Running Indeed for Recruitment Agencies: The Complete Guide to Getting Results [2026]

You have probably heard the line, for finding work, Indeed.

But many companies will say they know roughly what it is without really using it.

This article covers how a recruitment agency can attract candidates using Indeed, and is written for

recruitment agencies that have never used Indeed
and recruitment agencies that use it but want better results.

.

Indeed is a different kind of service from job boards such as Rikunabi and Mynavi, so understand what makes it different and use it accordingly.

Summary
Indeed is a search engine dedicated to jobs, and a powerful channel for recruitment agencies looking for candidates
Free listings are possible, but they rarely appear high in the results, so paid sponsored listings on a cost-per-click basis are the effective route
Indeed Plus lets you list on several job sites at once, which increases applications and makes the work more efficient
There are three ways to post jobs: direct posting, XML feed and crawled posting (due to be discontinued in March 2025)
The keys to running it are maximising impressions, getting the click rate right and improving conversion; campaign design, how the listing is written and bid strategy all matter
With more competitors, cost per click is rising, so reducing dependence on Indeed and diversifying your channels is also necessary

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies

1. What is Indeed?

Indeed is a search engine dedicated to job listings.

Unlike general search engines such as Google and Yahoo, it is a search engine for one particular category.
Google is said to have an algorithm that rewards specialist search engines of this kind,
YouTube for video,
Tabelog for restaurants,
Ikyu for travel,
and such specialist engines increasingly appear high in its results.
Search engines that bring together the information in one field like this are called aggregation sites.

In the HR field, besides Indeed there are Kyujin Box from Kakaku.com and Stanby, run by Stanby (now Z Holdings).

2. Free listings (organic) and paid listings (sponsored) on Indeed

When you post a job on Indeed, it appears in the results when a candidate searches by keyword and location within Indeed.

Indeed allows free listings, whether the role is your own, an agency placement or a temporary post.
But because Indeed carries a great many listings, the chance of appearing high in the results is low.
A free listing may therefore not secure enough impressions to bring candidates in.

So, as Google does, Indeed provides sponsored slots at the top and bottom of the results. (On mobile they are placed at random, as of February 2025.)

The Indeed sponsored mark

Choosing a paid listing gets your job in front of more candidates and raises the chance of an application.

Charging is per click.
Because the cost per click is set by auction, it varies greatly with the competition for that role and with how you configure it.
At present it starts at around 100 yen and can exceed 1,000 yen.

3. Indeed Plus, which posts to several sites at once

Indeed Plus is the way to reach a wide range of candidates and maximise applications.
Indeed Plus posts your job automatically not only to paid placements within Indeed but to external job sites and partner sites.

Conventional advertising reaches candidates within Indeed; with Indeed Plus you can list on several of the main job sites in Japan and reach up to 70% of the people who use them.

4. The advantages of Indeed Plus

There are three.

Posting to several job sites at once increases applications
Budget and candidate information are managed in one place
Data accumulates faster, which leads to steadier applications

4.1 Posting to several job sites at once increases applications

Because the job is posted at the same time to the various partner sites as well as Indeed, it reaches far more candidates.

With the job shown to more people, more applications can be expected.
Note that for agency and temporary roles some sites do not accept the feed, which is worth knowing in advance.

Job sites currently connected (as of 26 November 2024)
・Indeed
Rikunabi NEXT
Townwork
From A Navi
Torabayu
Hatarakiiku
Rikunabi Haken
Shufu Kita
Kyujin Journal Net
D-Star NET
Logistics and driver job search

4.2 Budget and candidate information managed in one place

There is no need to configure separate advertising for each destination; Indeed’s optimisation delivers to whichever site performs best.
And because listings and candidate information are managed in one console, the workload is lower and you can maximise results across several sites at once.

