The history
Since 2016 we’ve treated Indeed the same as any other job board. We posted out Apprenticeship opportunities, each one linked to an online application form.
The result was applicants were completing the same information. This in turn allowed you to compare like with like, and make a better recruiting decision.
You often ask for information like the applicant’s date of birth and nationality (for example). Although you ask for lots of different information at the same time.
We have also always asked for the following information to make an LRS search for applicant qualifications:
- Name
- Date of Birth
- Postcode
- Gender
This allows us to retrieve the applicant’s Unique Learner Number (ULN) and Personal Learning Record (PLR) at the point of application.
This was the only reason we asked for that information; to make applicants’ and users’ lives easier.
The issue
Indeed contacted us 2 weeks ago to tell us that some of our clients’ application forms were in breach of their Terms of Service. This was something as a shock, since nothing about the way we operate had changed in over 3 years.
We were then informed that all Apprenticeship vacancies that were on our feed had lost visibility since we had fallen foul of the Search Quality team at Indeed.
The team at Indeed decided that the questions that you ask as part of a standard application are discriminatory. As such, they dropped the visibility of the enrola feed, and all associated jobs on it.
The solution
Fundamentally, we need to make sure that you are able to receive applications from Indeed.
To do this, we’re changing the way that application forms work for Indeed. Now we’re only going to ask for the following information:
- Name
- Email address
- Phone number
This will ensure that we meet the Indeed posting guidelines. This ensures that your apprenticeship Opportunities are visible on the Indeed platform.
This means that we won’t be able to activate the automatic LRS lookup feature that we have for our other job boards. We’re working on solutions to resolve this in future updates, and will let you know when we’re ready to release them.
The apology
We’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.
We were surprised by Indeed’s actions, and have been working through the week to create a solution that they accept.
We’ve submitted this solution, and we’re currently waiting for the response. We hope this will be fixed early next week, and will let you know when it does so.
This has also meant that we’ve had to delay some of the other development work that we were doing. We understand from the feedback we’ve had how important posting to Indeed is for you.
Going forward, we’ll be in regular contact with our Indeed account managers to see if we can prevent incidents like this before they happen.