So, hey guys, my name is Chris Colon, I'm a software engineer for Indeed.com. For those of you that aren't familiar with Indeed, we're a job search site, we're the number one job search site worldwide.

I've been with Indeed for four years, before that I actually just went to school at the University of Illinois. Any Illini here? Yes, cool, awesome, me and you, and you go over there. So yeah, I've been working for Indeed the last four years, and in the last year and a half, I've been working on Indeed's newest product called Indeed Prime.

And so, I'm going to talk a little bit about that later, but right now I just want to talk about something that we kind of, a lot of us in this room probably experience, which is recruiters and recruiting messages and stuff like that. So, just a show of hands, who here has gotten a message from a recruiter

like daily, weekly, yeah, yeah, cool, I see we've got some engineers in the room, awesome. Okay, so, show of hands, who here has gotten an awful recruiting message from, yeah, okay, cool, I see we've got some engineers in the room. Yeah, so, and this is, I was actually talking with some of my colleagues about some of the messages that they get, and

one of my colleagues said that she would have a recruiter contact her once or twice a week, but always after 10 p.m. And I asked her, you know, what was happening, was he in Tokyo or something, was there a time difference, what was going on there? And she said, no, actually, he would leave her voicemail messages because he was drunk and would leave her these drunk recruiting messages.

That's not the type of recruiter I want to talk to, I'm not really going to be interested in working for that company. I had another coworker who, depicted here, who would get contacted by one recruiter, he got a couple messages, the first message was something like, hey, Juan, we saw your resume, we think you'd be a great fit for the company, let us know, reach back to us.

And my colleague didn't respond back to that first message. Recruiter sent another message a couple days later, hey, Juan, we really looked at your resume, think you'd be a great fit for the company, just talk to us, five, 10 minutes. Still didn't respond. Third message from the recruiter, hey, Juan, don't mean to bother you, if we could just get five or 10 minutes of your time, that'd be great, thanks.

And so, those messages don't sound that bad, if it was an interesting company, probably maybe Juan would respond. The only problem was Juan wasn't Juan, Juan is actually Amanda, and so they got the name wrong, and they got the gender wrong. Not really a recruiter you want to kind of message back, right, they're probably just cold calling a bunch of people. Also, if you looked at the resume that much, how did you get the name, I don't know.

And so, the other thing that happens with recruiting messages is, let's say you get a good recruiting message, you might have low quality companies reaching out to you, right? Tender Mifflin, yeah. And so, what makes a company low quality could be several things. They could not be able to afford you, right? So, I had companies contact me, give me offers that were half the salary I was currently making.

I don't care if you're a great company, I don't really want to take that pay cut. And then you also have companies that are just kind of cold calling, right? So, you're just one of the hundred engineers they try to reach out to, so they're not even looking to see if you're a match. I've heard of, I have a friend who's a game designer, and he gets contacted by like finance and bank companies, and it has nothing to do with his experience.

Once again, because they're just cold calling, right? They don't care who you are, you're just an engineer. The next thing that happens is you get unresponsive companies, and this can happen at different parts of the recruiting process, right? So, what happens to me is I'll get a message from a recruiter, and it's actually a good one, and I'll respond back, and I'll say, hey, I'm interested, give me some more information.

And I think that's when they go and play like ping pong at their tech office or something, because they never respond back to me. And so I just get that unresponsiveness, which is a huge turn off, right? You can also get unresponsiveness later on in the process, so a colleague of mine right before he started for Indeed got through the whole process.

He interviewed, phone screened, everything like that, and was told that he was going to get an offer. A couple days go by, he doesn't hear anything, tries to send him a message, they don't get back to him. A couple weeks go by, he starts looking for another job, right? He starts interviewing with Indeed. And a month goes by, he's working for Indeed, and he gets contacted again by this company,

and they finally say, oh, sorry, by the way, we didn't have the budget to hire you. At which point, he's just, he's like, that's fine, I work for another company right now anyways. And so, there's this problem, right, with recruiting messages right now, and it causes a lot of us engineers to have to sift through all this noise. Bad recruiting messages, low quality companies, unresponsive companies, and it makes it really hard when you're actually trying to find a job.

I was actually interviewing a really awesome candidate for Indeed. He had a great resume, and I noticed he wasn't working anywhere the current time. So I asked him, what are you doing right now? And he said, this is what he's doing. He's looking for a job. Looking for a job is his full-time job, right?

He has so many phone screens and interviews and emails to respond to that it's just too much. And so, there must be a better way, right? So I work for Indeed, and Indeed helps people get jobs. So a couple of us got to thinking, you know, a lot of us in this room, a lot of the engineers in this room especially, we don't really have to apply to jobs.

