Breaking news: Indeed won’t accept jobs via XML | ep106

Jim Durbin of Respondable Recruitment Media a/k/a The Indeed Whisperer is back with some more fantastic insight into changes announced by the world’s largest job board, Indeed.

Jim posted to LinkedIn earlier today that, effective immediately, Indeed will not accept any new, single-sourced feeds for integrated ATS partners in the U.S. So, what does that mean? As Jim wrote, “It means third-party agencies who have been doing the hard work of cleaning up your job postings are not going to be able to feed those jobs to Indeed anymore by XML. Instead, that information has to come from your ATS.”

Let’s say that you’re a Fortune 1,000 company, government agency, or other employer hiring at scale. There’s an excellent chance that you have an ATS, an ad agency, and a programmatic job ad distributor. Sometimes, your agency is also your programmatic vendor, such as Appcast, Inc, Radancy, and Shaker Recruitment Marketing. Until now, they may have scraped jobs from your ATS; cleaned up a LOT of the data; determined which jobs need traffic from Indeed, LinkedIn, Talent.com, College Recruiter job search site and other job boards; and sent them your CPCs or CPAs. Now, it seems you’ll need to send the jobs directly to Indeed from your ATS.

Is this a good change? In some ways, absolutely. But, even in those ways, it could be massively disruptive and painful for a lot of employers.