The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space, maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. Jeff, are you ready? I’m ready. I wore my tiger shirt for all my Detroit- long suffering Detroit fans who we actually have meaningful baseball here at the end of- at the end of the season. So I’m excited. Good for you. I’m not a White Sox fan, but I made a point to go to one of the games this year because I wanted to see their historically worst season in history
with my own eyes, so I can say I was at one of the losing games. They’re taking it from us, which is great. We no longer have, I think it’s like way far back, but in the modern era, the one of those Tigers teams was the worst. But good for you. It must have cost zero dollars. Basically. All right. This week’s topic, episode 96
” Why LinkedIn and Indeed are so hard to disrupt”. Yeah. And you want to kick us off here. So feel free to start off. No, remember Monster, CareerBuilder- we do. Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo Jobs. Like maybe these things, if you’re a Gen Z or even like a younger millennial, like the answer might be no.
You might, you might have no idea what we’re talking about. I mean, even Facebook tried to get into like the hiring job, you know, job board game and lost. And James, you’ll have a ton on that later. I think if that doesn’t raise an eyebrow, nothing will. Look, the crux of this is Indeed and LinkedIn have a massive stranglehold on this market and have done very, very little in the way of advancing the overall recruitment tech landscape in the past 10 years because they were at the forefront, which is
incredibly frustrating. So where there’s stagnation, there should be disruption. So this should be a great opportunity for someone to come in and disrupt the recruiting technology market, but it’s a lot harder than anyone thinks. Yeah. So what’s true is that AI is making software development cheaper and easier.
There’s new sourcing and prospecting tools left and right. Read faster ways for companies to get all your contact details so they can spam you, whatnot. Wonderful. Let’s start because this is kind of- these two tools are very different. We’ll start with LinkedIn first off. Yeah. We’ve looked at tons of new sourcing tools that have popped up.
We’ve trialed a bunch. In every case so far, they do not replace LinkedIn. They’ve at best augmented. They at best maybe you can eliminate a few licenses, but it’s still going to be, they’re all still additional spend, which is really unfortunate. These tools all kind of look, work the same.
Like they buy a ton of- buy or scrape a ton of public data from places like People Data Labs. Stick a new slick interface on it. Probably works better than LinkedIn’s interface does in a lot of respects. It’s easier to integrate with other tools out there. If you’ve got like HubSpot or some other kind of prospecting tools, rinse and repeat.
But it still doesn’t do the job and there’s reasons for that. And the first problem is, no one really understands like what LinkedIn really is. Like, it’s not truly just a software that helps you recruit or sell. It’s a marketplace. Like you, if you’re listening to us right now, you are the product.
They have you. You’re updating all your stuff in real time. I mean, think about that. Sitting off for a second here. Yeah, I think it’s 830 million people are LinkedIn users. It’s bananas. Yeah. It’ll be a billion people someday. They willfully go to this platform, giving out all their personal details, all their work history.
They upload it themselves, unprompted. Anytime they change a job, they change it because it’d be weird if they didn’t. Like, I have to give it to them. It’s kind of bonkers. When they were first starting out I thought like no way this would work, but somehow they made it do that. But because of how crazy that is, there’s three things that no other sales tool or recruiting tool can copy.
Yeah. The most, number one, the most powerful features are unique to LinkedIn. So because of what you just said, the data is all native on the platform. And so it can’t legally be scraped or downloaded or repurposed for another commercial tool, which makes, you can slap a, you know, a fancy interface on all of that other data that you just said.
It’s still the same. It’s all the same data. Right? So like you’re talking like open to work filters when you’re within LinkedIn recruiter on our side, or when someone last posted content and sales navigator, there’s these endless amounts of granular features that separate LinkedIn from all of the other amateur stuff.
And those features are only available on a native platform. And that’s what LinkedIn’s genius is. Yeah. The second thing is that actually, I actually love this feature. The DM box, the inbox adds like a second method of connecting with people, you know, as opposed to everything else, which just gives you their email address, which people get probably get annoyed with getting spammed on their email address.