Like, we don't have to go find jobs. We just have to start paying attention to the recruiting messages and figure out, like, who's good that's talking to us. So let's make this thing, and we'll call it Indeed Prime, and let's have it help top talent get jobs. And it's slightly different. So at the most basic level, Indeed Prime connects top talent with top employers.

So, but when we were building that, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted from a tool or a product like this, I had to keep in mind a couple things. So the first thing is I wanted an easy apply flow. I hate writing resumes. I hate writing profiles. I don't know if any of you guys like it, but I definitely do not. So I wanted something where I could just give some basic information and someone somewhere would do work for me.

I also wanted a portal with quality employers. I wanted a place where I didn't have to worry about low-quality companies reaching out to me or unresponsive companies reaching out to me. I also wanted transparency in messages. So I'd get contacts or recruiting messages that are really cryptic.

Like, they're like, we want a junior developer who doesn't have the company name or doesn't have any other information or even where they're at. They just kind of want to get, like, a foot in the door and have you respond back. So I wanted transparency in messages. I wanted to know who you are and kind of what your offer is. And then I also wanted an easy way to reply to messages. So when I am interested, and I do get, like, an email or something, I want an easy way to say I'm interested or I'm not interested.

So these are the things I kind of had to keep in mind. Oh, by the way, I didn't really say this, but I'm actually one of the two founding engineers for Indeed Prime. So I was the one trying to, like, keep all this in mind when I was building this product. So how do we deal with this easy apply flow? Well, what I did was I built super simple, like, just give me your basic, your name, your email information, and why don't we just

create and have this team of people whose job is to basically create your profile and work with you and do all of that for you? If anything, use Indeed Prime to get, like, an awesome, like, tech-written thing of your profile and then copy and paste that wherever you want.

But so we have this awesome team that is going to work, that works with engineers and stuff to make sure they're getting pushed along the process as well, right? So they're there helping you build your profile, evaluate offers, making sure you're not getting stuck anywhere in the process with any company. There's this awesome quote from a user of Prime that I love.

So he says, I really love the coaching and monitoring from the Prime liaison. Just knowing someone's in your corner helps a lot. And I think that's something that the, that awesome candidate I interviewed for Indeed would have benefited a lot from. Something that I want, if I'm considering, like, looking for a new job, just someone to help me manage all of this. Someone to help me sift through a lot of that noise.

So quality employers, how do you get quality employers? It's actually really simple. Just vet and screen all the employers, right? Be exclusive. And so that's what we do. We don't just let any employer see your profile. We vet and screen them. And then we also have a team that works with employers specifically to kind of make sure you're not getting stuck in the process.

So let's say you get contacted by a company, you're interested. We go ahead and we work with the employer saying, hey, look, Rebecca's really interested. She has a couple other offers on the table. You should really push her along, get that phone screen in, get that interview in. And that helps a lot with the unresponsiveness that we kind of get in normal recruiting.

So then transparency and messages, that's also pretty simple, right? So if an employer is going to reach out to you, let's make sure they give their company, which is automatic. And let's make sure they provide a salary, some information they can provide, relocation and equity. Relocation and equity are optional because not every company offers that.

But that's great. So now I get messages knowing exactly who I'm talking to, what the company is, and kind of what their base offer is, right? They're using this. They know I'm a prime candidate. They know I'm a great engineer. So they should be able to make me at least a base offer. The next thing is that easy reply that I want to basically express interest or disinterest when I get messages from recruiters or employers.

And so that also turns out to be really simple. When the emails that you get through Prime, we just add two buttons that say interested or not interested. Simple as that. I can easily respond and say, hey, look, I'm actually interested. And so all of this together leads up to this 90% response rate.

So 90% of the time, our candidates are responding to employers, which is awesome. I get so many recruiting messages daily, weekly. I respond to like 2% of them, if at all. So 90% is amazing. And there's this quote that I really want to credit to, which is at the

end of the day, a single Indeed Prime interview request is worth a dozen traditional applications. And I get excited every time I see one in my inbox, which is exactly the product I wanted to build. I didn't want to have to sift through all this noise. I didn't want to have to deal with all this, you know, I have to evaluate if this is a good recruiter or a good company.

This is the product working, right? Yeah. So I'm really happy with what I built. You guys should totally try it out. We are going to have a booth tomorrow and Friday. Check us out. We're going to have an HTC virtual reality setup, which is super, super cool. I'll be there. I can tell you a little bit more about the Indeed Prime tech stack.

We're also going to have another session on Friday, kind of diving in a little bit more of what Indeed Prime is, how it works, and also some resume tips as well. And yeah, there's a bunch of us in these like blue and orange shirts. So feel free to reach out to us if you all want to sign up or just talk to us for more information. So yeah, thanks. Have a great Rails conference, and may the fourth be with you.