Women Want Me, Indeed Employers Fear Me

 Is “Indeed” an accurate name for the platform that aims to help you find a job through its countless listings? My discouraging experiences with the site leave me wondering if “Improbable” might be a better moniker.

After two weeks of applying to jobs through Indeed, I noticed a pattern of three possible outcomes for these positions:

1. a brief rejection email explaining that the company has gone with another applicant,

2. a Zoom call invitation in which the potential employer pulls off their business mask to reveal that they are actually a Scooby-Doo villain, and I have been tricked into sitting through an hour of indoctrination into a multi-level marketing scheme, or

3. absolute silence!

Each option is disheartening in its own special way, but I’ve found that the vast majority fall into the third category: silence. I never hear back from the employer at all--not even for a gentle rejection. Why?

Out of curiosity, I checked the graveyard of my previously submitted applications on the Indeed site, and found a startling (yet blatantly obvious) answer.

 

A job that I had applied for just hours earlier had a whopping 28,346+ applications submitted for that position. Twenty. Eight. Thousand. That’s 20,000 more people than the amount of days that I’ve been alive on this planet (and anywhere else in our solar system).

Now, I could be wrong since this is one of my most recent applications, but I have a strong suspicion that this job will end up as Category Three Silence. In this case, I can forgive them for skipping a formal rejection.

I also must admit that I chose the job listing with the highest volume of applicants that I’d applied to for dramatic effect, though my application graveyard does average 1,000 other applicants per job listing. The rare positions with under a hundred candidates have been great about swiftly rejecting me via email, at least.

What is the point of these thousand-applicant job listings though? Why do these listings remain on Indeed for weeks or more, when so many viable candidates are already lined up to put in the work? It’s one thing for me to think I’m deserving of work in my field just because I got a degree, but I know that out of 1,000 people, at least one of us has to be qualified for the position we’re applying for. So what’s the deal?

A concrete answer still eludes me, so I hope that’s not why you’re reading this article. (If you didn’t already know, this blog is for my personal complaints. Indeed just happens to be the bane of my existence at this moment, so here we are.) I can, however, share the insight that I’ve gained from an evening of baffled Googling.

Two decent answers come from Indeed itself. In both cases, the question of who is posting each job listing is the most important factor. Let’s start with the less relevant answer of the two, so I can trick you into reading an extra paragraph or three.

The Indeed Help Center acknowledges that not all of their listings are legitimate; scammers quite often post false job listings with the aim of gaining personal and/or financial information from those seeking employment. These scams are commonly made to look like entry level jobs with great pay, listed under frequently searched positions from receptionists to warehouse workers. Hopefully that doesn’t discourage you from applying for those kinds of positions. Y’know, if the 28,000 applicants thing hasn’t already deterred you from using Indeed in general.

This answer doesn’t account for my experiences using Indeed though. I’m not being contacted by scammers. Hell, I’m hardly being contacted at all. The curse of Category Three Silence plagues me. If I am applying to scam listings, are the scammers just too preoccupied with their other 1,000 applicants to swindle me?

That brings us to the second option instead. Let’s say that a scammer didn’t post the listing that I’m applying for. That doesn’t necessarily mean that an employer posted it instead--at least, they didn’t post it on Indeed specifically.

When it comes to Indeed’s non-sponsored job listings, you’re looking at a mixture of listings that employers posted for free as well as listings collected from around the internet through Indeed’s search engine. While it’s great to have more job options to choose from, I have to wonder how employers are reviewing the applications for these listings if they weren’t the ones to post them on the platform. I assume that listings generated by the search engine are those which only have an “apply on company site” option, rather than the option to apply through Indeed directly. Even so, how does Indeed know when to remove these listings if the employer isn’t involved with Indeed at all? Could this be the culprit behind month old listings with tons of applicants and zero responses?

Again, I don’t have a solid answer, but with this knowledge of where the job listings come from I can much more easily conjure up reasons why I’m not hearing back from so many companies. Whether the positions are not real to begin with, are no longer available, or are simply too flooded with thousands of applicants, there has to be an explanation on Indeed’s end. Surely it must be Indeed’s fault, and not my lack of relevant experience for these positions… Right?