Now, we can go back and forth. Is LinkedIn DMs better? Is email better? But having 2 is better than 1, you know. Simple as that. And I think that it’s going to be user preference. I personally, like what I think that aside from trying to reach out to people for the first time, the one thing I actually love LinkedIn for, and I hate saying it, their DM is the best way to stay in touch with people you’ve met,
you’ve known personally. Like I have hundreds of people that I’m sure I have their email somewhere, but I know if I need to get in touch with them, these are people I’ve got professional relationships with, that I just I hit them up on LinkedIn. Anytime I go to a networking event, meet new people, we always kind of connect on it.
And then we have kind of direct line to each other without having to update anything else. It’s a great tool. No one else will be able to match that. It’s a beautiful barrier between like the personal and professional world too. Like the second you give your email, like you’re kind of beholden to-
anyway. I guess that’s for another rant. Number three, LinkedIn updates in almost real time. So as soon as the user update, the platform updates. So everything else, like these, the people data labs and all of this, like these scraping aggregators- they’re all waiting for the next scheduled pool. So a lot of the data is very, very unreliable in those instances.
So people are moving jobs more often nowadays. They’re updating things more often nowadays, like resumes and their profiles. So whether you’re selling or you’re trying to recruit a new candidate, you need to know when that happens, not one to three months after it’s already been done. Yeah, therein lies the rub.
There’s more and more tools coming out all the time but if it just ties back to LinkedIn, it’s just another expensive overlay. Zoom info is people love zoom info. People love seamless, but all those people still use sales navigator. Correct. Anyways. Now, the second thing we want to talk about on this is Indeed. Now, a lot of people in our circle-
I put myself in this because I haven’t worked on a lot of these roles historically. You might just think Indeed is just another job board. It’s not something that people need to totally rely on. But if you’re trying to recruit anything, anything in the labor market, skilled or unskilled, or anything a non tech territory sales, think like a roofing sales or construction design sales, anything like that.
You can’t do it without Indeed. Think of anyone in your family or friends that like anyone who works for a living, that’s not kind of in these circles and they do some job you don’t quite get and it’s way outside your circles, like anything that’s not LinkedIn centric, you have to have Indeed’s database to actually recruit those people.
Yeah. Full stop. Hospitality, restaurants. Honestly, the industries that drive our economy, like what’s real. Which we’re going to be a little bit more critical of this tool. At least LinkedIn has a few redeeming values. But anyway, continue. It flat out stinks. For those who remember Monster and CareerBuilder, and then a little less on those who don’t, it took what those two companies created and put like 500 data farming and upsell walls up without investing in any customer service.
That’s like the too long, didn’t read. And the sick part is we all keep paying for it because there isn’t an alternative. Their secret was- so back in the day, Monster and CareerBuilder, you could just post a job and it was a simple B2B process. You bought the job, posted it on the platform, and the applicants could send it to a desired email.
They could send it to an applicant tracking system, and you could even use Monster or CareerBuilder’s database, much like you would use DMs in LinkedIn now. Like, if you wanted to separate, you know, things into two different categories. Indeed was brilliant. The only kudos I’ll give them in that they broke the system and got everyone to jump to their platform by farming racks.
It was the first real farming like data aggregator from company career pages early on and then posting them on Indeed for free. So candidates had a single source of truth. They could go and look for the most relevant jobs in all different industries and it was on one platform. So it’s like the Expedia of jobs, right?
The idea was absolutely disruptive and no one can take away that brilliance from them. But since Indeed got that engagement, they got that critical mass, just like LinkedIn has, they started to pull back on basically everything. So they don’t scrape free jobs anymore. The days of you posting it on your career site and it going to Indeed are done.
Like you have to pay for it. Everything’s upsold, everything’s highlighted, everything’s sponsored, and it’s all getting super expensive. And just like LinkedIn, the product, i. e. the job seekers, first place, they all go to Indeed now. Like the next closest example is ZipRecruiter and it is- it’s not even close.
Yeah. So what started as a great aggregation of the candidates’ potential job opportunities became this giant massive money grab. So a few of the worst features of this healthcape, literally zero customer support. And when I say literally zero, it, the last time I wanted to interact with Indeed, it took me half an hour just to find an email to submit something in which I got a return email that said, we’ll respond to your inquiry in 72 hours.
