Posts from indeed

The first great investment we made at USV was Indeed in the summer of 2005. Brad had been looking for a search engine for jobs and I saw this post on John Battelle's blog in late 2004. I forwarded it to Brad and he reached out to Paul and Rony. It took two tries before we could convince them to take our money. They had bootstrapped the company, launched the service, and were well on their way. They didn't need our money. But eventually we convinced them to take it, along with the New York Times Company and our friends at Allen & Company.

Indeed has always been the quiet one. Nobody really talks about them. But as I have said a number of times on this blog, they are the most complete company in our portfolio. They have it all. Two world class entrepreneurs as founders. A solid management team all up and down the company. A product that is beloved and services more than 80mm people worldwide every month. An engineering team that has kept the service up with literally no down time that I can ever remember. A business model that, like Google's, is the best on the Internet. Revenues, profits, customer satisfaction, shareholder value. They built a fortress and I am just so happy to have had a front row seat watching them build it.

The quiet one is the one that can do a big M&A transaction over the summer without anyone finding out. The quiet one is the one that puts out the news on their blog and goes back to serving customers. The quiet one is the first great investment we made at USV and one that will always have a special place in my heart. Congrats to Paul, Rony, and the team. We will miss working with you.

As the world moves from web to mobile (our theme this summer), the idea of one click to do something becomes more powerful.

Did you know you can apply for a job with one click?

There are two services that make such a thing possible, LinkedIn Apply and Indeed Apply. In the spirit of full disclosure, Indeed is a USV portfolio company.

If you have your resume on LinkedIn or Indeed and you come across a job posting where the service has implemented the LinkedIn Apply and Indeed Apply buttons (think tweet and like buttons), then you can apply for the job with one click.

It turns out this is pretty popular. ZipRecruiter, a site that lets you easily post your job broadly across the web, put Linked and Indeed Apply buttons on their service and saw an almost 22% increase in job applications as a result. It makes sense, people will do more of something they can do easily.

So what does this mean for the job seeker? It means you should get your resume on LinkedIn and Indeed. What does it mean for the employer? It means you should put these one-click apply buttons on your job postings.

Some other interesting things came out of that ZipRecruiter blog post:

1) they get 3x the one click applications from Indeed vs LinkedIn

2) Indeed's resume database is growing at over 1mm resumes a month

3) Indeed is better for most job types other than management and executive

The world of recruiting has changed a lot in the past ten years and companies like LinkedIn and Indeed are driving much of that change. One click job applications is yet another example of this.