4.3 Data accumulates faster, which leads to steadier applications

Because Indeed Plus posts beyond Indeed itself, data accumulates faster.
Just after a listing goes live, the AI raises and lowers the cost per click to find the audience that applies most readily to that role.
With that happening across several sites at once, the data accumulates faster and the site and audience that produce the most applications are found sooner.

For the companies we support, the early cycle of winning applications settled quickly, and they now get a steady flow of applications without having to refresh the listings regularly.

5. The three ways to post, and the advantages and disadvantages of each

There are three options for posting a job on Indeed.

1. Direct posting
2. XML feed
3. Crawled posting

5.1 Direct posting

The simplest method: writing the listing to the format Indeed provides.

Advantages
Everything from search to application happens within the Indeed domain, so the application rate is high
It tends to rank well, so impressions grow

Disadvantages
Applications have to be managed in the Indeed console
If you have channels besides Indeed, you end up using several consoles

5.2 XML feed

Registering the job information in the XML feed format Indeed specifies.

Advantages
Updates can be reflected flexibly, without depending on Indeed’s crawler
A crawler is a system that gathers job information from the web automatically

Disadvantages
Producing the XML requires specialist knowledge or dedicated tools (scripts in Python, PHP or Ruby, an applicant tracking system integration, or an API tool)

5.3 Crawled posting (discontinued at the end of March 2025)

Linking your own job pages to Indeed so that they are listed there automatically.
Crawled listing places conditions on how the site is built.

Conditions
The job pages are on your own site
They are built in HTML
Each job has its own URL
How to apply is stated clearly
The role, the location and the terms are stated correctly
See Indeed’s own pages for the detail

Advantages
Because updates to the site are reflected on Indeed, managing listings is easy (there is a delay before they appear)
Applications come through your own site, so applicant management stays in one place
It increases traffic to your own site

Disadvantages
Because people leave the Indeed domain, the conversion rate is likely to fall
The crawl can sometimes display the listing in a way you did not intend

With crawled posting ending in March 2025, Indeed Entry is drawing attention.
Indeed Entry is a way of feeding jobs held in an applicant tracking system automatically.
Several applicant tracking systems are approved by Indeed and connected by API.
The connection means jobs held in the system are automatically adjusted to Indeed’s format and posted, and that applicant details are fed back into the system automatically when someone applies.

Unlike ordinary crawling or an XML feed, the listing is adjusted automatically to the format Indeed itself recommends, so more applications can be expected than usual.

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies

6. [In practice] How to get results from paid listings

The aim of running Indeed is to win more candidates who go on to be placed.

For that you need to
maximise impressions, keep the click rate at the right level, and maximise the application rate
.

Here we explain the benchmark for each figure and what to do about it.

Indeed is managed advertising, and its console shows impressions, click rate and application rate for each listing. You use that data to improve.

Applications = impressions × click rate × application rate
Impressions: the number of times the listing appeared in someone’s results
Click rate = clicks ÷ impressions
Application rate = applications ÷ clicks

6.1 Maximising impressions

There is no benchmark for impressions. The more the better.
There are two main ways to maximise them.

How to maximise impressions
1. Put the right keywords in the listing
2. Campaign setup

Let us take each in turn.

Maximising impressions 1: putting the right keywords in the listing

The potential for impressions depends on how often people search within Indeed.
Indeed compares what the person searched for with the words in your listing, and shows it in the results where the two are closely related.
Including the words that are searched for most often within Indeed therefore increases impressions.

For example, in writing the role on a listing,

office work

is searched for less often than administration,

administration (that is, office work)

so writing it that way raises the chance of matching a search.

And beyond the role itself, terms about how people work, permanent, weekends off, are used as search terms too.
So it is better to write it as

permanent administration role with weekends and public holidays off

.
To find such terms, we recommend searching within Indeed itself and looking at the suggestions.

Checking the suggestions in Indeed

Maximising impressions 2: campaign setup

The one thing you cannot avoid in running Indeed advertising is the campaign.

A campaign is something like a box that groups particular listings together for advertising
Rather than setting up paid placement for each listing one by one, putting listings into a box lets you place them all at once.