Yay. Like what do you do with that? Right? I just kind of stopped talking because I just- it’s mind boggling. Yeah. Number 2, it’s expensive as a standalone and has these endless up sales, so. But you get the FOMO because there’s no other alternative. So you just spring for it every single time. Number 3,
the integration with ATS’ is absurdly terrible. It’s shocking. You can’t manage your pipeline in the way you want to manage it. You have to manage it in the way they want you to manage it. So, where Monster and CareerBuilder succeeded, Indeed has made what is a very simple process incredibly difficult.
Yeah. Before, when searching as a company in the candidate database- so when we go and we search for the candidates who have uploaded their information, it’s their platform or nothing. Yeah. And when I say their platform, you’re reliant on the candidate actually checking the email that says “we reached out to them, to their Indeed”
and then they forget their email. So you’re adopting two platforms and nobody goes back in and read it. We don’t get access to their actual email address. And you’re trying to interact with somebody that isn’t used to a sophisticated messaging platform, and you’re getting 50 percent of the results back. It’s bonkers.
It’s awful. Now, I wanted to address this kind of thing at the end is like, okay, well, why can’t it be? Cause I think, what did we call this special? Why they’re so hard to disrupt. Here’s why. In order to disrupt a marketplace, you have to give the end users like a compelling reason to switch.
Now, I know the counterpoint that people are going to say, like marketplaces get disrupted all the time. Like eBay got disrupted by Amazon. Grubhub got disrupted by DoorDash. Expedia got disrupted by Airbnb. Hell, we even said Monster and CareerBuilder got disrupted by Indeed. The problem is that those, those first examples I gave, they’re all low effort behavioral changes.
Like you can install another food delivery app. You don’t have to change your workflow. It’s not that much that really goes into it. But the thing is, like, go back to LinkedIn. Does anyone really want another LinkedIn? Who wants to build out another professional profile that they have to maintain somewhere?
Not to mention, how are you going to get a few hundred million people want to do that? And because that’s really what it would take for anything to reach any kind of critical mass. So what if another large platform tries to take them down? What is some other big company? Well, that’s been tried.
Does anyone here remember Facebook for jobs? Did you forget about it? I had a vague recollection of it. So the quick history, Facebook introduced Facebook for jobs in 2017. They were going to do their own job board, do their own marketplace. They added professional profile features to the Facebook profiles.
They kind of went both directions. They want to be able to find people to upload their stuff. They did a Facebook workplace enterprise, basically suite in 2016. They were going to kind of go after the whole shebang. They want to know when everyone’s kind of business place too. Recruiting via Facebook groups, which, spoiler, might be the only thing that’s actually left out of this whole thing. Didn’t work.
None of it worked, really. What happened? Well, Facebook sucks. No one trusted it. Privacy concerns. The whole platform basically fell out of favor, but even short of that, people didn’t want like to job search on the same platform that their grandparents were sharing political memes on. It was the last thing anybody wanted to do.
Jobs on Facebook got shut down in 2023. So that’s officially gone. Facebook workplace is shutting down in 2025. They’re giving everybody one more year to get all their data off of it. So there you go. Biggest player in the space that would have had a chance data wise and money wise to do something fell flat on their face.
Yeah. It’s- I mean, in some respects, LinkedIn got into the game early enough where like data privacy really wasn’t even, it was a bit of an afterthought I would assume for most. Yeah. Anyway, a couple of takeaways, woefully long, but these have been going long anyways. Look, we became the product as we’ve said, and
we need it to get a job later someday, more than likely. Right? It’s like anyone, you know, likes reading our takes or other office dork takes for fun. Yeah. It’s just, it’s a necessary- it’s something you have to have if you want to get a job. If you do, I apologize. That wasn’t coming at you. I mean, like in our opinion, LinkedIn is pretty boring.
No one likes it, but everyone knows. Yeah, go ahead. We try to do our best to zest it up for y’all. Yeah, exactly. Look, the bottom line is everyone knows that they’re going to need it at some point to find a job, to find a prospect, to hire, something like that. But at least at present, there’s just zero appetite for this second off historic social network.
And we are short on clock. That is a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insights series which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com as well as YouTube, Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
