Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 2)

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? PF: Online recruitment has been dominated by job boards, particularly Careerbuilder, Monster and Hotjobs and specialized sites like Dice for technology professionals. Indeed.com makes it possible for job seekers to search across these sites to find exactly the right jobs. Job seekers click away from Indeed.com to apply for jobs on these sites. Many job boards are partnering with us to sponsor their jobs and drive additional job seeker traffic to their jobs.

SM: Describe the value proposition of Indeed, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. PF: Indeed.com is by far the most comprehensive search engine for jobs, aggregating jobs from well over 6,000 unique sources. When you search jobs on Indeed.com you get the freshest and most relevant jobs matching your query. Our tools for job seekers are second to none – including Job Trends, Salary Search, and Forums. We have three to four times more traffic than any direct competitor, which is testament to the power of our job search engine and tools.

SM: In my opinion, it is the Vertical Search function that is your differentiator, the rest is commodity so far. Everyone else has it too. How big is your market? How do you calculate TAM? PF: We’re in a $10 billion+ industry which is growing fast. Recruiting is one of the things that really makes sense to do online, and recruitment advertising is one of the biggest segments of online advertising. Classified advertising continues to migrate online from print, and the revenue of the big job boards alone is several billion dollars. Recruitment advertising dollars are also flowing to pay-for-performance products like Google and Yahoo’s keyword ads. Vertical search engines – like Indeed – add yet another dimension.

SM: Yes, but that’s a 30,000 ft analysis of the overall industry, which my audience is very familiar with, since we just did an overview of your industry. What is your specific TAM? Or perhaps, the better question is what is your business model, and what % of this multi-billion dollar recruitment classified TAM would that allow you to address? PF: Well, we have two kinds of advertising on our site, whcih are very similar to the overall search business model that Google has promoted. One, we have Sponsored PPC Ads on top of the search results. Two, we have auction-pricing based keyword ads on the side panel. These two advertising models basically drive our revenue models.

SM: I see. So you are taking a sliver of the general search model, and applying it to the Jobs vertical, and following exactly the same format as Google. You don’t really get paid on a “Pay-Per-Listing” basis, which is a large % of the online jobs TAM, though. The question is, what % of the market is available to you on the basis of what you have to offer? PF: I don’t worry about these things. I am focused on running the business.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster
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