We just released the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit agenda, and I’m incredibly proud of what our team has put together. It is packed with topics that are critical to talent acquisition leaders right now.

This November, RIS will bring together TA practitioners from Wells Fargo, Ford Motor Company, Roblox, CVS Health, and more to share what they are learning, testing, and changing inside their recruiting organizations.

We’ve also got more amazing speakers and announcements coming up, so I hope that you can join us in San Diego.

Now, on to this week’s story.

Hamra Enterprises, a large restaurant franchise operator with more than 7,500 employees, needed to hire 50 associates for the grand opening of a new Panera in Spring, Texas. The company paid Indeed for Sponsored Jobs to maximize visibility. But when Sonja Breuer, Hamra’s senior vice president of human resources, searched for the openings, she saw jobs at Panda Express, McDonald’s, and other restaurants while Hamra’s sponsored jobs did not consistently appear.

“They’re putting in ‘Panera, Spring Texas,’” Breuer said. “You can’t get any more specific than that.”

After weeks of back-and-forth about how Indeed’s search system worked, Breuer’s frustration came down to a simpler point.

“I just want the search tool to work as it should.”

Breuer’s experience, which I first heard about via the Chad & Cheese podcast, highlights the dilemma facing Indeed right now. As the company places more emphasis on paid posts and a personalized search experience, it is making its search results less intuitive.

“To help job seekers find the most relevant opportunities, we combine exact search terms (specific employer, job title, or location) with additional context, including a person's skills, experience, preferences, qualifications, and real-time search and application behavior on Indeed. As a result, two people searching for the same employer, role, or location may see different results,” an Indeed spokesperson wrote when asked for comment.

There’s a legitimate opportunity to tailor search results to each candidate’s needs and improve relevance. And as agents play a larger role in job discovery, those customized results may ultimately become more important than a traditional search page.

That opportunity is very much at odds with Indeed’s monetization strategy.

“Premium Sponsored Jobs appear in the top three search results 2x more often than Standard Sponsored Jobs,” an Indeed representative wrote to Breuer, while also noting that premium sponsorship does not guarantee visibility in any particular search.

Charging employers to reach more candidates has long been Indeed’s business model, and Sponsored Jobs are not new. What’s changed is that Indeed is selling employers different probabilities of appearing in the most valuable positions within an algorithmic system they cannot reliably test or reproduce.

Indeed built its dominance on simple search results. Those results are now a black box, increasingly shaped by what employers pay.

“Where the hell is the competition?” Chris Russell asked a few weeks ago, questioning why Indeed’s established rivals have not challenged it more aggressively. Part of the answer is that many have reached the stage where monetizing their audience and employer relationships has taken priority over the job-search experience. 

The more interesting challenges are coming from startups and founders that are still focused on building a better experience. Role and Dreamwork are two of them.

Role is trying to reduce job-search clutter

“Let’s start at the top of the funnel with building a better search,” Deven Patel said of the idea behind Role.

Patel’s frustration began during his own job search, when he kept finding duplicate openings sourced from other job boards and intermediaries. He would encounter the same job more than once or follow a listing to a third party rather than the employer.

Patel’s initial objective is to remove that clutter: duplicate jobs, third-party reposts, scams, and listings that redirect candidates through unnecessary intermediaries.

Role is designed more like a search engine than a traditional job board, and employers do not pay to have their jobs included in Role’s index. It pulls openings directly from company career sites rather than limiting its inventory to jobs submitted by paying customers.

“What I’m trying to build is basically like Google for jobs,” said Patel, “not necessarily a job board but a job-search engine.” 

It sounds a lot like the old Indeed.

Dreamwork is using matching to bypass traditional search

Dreamwork founder Colin Johnson began developing the site after his wife, who was then a product manager at Indeed, was laid off while pregnant. What began as a project built out of spite has become a full pivot for his investor-backed three-person team.

Instead of asking users to search through a general results page, Dreamwork asks them to upload a resume. It compares the resume with the jobs in its database and ranks opportunities by estimated fit.

Johnson described his ideal experience as receiving the strongest matches with “no ads, no sponsor.”

Dreamwork does not so much clean Indeed-style search results as bypass them. The candidate receives a personalized list organized around the platform’s assessment of relevance rather than an assortment influenced by employer spending.

The product can also generate a tailored resume, cover letter, and answers to application questions. Paying users can have an automated agent submit the application through the employer’s applicant tracking system after reviewing the materials.

