I recently sounded the alarm on the misteps of Indeed, writing about how HR professionals and employers are finally reaching a breaking point over rising costs, complex pricing/rules, and diminishing returns. The phrase “The Indeed Tax” has begun to resonate deeply with anyone managing a recruitment ad budget.
But as I look at the broader landscape of the recruitment ad industry, I’m left asking a incredibly frustrating question: Where the hell is the competition? And Why haven’t they capitalized on the Indeed missteps?
Indeed has handed its rivals a golden opportunity on a silver platter. Yet, platforms like ZipRecruiter, Talent.com, Jobcase, Adzuna, and the other major job search players have failed to step up, make a dent in Indeed’s traffic, or capture any meaningful mindshare. I think they are letting a massive market shift pass them by.
As someone who has tracked the job board industry for years—from chronicling the unraveling of legacy giants like Monster and CareerBuilder to analyzing modern marketplace shifts—I want to dissect exactly why these sites are failing to capitalize on Indeed’s vulnerability, and outline the aggressive playbook they need to adopt to finally take back market share.
Consider this constructive criticism. I think its imperative that employers have other solutions beyond the likes of Indeed and LinkedIn that they can turn to as alternatives. Without quality competition, Indeed will only get bolder.
Why the Competition Has Failed to Step Up
1. They are retreaters, not aggressors
Instead of leaning in when Indeed squeezes its clients, competitors are turning inward, cutting costs, and shutting down the very networks that drove growth. Look at ZipRecruiter: the axed their ZipSearch affiliate program, disconnecting the APIs that publishers and smaller job boards relied on for backfill. Rather than expanding their ecosystem and footprint to catch Indeed’s fallouts, they pulled back. You don’t win a market share war by shrinking your distribution network.
2. They suffer from an identity crisis
What exactly is Jobcase to the average employer? Is it a blue-collar LinkedIn? A community site? Not anymore. What is Talent.com to the average US SMB—an aggregator or a standalone job board? Indeed, for all its current flaws, has a crystal-clear identity: they help people get jobs. The competition has failed to articulate a compelling counter-identity.
If you don’t stand for something highly specific, you become background noise. Other than Ziprecruiter no one else has even tried to reach out to consumers to build their brand via TV and radio (in the past decade). Its hard to gain ground if job seekers don’t hear about you so they can tell their friends & family through word of mouth.
3. Over-reliance on “Black Box” tech and programmatic middlemen
Many of these competitors have stopped trying to build direct, loyal relationships with employers. Instead, they rely heavily on programmatic job distribution platforms (like Appcast or Recruitics) to fill their inventory. By becoming just another line-item in a programmatic budget, they’ve commoditized themselves. When employers buy programmatic traffic, they don’t care if the candidate comes from Adzuna or a random niche site—meaning these brands are failing to build independent equity or mindshare with corporate recruiters. The buying and selling of job traffic is not exactly exciting but thats what a lot of Indeeds competition has become. They have zero consumer brand to bank on.
4. The “Window Dressing” approach to niche markets
When competitors try to innovate, it often feels like corporate PR rather than a dedicated business strategy. A few years back, ZipRecruiter launched SchoolJobsNearMe.org to address the teacher shortage. It was a great headline, but without sustained marketing spend or deep integration into that community, it became window dressing. They didn’t commit to dominating the niche; they just built a landing page. These efforts need to stop unless they are willing to commit.
5. They Failed at Alternate Revenue Streams
Candidates are now willing to pay for things that help them stand out in a crowded job market and investors are noticing. Candidate led tools like Teal and FirstRound have garnered funding. Indeed launched (free) AI career assistants for both job seekers and employers. Why haven’t the other players followed suit? These features are going to become table stakes any national job aggregator needs to have.
If given something of value that allows job seekers to shorten their search or stand out (featured profiles) they will pay for it. Failing to add new products for both seekers and employers will continue to haunt them in down hiring cycles like the one we are currently stuck in. You can no longer rely simply on job ads to get by.
