Chat With Indeed CEO Paul Forster

This afternoon I spoke with Indeed CEO Paul Forster to get updates on the job aggregation service. I initially conducted an audio interview with Paul last year. We also took a look at Indeed, SimplyHired and Jobster using Google Trends last week. Indeed launched in 2004.

Paul shared that they are currently serving 7 million unique visitors a month and over 130 million pageviews per month. The company is now profitable and they have 50 employees located at their headquarters in Stamford.

As for their business model, revenue comes mostly from PPC (pay per click) advertising and they also power a large number of job boards including the one on about.com.

One thing I’ve noticed is that SimplyHired seems to have disappeared. A year ago I received weekly emails from SimplyHired with updates and now, nothing. I had a number of good conversations with their execs. The SimplyHired blog hasn’t been updated in nearly four months as well. Maybe they are hands-down building the next release.

Paul says that Indeed has the most comprehensive job search and that they are the leaders in innovation.

The most recent feature they have added is on the backend for companies who use Indeed. It’s called Job Analytics and gives companies very detailed statistics on where their jobs are featured, which sites are working, click rates, and the most popular job titles. This tool might actually be good for the Internet marketer at those companies to look at as well. This data could lead to good marketing relationships. If you know a site or blog is working well for job leads, maybe it’s something to consider for a larger marketing program.

The last topic we touched on was the current economy. I was thinking that in an economic downturn Indeed would do very well. But of course there are less jobs so it’s probably a wash. Paul noted that healthcare and government jobs are still doing very well overall. Financial, retail and housing jobs are the weakest currently.

Paul ended the discussion by stating that Indeed’s focus is to provide the best job search for the job seeker and the companies who post their jobs on the site.