The advantages are that the listings are easier to manage and the data behind the improvement cycle accumulates faster.
Given how Indeed works, the more listings in a campaign, the greater the chance of matching a search and the more impressions you get.
The cost per click also falls.

Remember that bringing listings together rather than splitting campaigns finely produces better results.

How to divide campaigns depends on your aims and your situation.
Generally, two cases warrant splitting them.

Common reasons to split a campaign
1. Where costs per click differ greatly
2. Where the budget differs by location

Case 1: where costs per click differ greatly
Cost per click varies considerably by role and by area.
Running these in one campaign means the clicks gather on some listings and the budget is consumed by those alone.
Where costs per click differ greatly, split the campaigns.

Case 2: where the budget differs by location
Where you have branches across the country and each manages its own budget, splitting campaigns is not optimal for Indeed, but it is necessary for managing the budget.

On clicks gathering unevenly within a campaign
A question we are often asked about running campaigns is the uneven distribution of clicks within one. A great many listings in a campaign receive almost no impressions.

To prevent that, the campaign settings include a balanced delivery option. Choosing it spreads the clicks across all the listings in the campaign.

In practice, however, normal delivery produces more impressions, so for now (March 2025) we would run it without that option.
Where there is a listing you particularly want clicks on, we recommend running it in its own campaign.

6.2 Getting the click rate right

The benchmark for click rate is 3.0 to 5.0%

What raises the click rate is the The title.
Unlike impressions, a higher click rate is not necessarily better.
The goal is to win more applications, so a click that does not lead to one means nothing.
Setting an appealing title that does not match the actual role, in order to raise the click rate, only invites wasted clicks.
Because Indeed charges per click, more wasted clicks naturally means a worse return.
Write the title, then, both to appeal to the people you want and to screen out those you do not.

For example
Permanent administration role using Excel, weekends and public holidays off (office work)

6.3 Maximising the application rate

The benchmark for the application rate is 0.3 to 1% (it varies by sector)

There are three main things that improve it, and here a higher figure is always better.

What improves the application rate
1. Bid strategy
2. How the listing is written
3. The terms of the role

Let us take each in turn.

Maximising the application rate 1: bid strategy」

One important factor in raising the application rate is the bid strategy.
On Indeed the bid strategy is automated.

Automated bidding
With automated bidding (maximise applications), Indeed sets the cost per click automatically in line with the going rate in each auction.

Advantages
It is easy to run
Machine learning shows the listing more often to candidates more likely to apply

Disadvantages
The cost per click tends to rise
The cost per click moves a great deal and is hard to predict

Maximising the application rate 2: how the listing is written」

As a technique in running Indeed, concentrate on removing what drags the application rate down.
Three things mainly drag it down.

The three main causes of a low application rate
1. A gap between the title and the body of the listing
2. Text so bare that neither the appeal nor the detail of the role comes across
3. Requirements that set the bar for applying too high

Revising the listing with these three in mind is what keeps the application rate up.

Maximising the application rate 3: the terms of the role」

The application rate depends heavily on how appealing the role itself is.
Fundamentally, winning more attractive roles to advertise has the greatest impact of all.

7. In closing

We have gone through running Indeed for a recruitment agency in detail; the order to think in is as follows.

1. How to divide the campaigns, to use the budget well
2. Increase the number of listings, to raise impressions and lower the cost per click
3. Work on the titles, to raise the click rate
4. Bid strategy and how the listing is written, to raise the application rate

Indeed’s monthly visitor numbers are on a different scale from the major job-change sites, and it will certainly remain an effective way for recruitment agencies to win applications. But more competitors are using it to attract candidates, and the going rate per click is rising.

Running it well enough to use the budget efficiently calls for real skill, and a recruitment agency also needs to build a way of attracting candidates that does not depend on Indeed alone.

We cover how to reduce that dependence in our seminars.
If that interests you, do register.

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies