1 and more than 3.5 million employers looking for candidates around the world, 23 people are hired per minute on Indeed.2 That's more than one every three seconds. But that hasn’t always been the case.
When Rony Kahan and Paul Forster launched Indeed it was a job aggregator – a window into Craigslist, Monster, Career Builder and others. Job seekers had to comb through dozens of websites to find what they were looking for.
“We saw a better way,” Hyams says. Over the years, Indeed brought all listings together into one place for the job seeker. This also solved a challenge for employers with the adoption of a pay-for-performance business model. Instead of paying for a listing that may attract two or 200 candidates, employers pay based on how many job seekers reply to their listing. “We’ve evolved from a search engine to an AI-powered two-sided marketplace, connecting job seekers and employers with simplicity and speed,” Hyams says.
Indeed has also developed a suite of AI-powered products to improve how job seekers and employers connect with each other: Matched Candidates, Smart Sourcing, Indeed Apply, ATS Sync Integrations and more.
During his keynote at Indeed FutureWorks 2024, Hyams introduced Pathfinder, an upcoming AI-powered product that helps users discover career paths – either within their current field or in an entirely new one – by analysing their skills and interests. The vision? Through Indeed, every worker in the world will have something akin to their own personal talent agent, an entity that knows the job seeker's capabilities and preferences and can work tirelessly on their behalf to chase new opportunities. And every employer will have in essence their own personal talent scout. As a testament to these efforts, the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan recently named Indeed the most innovative matching and hiring platform globally.
Better work for better lives
The average person spends nearly 90,000 hours of their life at work. That's why Indeed has expanded its efforts far beyond the hiring process alone. It has focused its expertise and resources on championing a better future of work for all.
Breaking down barriers: talent is universal but opportunity is not, so Indeed established its 2030 Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) commitments, including a company-wide goal of helping 30 million people facing barriers get hired.
Indeed believes in skills-first hiring, or prioritising a candidate’s skills over degrees or years of experience. Not only does the strategy give every job seeker a fair chance to realise their potential, but it makes it twice as easy for hiring managers to find qualified candidates. Indeed is proud to have helped 6.9 million job seekers facing barriers find jobs.3
Learn more about Indeed’s full list of ESG commitments.
Sharing data with the world: Indeed launched Hiring Lab, an independent economic research bureau where a team of leading economists and data scientists provide real-time insights on global labour market conditions, including hiring trends, salary information and AI’s impact on jobs. Business leaders, academics, policymakers, the media and job seekers around the world turn to Hiring Lab's proprietary data and comprehensive insights to help them make informed decisions.
Visit Indeed Hiring Lab for the latest news on the global labour market.
Improving the workplace: Developed in partnership with leading happiness and wellbeing experts, Indeed’s Work Wellbeing Score measures how people feel at work and appears on thousands of company pages within Indeed. These insights guide job seekers to organisations where they can thrive (currently, only 22% of those surveyed say they’re thriving at work). Furthermore, in partnership with the University of Oxford, Indeed developed the Work Wellbeing 100, an index of public companies that are excelling in work wellbeing and outperforming the market, demonstrating one of Indeed’s core beliefs: wellbeing is not just good for people, it’s good for business. This year, H&R Block, Delta, L3Harris, Accenture and Nike claimed the top spots.
Better work for better lives
Looking ahead, Indeed sees an impending labour shortage that will necessitate skills-first hiring as a primary strategy for finding top talent and employers who prioritise work wellbeing to keep up with workers’ demands and expectations. AI-powered products will streamline the hiring process – and work in general. But despite rapid advancements in the field, AI won’t be taking anyone’s job from them anytime soon. However, leaders should prioritise upskilling their workforce in AI tools and their applications so that they – and their companies – can grow with the evolving technology.
At Indeed we’ll continue to make hiring simpler, faster and more human. As Hyams says, “Despite how far we’ve come, it is no exaggeration to say that we are all just getting started.”
*Some features are not available in certain markets.
Sources:
1Indeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts that have a unique, verified email address
2Indeed data, 2023 average
3Represents the number of hires made on Indeed, reported through its Hired Signal measurement, from May 1, 2021 to March 31, 2024, globally. A job seeker barrier is defined as having no college degree, having a disability, having a criminal record or arrest, having military experience, receiving Work Essentials support through our partner organisations, or any combination thereof.
