Register today for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, Nov 10–11 in San Diego. 

Confirmed participants include senior acquisition talent leaders from Samsung Semiconductor, Google, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, CVS Health, Ford Motor Company and Expedia. 

There’s something for every kind of talent acquisition professional at the Summit. The Recruiting track is for practitioners: the skills and workflows that get a req from intake to a filled pipeline. The Innovation track is case studies and live demos showcasing the new technology that’s changing how hiring actually gets done. The Summit track is for TA leaders: strategy, org design and the executive-level decisions that come with driving change across a business. Every speaker will hold office hours in our AMA Lounge after their session, so you can bring a real problem and work it through together.

Thanks to our partners for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit: AcquireROI, AppVault, Cadient and Tenzo AI. For sponsorship information, get in touch with Claire Stroh: [email protected].

Today: Indeed just told Wall Street its AI does the work of "several full-time recruiters," and it's now pitching your CFO directly.

Indeed pulled in 35% more revenue from each job posting on its U.S. platform in the April-to-June quarter than a year earlier.

Earlier this month Recruit Holdings reported that revenue in its U.S. HR Technology segment, which is almost entirely Indeed, rose 30% year over year to $1.64 billion. That surge in revenue came as U.S. job post volume fell about 4%.

The revenue strength came from the rising prices as well as employers buying more sponsored jobs and add-ons. Indeed has been decreasing the visibility of free job postings recently, and the efforts appear to have been successful at transitioning employers to paid products.

CEO Hisayuki Idekoba, who goes by Deko, was candid on a recent analyst call that increases in client spend have been steep. "It's also true that average spend per client has risen rapidly over a short period," he said, according to Recruit’s English translation of the call, which was conducted in Japanese. "To protect our sustainable, mid to long-term growth, we will continue to monitor client satisfaction very closely."

Robust revenue growth off a shrinking base of postings is not sustainable, so the company is looking to a larger market for its future growth. Rather than the $34 billion job advertising market, CFO Junichi Arai told analysts the company is targeting employers' total hiring expenditures, which it estimates at $200-$300 billion, depending on what is included in the figure.

He’s talking about money that currently goes to recruiter salaries and agency fees.

"Rather than simply selling software tools, to put it very simply, we are eliminating downstream processes," Deko said. "Even when an employer doesn't want to interview 20 or 30 candidates they don't plan to hire anyway, they still end up having to manually review each resume, verify licenses, contact candidates, and so on. By targeting and delivering extremely high-quality candidates right from the start, we are effectively eliminating that downstream work."

Clients, he said, "might compare AI sourcing or AI screening against their internal in-house recruiters, or more often, it results in them reducing their reliance on external placement agencies."

The company sees a future where much of the work that has traditionally been done by recruiters is handled by Indeed. If this vision sounds familiar, it’s because it describes an agentic future where AI automates the nuts and bolts of recruiting that take so much time. It’s a vision shared by every major software company in the talent space.

Indeed brings something to the table that these companies — except for LinkedIn — can’t match. Sam Fitzroy, CEO of the candidate conversion platform Dalia and a former senior director at Indeed, put it this way: "Indeed has something the rest of the industry largely doesn't: a consumer brand that generates massive amounts of free job seeker traffic. Until someone builds a product that meaningfully competes with Indeed for job seeker attention, the dynamic isn't going to change."

When asked by an analyst how Indeed planned to get past resistance from HR departments, Deko said that Indeed has changed who it calls. "Previously, we rarely had opportunities to speak directly with CFOs or CEOs, but those instances have increased dramatically over the past six months or so," he said. Indeed has started sponsoring CEO-level gatherings and major events, including the World Cup, and hosting client dinners around them.

Indeed deliberately does not open with cost-cutting when pitching new business. Instead, it invites enterprises to trial premium products on the promise of reducing downstream work, and expands from there. "Many HR professionals themselves are simply glad that their manual workload is reduced, especially since many of those tasks were already outsourced to begin with," he said. "So we haven't experienced as much pushback as one might expect."

— David

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Sponsored Content

ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit - November 10-11

On November 10-11, join fellow talent acquisition leaders in San Diego for the ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit, a practitioner-led event built around the real work of recruiting today.

