How to Use Indeed Resume Search to Find the Best Candidates Fast

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Indeed is the world’s largest job search engine with hundreds of thousands of jobs from over 60,000 employers. It has been a trusted source for career seekers since 2000 and they are now using their resume database to make hiring decisions more efficiently.
The ability to search resumes by name will be an invaluable tool in finding top candidates quickly without having to sort through endless piles of paper.

Indeed Resume Search is a free tool that allows users to search resumes on Indeed.com and send them an email with the job posting. This is helpful when looking for candidates who are interested in your job opening. Read more in detail here: indeed resume search free.

Indeed resume search is an Indeed.com product that allows businesses and recruiters to search over 150 million resumes for free. It’s a fantastic approach to find passive applicants. While the resume search is free, a membership that allows you to contact up to 30 prospects directly via Indeed costs $100 each month.

We’ll teach you how to search for resumes on Indeed, as well as how to sort and filter resumes, so you can locate the finest applicants quickly. We’ll also provide you an email template for reaching out to prospective applicants after you’ve identified them.

How to Find Free Resumes on Indeed in 6 Easy Steps

It’s quite easy to get started recruiting on Indeed. We just filled a digital marketing job at Fit Small Business utilizing Indeed, so we’ll show you how we did our own resume search using the techniques below.

Step 1: Sign up for a free Indeed Employer Account.

While anybody may look for resumes on Indeed, you’ll need an account to view applicant names and contact the ones you’re interested in.

It’s free to set up an employer account, and you’ll get a $50 credit for advertising a position when you do.

Indeed, have a look.

It’s a good idea to set up a separate business email address for recruiting so that applicant emails don’t clog up your primary account. Consider ‘jobs@companyname.com’ as an example.

Step 2: Use Indeed’s Simple Free Resume Search to get started.

Click “Find Resumes” in the top left corner of the Indeed homepage navigation bar.

After that, type in a keyword and a place. It’s that simple.

As we’ll illustrate further down in this post, you may also search by job kind, education level, and area. However, we first looked for our available job at Fit Small Business in New York City using the phrases “digital marketing.”

Resume Search on Indeed (searching by keyword and location)

We discovered over 12,000 suitable prospects right away. This included any resumes containing the words “digital” or “marketing” in the title or body text, as well as just those who lived within a 25-mile radius of our office. Obviously, there are far too many to sift through. Instead, we used Indeed’s advanced search to narrow it down, which we’ll go through in the following step.

Step 3: Use Indeed’s Advanced Resume Search to obtain more targeted results.

The best strategy to target certain job seeker resumes on Indeed is to use advanced search. It lets you search through millions of current online resumes for certain terms, phrases, job titles, firms, years of work experience, school name, degree, subject of study, and location.

Maybe you’re not receiving enough responses to your job ad, or you’d want greater control over who you hire. Indeed enables you to find people that fit your job description on your own, which is far less expensive than contacting them via social network platforms like LinkedIn InMail or Recruiter.

Screenshot of the advanced search option on Indeed

In this example, we used advanced search to look for the specific word “digital marketing.” This eliminates individuals with marketing expertise but not especially in digital marketing.

Indeed, utilizing search parameters, you may do a more sophisticated resume search.

After that, we added a few additional job-related skills. We were looking for someone who has expertise with SEO (search engine optimization), public relations, and WordPress. While none of these abilities are essential in and of themselves, we needed our applicant to possess at least one of them. We’ll input the terms under “at least one of these words” to include them in our search.

Even if we categorized them by date, 8,000+ resumes is still too much to examine in an afternoon.

Using advanced search parameters, Indeed resume search results

Step 4: Narrow Results Using Indeed’s Robust Filtering Options

We utilized Indeed’s filtering features to reduce our findings to a tolerable amount. Following a search, the filter choices are shown in the left-hand column.

Distance and latest updated date are the first two filtering options:

Filters and sorting criteria are true.

Distance – How far out from your city (between 5 and 100 miles) do you want to look for applicants? The last thing you want is to become enthused about a recruit only to discover that he or she will have an impossible commute to your office (this filter may be irrelevant if you hire remote staff however).
Recent Updated — Displays resumes that have been updated in the last day, week, or month, as well as all resumes, regardless of age.

The remaining search criteria are all about filtering for job-specific data:

Job Type – Select whether you want to see resumes for full-time, part-time, contract, internship, or commission-based positions.
Indeed will provide a list of job titles that came up during your search, such as “Marketing Director” and “SEO Specialist.” (There’s also a job trends search feature on the site.) If you’re searching for individuals who have held certain jobs, this might be useful since it enables you to locate applicants even if the job title they use isn’t the same as the one you’re looking for.
Years of Work Experience – Sort applicants by the number of years they’ve worked. But proceed with caution. Indeed combines professional experience – one year of digital marketing and five years of shoe sales, for example, equals six years.
Indeed enables you to select individuals depending on their educational level, which ranges from a high school certificate to a PhD.
Companies – Indeed will also include previous employers where applicants have worked. You might look for applicants who have worked in comparable firms or sectors to the ones you’re looking for. Another option to identify certain firms is to use “advanced search.”

Filtering Criteria for Our Resume Search

We made the following changes to limit down digital marketing resumes for Fit Small Business:

The distance was set at 5 miles. Because New York City is so large, our prospects will most likely need to live in one of the five boroughs to be commutable.
We set “last updated” to within the previous month to ensure that we only received job searchers who were still looking.
We only sought for those who wanted full-time job.
We need at least three years of experience.
Only individuals with a bachelor’s degree were considered.

