If you are asking “why aren’t my jobs appearing on Indeed?”, this short blog should help. It includes the 10 top reasons why jobs don’t appear on Indeed and a handy link to Indeed’s job posting guidelines.

Most job posting issues concern free job adverts on Indeed. Free adverts are referred to as organic adverts by Indeed. They can be created by hand on the employer’s Indeed console or they can be delivered by your Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Employers encounter fewer issues with sponsored adverts. Sponsored adverts are those you pay for to improve their ranking in search results. Sponsoring adverts on Indeed works a little like a bidding process. Employers compete to make adverts more visible compared to adverts for similar jobs in the same locale.

What is Indeed?

Indeed is the largest job board in the UK and it offers free job postings for employers. That is a valuable service so it is important to obey Indeed’s​ ​job posting guidelines​, otherwise your jobs may be delisted.

Indeed Job Posting Guidelines

First and foremost, your jobs must adhere to Indeed’s ​job posting guidelines.​ Indeed works hard to avoid quality issues as it attempts to offer only real, relevant jobs to jobseekers. We encourage you to familiarise yourself with Indeed’s educational materials.

Be aware that historical job visibility does not guarantee future job visibility on Indeed. Critically, any job listing that could mislead the jobseeker, compromise their experience or fail to represent a “real” job may be removed from search results altogether. ​

It may sound harsh, but Indeed reserves the right to reject or remove any job or disable any Company’s account, for any or for no reason. Indeed is not obliged to explain why a job or a Company is removed. It just retains the right to remove any job, free or sponsored, should they feel that it’s in their own or their users’ interest to do so

The top 10 reasons why jobs don’t appear in Indeed search results

Now let’s get onto answering your question; “Why aren’t my jobs appearing on Indeed?”. Here are the most common reasons.

We will cover:

• Indeed hasn’t received your jobs yet
• Your jobs are still being quality reviewed
• Violating the Indeed ​job posting guidelines
• Location issues
• Advert duplication
• Persistent advert refreshing
• Mass expiry
• Indeed believes you are a recruitment company
• Using inappropriate words
• Including email addresses or URLs in the body of your advert

1.  Indeed hasn’t received your jobs yet

Your ATS may have a MultiPost module that posts your jobs to Indeed. In this case, jobs are not delivered individually at the time you publish them on your ATS. Instead they are packaged up periodically and delivered to Indeed in a larger file of many jobs. Indeed unpacks the jobs from the file and inspects each one for duplication and other issues. If your jobs meet Indeed’s quality standards, Indeed should publish them.

Let’s say that your ATS delivers jobs to Indeed at 11am and 6pm daily. It shouldn’t deliver more frequently because Indeed can delist your previously published jobs for up to 30 minutes each time it receives a new file.

If you were to publish a job via your ATS at 9:30am and your ATS delivers your jobs to Indeed at 11am, we can calculate when that job should be listed on Indeed.

• You publish a job on your ATS at 9:30am
• Your ATS delivers that job to Indeed at 11am
• Indeed should make that job visible to jobseekers by 12pm

To locate your jobs on Indeed, type the name of your company in quotations within Indeed’s job search. For instance, if your company name is ABC Care, type “ABC Care” in Indeed’s search.

You should also see your jobs in your Indeed Employer Console, subject to completing a process that Indeed calls “claiming your source”. Claiming your source means that Indeed will identify your ATS-published jobs and display them in your Indeed Console. You can then sponsor any advert if you wish. Your Indeed Account Manager or Indeed Success Manager can help you with this.

2.  Your jobs are still being quality reviewed

You can request free job listings with Indeed via your ATS. First your adverts must pass an Indeed Quality Review. That review is completed by real people in the USA. None of your jobs will be visible to jobseekers until that Quality Review is complete and to Indeed’s satisfaction.

The quality review typically takes two or three business days. However, it may take longer depending upon their workload and any issues they may detect with your job adverts.

The good news is that Indeed’s quality review process is performed only once. After successful review, your adverts should post without further delays.

You should continue to observe Indeed’s quality rules. Indeed wants to “Help People Get Jobs” and the jobseeker is central to their mission. Indeed’s Search Quality team and automated algorithms continuously review all jobs sent from all sources. That includes continuous monitoring of your jobs sent via any ATS, such as CVMinder ATS for example.

3.  Violating the Indeed ​job posting guidelines

Indeed encourages you to ensure that your jobs adhere to Indeed’s posting guidelines and to accept guidance from the CVMinder Team if you use CVMinder ATS.

4.  Location issues

Location Too Wide

Indeed requires you to sponsor jobs that are are for larger geographic areas. For example, if you advertised a job for the location of Kent or England it would require sponsorship. You may see a message like “This job must be sponsored in order to be shown on Indeed”.

Define your locations carefully. For instance, Dartford or Bristol are allowable for a free job post. To help, your ATS may require you to specify a post code for each job. A post code defines a specific location for the job. However, you should ensure that the Town / City and post code collectively describe the same location. This can be confusing because county and city boundaries change.

For example, you could mistakenly specify Bromley as part of Kent, when it is actually part of London. In this case, specifying Kent could result in Indeed never listing your advert for jobseekers.

Location Blasting

Location blasting is defined as advertising the same role more than once, concurrently and in multiple locations all within close proximity of each other. Indeed considers location blasting an abuse of free job advertising and treats your adverts as duplicates. It can diminish them in search results or delist them altogether. Indeed’s detection of this activity can also result in the permanent suspension of your access to free job advertising.

