When you have the option of posting a job for free there’s two options that stand above the rest: Indeed and Glassdoor. I narrowed it down to these two because they’re hands down the best options. I ran a head-to-head challenge between the two to see which got me better results. But first — here’s a breakdown of both.

Indeed is the largest network of job listings and job searchers, and Glassdoor is the largest network for job candidate research.

Yes, you could always post to both, but do you really want to manage two different accounts? I know I don’t.

So how do you choose?

The Case For Indeed

Indeed has the largest network of job seekers. I repeat, THE LARGEST. They’ve done incredible stuff building their product through SEO, and the results show. No matter what job you post here, you’ll get a number of candidates. But will these be the right candidates? What I mean by this is that will they be the type of quality of applicants that you’re looking for. If you’re looking to fill more niche roles, or positions that you expect to have fewer candidates overall, then Indeed might be right for you. You may need as much volume as possible and you may not care about the quality. Just being able to fill your empty seats, and getting fresh new puppy-eyed employees in the door and trained might be your goal, and for this Indeed is great.

Jobs that work best on Indeed: Entry-level positions, internships, maintenance, facilities, mid-level roles,

The Case for Glassdoor

Simply put, Glassdoor was originally built to be a review site for businesses. The goal was to empower job seekers to learn if they’d be a good fit for a business, or if that business had a horrible culture that they should avoid. Several years later, and I think it’s safe to say they’ve been very successful at that. Then, they went and added job postings for employers, which makes tons of sense. They have a highly engaged user base, which is prime for finding both passive and active job seekers.

Jobs that work best on Glassdoor: Mid-level positions, skilled business roles in marketing, HR, finance, operations, Management & Director level positions.

Glassdoor vs Indeed: The Head-to-Head Challenge

Now for the fun part. I didn’t have the capacity to run this test at a greater scale, but for a single position that we were hiring for, I thought it would be fun to test which job platform performed better: Glassdoor or Indeed.

For the sake of the exercise (and to save time), I used the exact same job description for a Content Marketing Specialist.

I measured performance by 3 key metrics: Volume of Candidates (Total Candidates), Qualified Candidates (those that were the right fit), and Hire.

Obviously, measuring and concluding by “Hire” for a single position is a bit presumptuous. But still fun nonetheless.
indeed hiring metrics
glassdoor recruiting metrics

You can clearly see who won the category of “Total Applicants.” Indeed provided a far greater number of candidates than Glassdoor, which is great if you care about having a high volume. However, you can also see that Glassdoor had a much higher qualified candidate ratio. To me this is most important. It means that I won’t have to spend as much time sifting through resumes because a) I have significantly fewer junk resumes and b) the majority of candidates will fit within my realm of “ideal” fit for culture and skills.

After all, I’m hiring to make my life easier, the last thing I want to do is to burden myself with over 100 resumes to read. It’s all about quality for me not quantity. Some people care about candidate volume, but I don’t. So, in my eyes and in this particular experiment Glassdoor proved victorious over Indeed. When I have candidates coming in from Glassdoor that were former Movie Award Nominated Writers/Producers, published in numerous publications vs Close to a hundred recent college graduates, then it’s pretty obvious who the winner is.

I will leave you with this little tidbit, most of those so called niche boards are a scam. Statistically, I’ve seen them in bring some of the lowest levels of qualified candidates, and most of the top talent is going to be cruising around on the major job boards.

Do you have a favorite job board? I’d love to hear about it! Let me know in the comments!