You’ll hear from TA leaders sharing what is working, what is not, and what they are still figuring out across AI, hiring strategy, candidate experience, and recruiting operations. And the sessions are only the beginning. Small-group speaker AMAs give attendees direct access to speakers and peers for deeper, practical conversations after each session.

Featured Story

6 Ways Recruiters Should Use Claude

Elena Volk is back with a detailed look at how she is using Claude day to day to run recruiting work, from market research and sourcing to client reporting, candidate summaries, database cleanup, and workflow automation. She shows how Projects, Deep Research, Claude Code, Skills, and custom agents can move AI from a one-off productivity tool to an operating layer for repetitive recruiting work. (ERE)

More Recruiting Insights

Does AI stop children from learning? 80% of undergraduates are using AI, but is it helping them learn? This study of pupils ages 12-18 found that students using AI performed better on their homework, but substantially worse on tests. Interestingly, the drop correlated with the time spent on the homework. Those who used AI as a copy/paste shortcut showed the worst test scores. (The Economist)

Report: The New Reality of Frontline Hiring in 2026. This report from Ben Eubanks and ICIMS says that 48% of employers are increasing their AI investment in frontline recruiting. While screening, scheduling, and sourcing lead current AI use, employers say their future priorities are shifting toward compliance, fraud detection, and other applications that strengthen trust in the hiring process. (ICIMS)

To cram more AI skills onto LinkedIn profiles, more job seekers are turning to ‘time travel,’ say researchers. Researchers analyzing LinkedIn profiles found that 19.7% of established U.S. users had retroactively edited jobs they had already left, with additions of AI-related language rising sharply after ChatGPT’s release. The pattern suggests candidates are reshaping their work histories around what they believe employers now value, a prime example of what Kyle Lagunas calls “lowercase fraud”. (CNBC)

You’re Not Going To Like What Comes After Marketing. As AI becomes the layer through which buyers discover and evaluate products, Steve Smith writes that visibility is shifting from website traffic to whether AI systems cite a company’s content and sources. Unfortunately the algorithms behind those citations can change at a moment’s notice. We have not learned our lesson from the search engine era and are about to get schooled again. (Work Tech)

Webinars

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)

Veteran Hiring Ask Me Anything (AMA)

September 1, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Most hiring organizations say they value veterans. Few understand the true meaning of the transition, or what’s on the other side of it: candidates trying to translate high-consequence experience into a résumé and an interview recruiters can recognize and quantify.

Sean and Bradley have each lived the transition and led hiring teams on the other side. Bring your questions and get answers from two people who’ve actually done both. (ERE)

How to Run a High-Volume Recruiting Event Ask Me Anything (AMA)

September 8, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

High-volume recruiting events can quickly become chaotic. Candidates wait. Hiring managers scramble. HR spends the days leading up to the event answering questions instead of getting ready to hire.

Choctaw Casino & Resort Durant built a different model. In this live Ask Me Anything (AMA), members of Choctaw’s recruiting team will open up their process and answer your questions about what it takes to run a high-volume hiring event that is faster, more coordinated, and easier to repeat. (ERE)

Sourcing Lab: Watch the Search Happen Live

September 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Expect real scenarios, real techniques, and real discussion around the moments that usually get edited out: dead-end searches, unexpected pivots, adjacent talent pools, niche communities, AI-assisted approaches, and the lateral thinking required to find people who don’t show up in a straightforward keyword search.

You’ll hear how these sourcers decide when to abandon one approach and try another, which tools and techniques they reach for when a search gets difficult, and why four experienced sourcers can attack the same challenge in completely different ways. (ERE)

What AI Is Actually Delivering in Recruiting: New Research from Kyle Lagunas

September 18, 2026 | 2:00 PM EDT | 1 Hour

Kyle Lagunas has spent the past three years studying how AI performs inside real talent acquisition teams. His research includes a survey of more than 350 senior HR and talent leaders, a head-to-head evaluation of 12 AI interviewing platforms, and an in-depth look at the rise of candidate fraud.

In this session, Kyle will share the findings that matter most to recruiting leaders. He will break down where AI is delivering measurable value, where tools are falling short, and what organizations should consider before making their next investment. (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.

We hope to see you there! (ERE Recruiting Innovation Summit)