Identifying the problem is the easy part

Indeed became dominant by making job search simpler. The current system is more sophisticated, more personalized, and more heavily monetized. It is not clearer.

Role and Dreamwork have both identified real weaknesses in the experience. Role is trying to clean up the job inventory. Dreamwork is trying to replace search with personalized matching and application support.

Both companies are still in the early stages, driven by their founders’ frustration with the existing job-search experience. To be successful, they will need to attract enough candidates to prove that their approaches matter.

Role and Dreamwork are not close to replacing Indeed. But they are paying attention to a part of the experience that established competitors have largely stopped trying to reinvent.

— David

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Featured Story

How Rippling Evaluates Executive Candidates

Julia Aybin offers an insider’s take on how Rippling hires senior leaders, from realistic case exercises to deep reference checks and candid conversations about the demands of the role. Julia demonstrates how the company evaluates executive judgment, operating ability, and fit rather than relying on pedigree or polished interview performance. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

New report: The State of Candidate Fraud Detection & Prevention. Industry analyst Kyle Lagunas, who will be keynoting the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit in November, examines how candidate fraud has expanded from a hiring-quality concern into a broader security and organizational risk, with vulnerabilities stretching from application intake through post-hire access. The report offers a comprehensive look at vulnerabilities at every stage of the hiring process, and is a must-read primer on this growing issue. (Kyle & Co.)

Land O’Lakes is letting workers choose what days and times they work—and the flex jobs are getting 25% more applicants than full-time gigs. Land O’Lakes is building part-time manufacturing and supply-chain shifts around workers’ availability rather than requiring fixed schedules. The flex roles receive about 25% more views and applications than traditional jobs, while turnover among new flex workers is 12 percentage points lower. (Fortune)

OpenAI says AI models went rogue during testing, triggering ‘unprecedented’ breach at startup. An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI models escaped a restricted testing environment, exploited security vulnerabilities, and accessed Hugging Face systems while trying to obtain answers for an evaluation. The incident shows how rapidly AI capabilities can outpace safeguards, raising urgent questions about access controls, monitoring, and human oversight as companies deploy agents into sensitive business systems. (NBC News)

Introducing the Workforce Data Explorer. Regular readers know I’m a data geek, and I love what Lance has put together here. His open-source Workforce Data Explorer combines 89 U.S. labor and workforce data sources with an AI chat interface, making it easier to ask questions, explore trends, and turn complex data into useful recruiting and workforce-planning insights. (Lance Haun)

Webinars

Hiring Changed. Recruiting Didn’t. How TA Teams Can Level Up Now

August 4, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Hiring has changed dramatically since 2020. Most recruiting models haven’t. TA teams are being asked to act as strategic advisors, market analysts, and operational problem-solvers – often with fewer resources and higher expectations than ever before.

Mike Rasmussen will take an honest look at why more tools, more activity, and more reporting haven’t automatically produced better hiring outcomes. He’ll show what it looks like when TA teams stop managing requisitions and start shaping decisions. (ERE)

Candidate Fraud AMA with Stacy Donovan Zapar

August 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Fraud Squad founder Stacy Donovan Zapar will lead an interactive discussion on how candidate fraud is changing hiring and what teams are seeing in their own pipelines. The session will explore a shift from reactive detection toward prevention, smart friction, and more resilient hiring processes, while previewing the deeper conversation she will bring to the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit. (ERE)

How to Hire for AI Fluency Now That It’s a Critical Skill

August 26, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Drawing on patterns from more than 60,000 AI-enabled technical interviews, CoderPad’s Bayo Ojuri offers a practical framework for defining, assessing, and scoring AI fluency by role. The webinar focuses on realistic exercises, fresh questions, consistent criteria, and observable signals that help hiring teams distinguish genuine capability from polished but shallow answers. (ERE)

Conferences

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit

San Diego, CA
November 10-11, 2026

Talent acquisition is moving fast. The best leaders are not just chasing trends. They are comparing notes, testing new approaches, and learning from practitioners who are already deep in the work.

This November, the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit comes to San Diego for two days of practical insight, honest discussion, and peer-to-peer learning. You’ll hear real examples from recruiting teams tackling today’s biggest questions, from AI and automation to candidate trust, quality of hire, hiring manager alignment, employer brand, and recruiting at scale.

Experience the future of talent acquisition next month. We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)