5.  Advert duplication

Indeed receives your jobs from an ATS and aggregates listings from by-hand advertising, alternative career pages, staffing agencies, job boards and other sources. This can result in unintended duplication. Duplicates identified by Indeed can diminish the visibility of adverts delivered by your ATS. Indeed does its best to favour the correct postings, but this can take time.

If you believe your jobs are being duplicated by a source outside of your control, speak with your Indeed Account Manager or reach out to Indeed here.

One duplication method you can avoid is posting your job via an ATS and then posting the same advert by hand on your Indeed account. This has an immediate and detrimental affect to to your ATS-posted advert.

6. Persistent advert refreshing

Indeed can detect persistent refreshing of free job adverts. By refresh, we mean expiring an advert then re-advertising the same vacancy on that same day. Indeed considers this an attempt to improve the search ranking of free job adverts and therefore an abuse of free job advertising.

You should avoid refreshing adverts within 30 days of initial listing for any free job advert. We advise that you give your advert a rest between advertising cycles. A rest period cab persuade Indeed that your advert is for a real job and may have had a recruiting outcome.

7. Mass expiry

Indeed can detect mass expiry events. That is when a significant portion of your adverts expire at the same time. 

Indeed sees this as unnatural advertising cycles. It believe the practice is linked to refreshing job adverts. If an employers takes down all adverts every Friday and then re-releases those adverts, these are mass expiration events followed by refresh events.

Indeed wants to stop employers abusing free advertising. Advert mass expiry and refresh indicates attempt to improve advert search rankings. Why is mass expiry an indicator for Indeed? If an employer is hiring 10 new staff members for different roles, it is hard to believe that every person would be hired at the same time. It is more natural to assume that the advertising cycles for each vacancy would differ.

8.  Indeed believes you are a recruitment company

Recruitment company vacancies may only become visible on Indeed if the job is sponsored. More information about Indeed’s policy can be found​ ​here.

9. Using inappropriate words

Words like “urgent” or “urgently” may be detected by indeed in advert titles. If Indeed doesn’t like a word you are using you may see a message in your Indeed Console similar to “This job must be sponsored in order to be shown on Indeed”.

Remove the words and try again. Otherwise, sponsor your advert.

10. Including email addresses or URLs in the body of your advert

If you use Indeed’s free advertising, Indeed wants to detect when an application is made. That means that you should not direct the applicant to contact you or apply by other means. Indeed can detect email addresses and website URLs in the body of your advert. Avoid including these or you may find that your advert is delisted.

If you must include such information, then you may find that you can sponsor your advert to overcome this issue. You may see a message like “This job must be sponsored in order to be shown on Indeed” in your Indeed Console.

Preserving your access to free job advertising with Indeed

We suggest you do not try to rely upon free job advertising alone. Sponsoring adverts can help you to succeed with your hiring goals.  Indeed is a commercial company so try to remember that it can only offer you free job advertising if the company remains profitable.

Balancing free and paid job advertising helps you to recruit successfully within budget. So, you should always work to preserve your access to free job advertising.

Indeed monitors job advertising with a suite of detection algorithms that seek out abuse of free job postings. They can deny your future access to free job advertising. It can happen without notice and it is very difficult to recover the same benefit once it has been lost. No ATS provider, including the CVMinder Team, has any jurisdiction in this regard. Even Indeed’s own Account Managers have little leverage over their Quality Team. This will be regardless of your size and any past commercial relationship.

Sponsoring your ATS-delivered adverts on Indeed

Sponsored adverts generally appear higher in search results than free job listings. If using an ATS and after claiming your source it’s easy to sponsor your adverts on Indeed. You have two options:

1. Enable access to your ATS-delivered adverts within your Indeed Employer Console. Talk to your Indeed Account Manager about this. Once visible, you can sponsor any advert individually.
2. Working with your Indeed Account Manager and / or Customer Success Manager. They can help you manage your budget. You may be able to flag which adverts you want to include in any sponsored campaign. For example, CVMinder ATS helps you by managing #hashtags. Those #hashtags are agreed between you and your Indeed Account Manager and then implemented in CVMinder ATS. You can then add #hashtags to select adverts in CVMinder and they will be delivered to Indeed.

We hope we have answered the question “Why aren’t my jobs appearing on Indeed?”. If you think there might be a different reason, please contact us and let us know your own experience.

What is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a recruitment system. An ATS helps any employer to recruit staff and some like CVMinder ATS are designed to work without the need for dedicated recruiters. An ATS helps reduce the effort and cost of recruiting so you can achieve your recruiting goals more easily.

Some recruitment systems like CVMinder ATS also have a MultiPost feature. MultiPost posts your jobs to job boards automatically. CVMinder Multipost posts your adverts to Indeed and others.

How can CVMinder ATS help?

CVMinder ATS includes an advert analyser. Not only can it post adverts to indeed and collect applications for review, but it can also:

• Help you optimise your adverts to improve search results.
• Detect and warn you of duplication before you post adverts.
• Post using your job title rather than advert title to avoid sponsored wording issues.
• Warn you if email addresses and or URLs are included in the body of your advert.

Most of our customers get great results from using Indeed and mixing free with sponsored advertising. If you:

• want to improve advert search results, or
• protect your free advertising on Indeed, or
• start advertising for free on Indeed,

then contact us to find out more. We’re here to help.