2030 ESG Commitments
Shorten job search duration by 50%
Research from March 2020 showed that 40% of people in OECD households would fall below the poverty line if they went without income for three months or more. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries. The 40% figure is based on data compiled in 28 countries (source: OECD (2020), How’s Life? 2020: Measuring Well-Being). We believe that getting a job should be faster and simpler, and that shortening the duration of job search can have an enormous impact on the wellbeing and livelihood of workers.
By 2030, we are committed to reducing the time it takes for job seekers to get hired by half.The period from the time a user starts an active job search on the Indeed job platform to the time the user confirms receipt of a job offer.
Finding a job should be faster and simpler
At Indeed, we believe we have one of the largest pools of data available on the job market. Preliminary research shows it takes about 15 weeks for most people to find a job.
Getting a job should not be this hard. It should be as easy as pushing a button. When an individual thrives, communities thrive, and society thrives.
We’re putting our insights and our platform to work to not only help people get jobs but to help make the process of getting a job faster and easier.
Our approach to shortening job search duration
No standard measurement methods are available to capture exactly how long it takes for people to get jobs using a jobs and hiring platform.
Behavior patterns of how people search and apply to jobs are extremely diverse. Some may spend months casually visiting and searching for jobs, while others may apply to a job that day and get hired fast. While this makes measurement difficult today, we are well positioned to assess the job seeker experience using real-time product-based signals and third-party benchmarking against an ever-evolving job market.
To be able to shorten job search duration, we must be able to capture the entire journey, not just from the point when an application is submitted or interviewing starts. Over the last year, we’ve built a sizable and growing data set of self-reported job search durations from people who found a job using Indeed, and have been able to use this to better understand the different journeys to getting hired. At the same time, we formed a cross-functional team, including data scientists and researchers, to work together to pinpoint the exact start of a job search on Indeed.
We started by calculating data from Indeed users to define our 2021 baseline for job search duration, and found it to be approximately 15 weeks.Baseline job search duration calculated as of March 31, 2022. Calculated as the period from the time users started an active job search on the Indeed job platform to the time that 90% of such users had received a job offer (assuming for this purpose that the period it takes for 90% of users to receive a job offer represents a statistically significant value). The job search duration is calculated based on surveyed user data collected between September 2021 and March 2022. By 2030, we aim to reduce the time it takes for job seekers to get hired by half to 7.5 weeks.
In 2022, we established methods to regularly measure duration. Today, we can identify the “end” of a job search using our “hired signal,” which is when someone receives a job offer.
In pursuit of our long-term goal to reduce the time it takes to get hired by half, we need to understand the process of both the job seeker and employer. In FY2023, we accelerated our efforts by focusing on employers’ “time to hire.” An employer metric defined as the days elapsed between when a job is created on Indeed and when the first hire is reported for that job. Duration can be measured at each step of the hiring process, up to and including the hire, using Indeed data.
Currently, it takes an average of 55 days 55 days is the mean time to hire (starts from a job creation and ends with the first hire) for measured hires on Indeed in December 2023. to make the first hire for a job posted on the Indeed platform. An employer’s hiring process includes posting a job, receiving applications from job seekers, reviewing resumes, and conducting interviews. We use our own data to understand this hiring journey and solve challenges throughout the process through product capabilities on our platform; thereby reducing the time to hire and the job search duration.
We will continue to deepen our knowledge about the time it takes for job seekers to get a job and for employers to make a hire. We will also continue reducing the time to hire by evolving our products with responsible use of technology for better matching, by simplifying hiring through friction reduction at every step of the job search process, and through automation.