The Playbook: How to Take Market Share from Indeed
If players like ZipRecruiter, Jobcase, or Talent actually want to weaponize the brewing resentment against “The Indeed Tax,” they need to stop playing defense. Here are four things they must do immediately:
1. Move to Free Organic Listings for Employers
Indeed’s latest move is to remove or reduce free organic traffic for employers. According to this news, “Organic visibility will not be completely removed, but organic visibility for free jobs is not guaranteed nor will it be consistent over time, particularly in competitive roles or locations.” This is an obvious opportunity for the competition to grab. Become the “anti-indeed”!!!
- The Play: Don’t be a pay to play ecosystem like Indeed. Offer employers free organic listings to improve your relationship with them and upsell them on sponsored postings. You’ll attract more jobs which will turn into more traffic and help you grow and attract more seekers.
2. Rebuild the Ecosystem They Abandoned
Indeed grew into a giant because it originally indexed the entire job market (including other boards) got great at SEO and partnered with everyone. Now that Indeed has closed off its ecosystem and squeezing margins, its competitors should do the exact opposite.
- The Play: Competitors should aggressively court the thousands of niche, hyper-local, and diversity-focused job boards out there. Instead of killing affiliate programs, they should build a superior, high-yield publisher network. If you power and monetize the long-tail of the internet, you aggregate the traffic required to challenge Indeed’s dominance. In fact, they should each buy one of the various job board software providers to further that goal. Ziprecruiter did this several years ago when they acquired Jobboard.io but they eventually dedicated less resources to it and its not doing much for them at all these days. They gave up too soon on this strategy.
3. Acquire and Expand in Niches
You cannot beat Indeed by trying to be a better general job board overnight. You beat them by slicing away pieces of their pie. Jobget is gaining steam in the hourly, essential-worker space. Healthcare has new marketplaces like ShiftMed ad Incredible Health.
- The Play: Pick 3 to 5 critical hiring verticals (e.g., healthcare, logistics, hospitality) and pour real marketing dollars into owning those communities. Don’t just list the jobs—build the definitive hub for those job seekers. When an employer needs a forklift driver or a travel nurse, your platform should be the first thought, not an afterthought. Acquiring the top job sites in these verticals is a good move. Just ask Jobget who acquired sites like Snagajob in recent years and is still gobbling up other players. For example, go acquire the top 3 niche sites in healthcare and start to dominate that space.
4. Optimize aggressively for the AI “Long-Tail” search future
We are moving away from traditional keyword search and into conversational, AI-driven search (SearchGPT, Gemini, etc.). Candidates aren’t just typing “marketing jobs” anymore; they are asking complex, conversational questions.
- The Play: Competitors need to stop relying on legacy SEO structures and completely re-engineer their job data to rank for these hyper-specific, conversational long-tail queries. If Adzuna or ZipRecruiter can master semantic AI indexing faster than Indeed’s massive, slow-moving legacy infrastructure, they can intercept the next generation of job seekers before they ever even land on an Indeed search page. Build in career intelligence data into your job listing pages to give seekers a better picture of that company and its history. For example let job seekers know if a company is growing headcount by tracking new postings over time. Integrating your listings with the LLMs is a good start, but you must create content that offers career intelligence job seekers can use to get ahead.
The Bottom Line
History tells us that no job board giant stays on top forever. Just ask anyone who worked at Monster and CareerBuilder—platforms that once seemed utterly untouchable until a nimble aggregator named Indeed disrupted their entire business model.
Another longtime purveyor of the industry Joel Cheesman, told me recently, “Being more competitive doesn’t come down to building a better mousetrap, spending more money on marketing or, as of late, cutting more overhead and laying off employees. Tesla, Uber and Lyft disrupted traditional players by providing a service that was fundamentally different and appealed to a breed of customer looking for something else. Competitors looking to take on Indeed and LinkedIn must repeat that strategy. Hoping to out-Indeed Indeed is a waste of time. They zig, so you better zag.” …..I’d agree. Competitors need to think different in this new age of job search.
Right now, Indeed is showing cracks. Employers are fatigued, budgets are strained, and the market is begging for a viable alternative. But alternatives don’t just happen by waiting around. If ZipRecruiter, Jobcase, Talent, Adzuna and the rest keep playing it safe, they will remain perpetual runners-up.
