Job search site Indeed confirmed it is beta testing resume uploads, but is otherwise mum about the details.
“We have been beta testing allowing users to upload their resume,” Indeed CEO Paul Forster said in an email. “That is all I can say at this point.”
Jason Davis of RecruitingBlogs.com first tweeted the news this morning.
Until now, Forster’s site, like its competitor SimplyHired.com, has indexed job postings from corporate career sites and job boards, including all the majors. Many of them, in fact, provide a daily feed of their listings, finding the two sites a valuable — and free — source of traffic.
Indeed ranks 3rd in the U.S. in traffic; SimplyHired is 4th. The leaders are CareerBuilder and Monster. However, with 13.1 million unique visitors in January, according to comScore, Indeed had more than twice the traffic of HotJobs, which is now part of Monster.
That makes it a formidable player, although both job search sites have scrupulously avoided head-on competition with traditional job boards. Until now, neither has accepted resumes. And both have stayed away from the usual job board pay-to-post business model, offering a pay-per-click premium service.
As a result, many job boards not only provide their listings to Indeed and SimplyHired, some of them are also among their better customers, buying positions on the sites for select ads to drive traffic.
In response to my question about whether this resume beta test changes the relationship with job boards, Forster commented:
I’m not aware of any feedback from job boards on this. We have always seen job boards as partners and don’t see that changing for any reason. We provide job boards with a lot of free, organic traffic and many of them are sponsoring their jobs with us to drive additional traffic. We also enable job boards to display our sponsored jobs as backfill to their own jobs, which improves the job search experience for their users and generates revenue for them.