Indeed, the results of the search display the filtering parameters that were applied.

Because we only wanted to view the most relevant resumes first, we set the “Sort by” option to relevance, which is the default. You may arrange applicants in one of two ways at the top of the left hand column:

by relevancy (to your keywords); or by a combination of the two.
by the last time your CV was updated

While Indeed has the majority of up-to-date resumes, they may be months or even years old. A applicant that has recently posted their CV is considerably more likely to respond. Also, observe how the most recently updated resumes are highlighted in orange lettering.

After filtering, we had 68 resumes to go at, which we ordered by most relevant first. Perfect!

Step 5: Go to Indeed and look at resumes.

Indeed makes it simple to skim through resumes quickly. When you hover your mouse over each candidate’s name, a glimpse of their work history will appear.

When you hover over a job seeker’s name, a resume from Indeed appears.

Indeed will highlight your keywords on their CV, allowing you to quickly discover your best candidates.

When you click the “View Complete Resume” link, you will be taken to the full resume, which you may save, forward, or download for free. You’ll note, though, that no contact information is supplied.

On Indeed, you may find examples of resume information.

Only thing you won’t be able to do for free is contact the applicant through Indeed. So, let’s go on to the next phase!

Step 6: Reach out to candidates through Indeed email.

Now that you’ve chosen the ideal applicant, the next step is the most difficult. How can you get in touch with them?

If you want to reach out to prospects you’ve seen on Indeed or get their contact information, Indeed provides resume search subscriptions that start at $100 per month. To contact them, go to the right-hand side of the screen and press the button. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll be asked to complete your registration and enter payment information depending on the subscription you pick. For example, a regular membership costs $100 per month and enables you to contact up to 30 job searchers, while a premium subscription costs $250 per month and allows you to contact up to 100 job seekers.

A cold sales email is similar to a recruitment message. The individual is deemed a passive applicant since they haven’t applied to your organization. You want to capture their attention right away and provide them an easy method to follow up. As a result, customise your email. It’s simple for applicants to mistake it for spam or a fake mass email, much like a sales email. Instead, highlight certain sections of their résumé that piqued your interest, and explain the position in a manner that would likely pique their interest. Take a look at the sample below.

Email Message to a Passive Candidate Example

You may copy or save this example email recruitment message template:

Good day, [first name],

I’m a hiring manager, and I saw your CV on Indeed today. My attention was piqued by your past job experience. I saw that you [insert specific skill or expertise that may be relevant to your job posting] in particular.

I was hoping to get your phone number or email address so that I may contact you about the [explain employment opportunity here] that we have available at our firm.

We’re [one-sentence business description]. We provide [describe unique advantages, such as flexible hours or unlimited vacation time] to our workers.

I look forward to hearing from you soon!

[put your signature and contact information, including phone, email, and website]

Download the template in MS Word or Google Docs.

In general, refrain from discussing remuneration in the first email. You’re better off negotiating compensation later, once you’ve learned more about their credentials and can see whether they’re a suitable fit for your available position.

Check out our other useful articles for particular suggestions on utilizing Indeed to locate different job applicants, such as IT or marketing candidates, or to put up your own Indeed recruiting page:

Maintain a presence on social media sites such as LinkedIn.

If you don’t want to pay to contact the applicant via Indeed, or if you don’t hear back from the candidate after a few days, try looking for the candidate by name on LinkedIn. Despite the fact that Indeed communications are sent to their own email account, applicants may overlook them or misinterpret them as spam.

Hubspot illustrates how to utilize InMail to send a LinkedIn message to someone you’re not linked to, which is just one of many possible recruitment methods.

Not all applicants will react, but it’s important contacting them this way so they know your initial message wasn’t spam and you have a better chance of obtaining a response.

How to Use Indeed to Find a Specific Person

The “advanced search” tool on Indeed is the most convenient approach to find a particular person’s resume. Fill in details about the person, such as their name and location. Indeed will search all resumes’ text for those that fit this precise criterion.

If someone recommended that you chat to a candidate, and you want to discover more about them by searching for their exact resume online, you may want to utilize this sort of search.

An example of how to use Indeed to find a certain individual.

After you’ve gotten a small list of results, go through the resumes to discover which one belongs to the individual you’re searching for.

The Hiring Process Continues

So you’ve narrowed down your top choices and reached out to them. So, what’s next?

When a candidate answers, the first thing you should do is schedule a 10-minute phone conversation, Google Hangout, or Skype interview with them. You should be able to see whether the prospect is a good fit quite soon. When compared to scheduling each applicant for a complete interview, this phone/video conference screening will save you time. After that, choose just the top 3-5 prospects and invite them to a face-to-face interview.

Check out these Fit Small Business articles for more information on holding a job interview, including what questions to ask and what to avoid, as well as how to do a phone interview:

Read our post on how to perform application screening to learn about the several strategies you can use to screen prospects.

Conclusion on Indeed’s Resume Search

Indeed resume search is a useful tool for locating unique talent that meets your precise requirements, from region to education. It’s simple to identify suitable applicants that are seeking for a new job with over 2 million resumes submitted each month. That’s usually a lot simpler than waiting for candidates to apply for available jobs or attempting to persuade an excellent prospect to quit their present employment!

Accept the free $50 credit to boost your job posting on Indeed if you’re ready to hire. Because submitting a job on Indeed is free, you may store the credit to use at your leisure later.