Job seekers have been telling us for a long time they only want to see jobs that pay enough and that salary is a key criterion in their job searches. But its been a tough problem to solve as the vast majority of the millions of job listings we aggregate do not include salary information. Our solution is to estimate the salaries of these jobs, so all jobs can be searched by salary. This is the first service of its kind - allowing job seekers to search jobs comprehensively and limit their results to jobs paying a sufficient salary.

How do we estimate salaries? We use a proprietary methodology based on an analysis of similar job listings that include salaries. We start by extracting salaries from all job listings containing this information - about a fifth of the total - and then estimate salaries for the rest.

We expect this will considerably help job seekers find the right jobs and employers receive better targeted applicants.

This feature is in beta, so your feedback is appreciated and will help us improve it. Bear in mind that our estimates are just that - estimates - and are not endorsed by companies.

Here is our press release.

If you think your job is at all at risk, you should be looking for alternatives. As the job market tightens, it becomes more important than ever to have the right approach when you are job hunting.

Here are ten tips for a successful online job search. Use them to search for jobs more effectively and increase your odds of getting hired.

1. Choose Job Sites Carefully
Jobs are listed on thousands of different websites, so be selective about which ones you use. As a comprehensive search engine for jobs, Indeed.com will help you find specialized job boards or employer career sites that fit your interests. It will also save you time and steer you to jobs you won’t otherwise find.

2. Refine Your Job Search
Search using keywords and add more terms to narrow your search. Don’t forget to specify your location; your zip code normally works fine. Most job sites also have an Advanced Search so you can narrow your results using, for example, a particular company name, job title, or commuting distance.

3. Set up Email Job Alerts
Save your searches to receive daily or weekly email alerts including new jobs matching your criteria. You can also save your searches as an RSS job feed using any reader. This will help you apply for jobs as soon as they are posted, making it more likely employers will notice you.

4. Keep it Focused!
Only apply to jobs you are qualified for. Companies notice candidates with the skills and experience they’re looking for. If you don’t have these, your resume will be ignored.

5. Watch Out for Scam Job Listings
Be careful if you see job listings promising quick and easy income, or requiring a fee or your social security number in order to apply - they’re likely to be scams.

6. Write a Customized Cover Letter
A well-written cover letter that is customized to the company or individual recipient shows you are serious. Try to show how your qualifications and experience relate to the company’s needs.

7. Post Your Resume
Posting your resume to job boards helps companies find you online. Bear in mind that anyone may be able to see it, including your current employer. Most job sites give you the option of posting anonymously, although companies may then be less likely to contact you.

8. Clean Up Your Act
Check your resume and cover letters for typos and grammatical errors. Use consistent font sizes and formatting in your resume. Potential employers may look at any online profile of yours, so keep them up-to-date and free of content that would embarrass you.

9. Do Your Research
Spend time on the company’s website and learn as much as you can about the firm’s products and services. Read up on company news and trends in the industry – use sites like Wikipedia and ZoomInfo and look at Job Trends. Find out who is interviewing and Google their names to learn about them. If you know anyone who works at a company you are applying to, try to speak with them first for advice.

10. Know Your Salary
Once companies are ready to make you an offer, they’re likely to discuss your salary needs. If you’re armed with objective salary information, you’ll be in a better position to negotiate. Try Indeed’s Salary Search.

So, before you start sending your resume or networking to get into these companies, take a look at the hiring they’re actually doing today and where it’s trending. Here are the jobs on Indeed.com at Fortune’s top 10 companies, plus the trend in job openings at these companies over the last couple of years:

1. Google jobs (job trend)
2. Quicken Loans jobs (job trend)
3. Wegmans Food Markets jobs (job trend)
4. Edward Jones jobs (job trend)
5. Genentech jobs (job trend)
6. Cisco Systems jobs (job trend)
7. Starbucks jobs (job trend)
8. Qualcomm jobs (job trend)
9. Goldman Sachs jobs (job trend)
10. Methodist Hospital System jobs (job trend)

Some of these companies are, of course, a lot bigger than others (Goldman Sachs has 25,000 employees compared with 5,000 at Quicken Loans, for example). But as a prospective employee, you’re going to have a much better chance applying to work for a company with lots of open positions and an accelerating hiring trend compared with one that has few positions or a declining trend.

God bless America! Thank you Indeed!! You came through in just 3 weeks time when I didn’t find anything with Yahoo or Monster in many weeks!! This is the BEST place to be! Ever since I came into this place I was busy nonstop and my phone and computer was always buzzing with calls from recruiters and employers. I got a job ‘direct hire’ by an employer! Thank you again for this wonderful Christmas! It is the best Christmas gift I can give to my 5 year old daughter. I wished I would have started sooner with Indeed. I am like ‘WOW.’

And another holiday gift for a user who found his new job via Indeed:

When earlier this month a friend of mine asked the question, “What do you want for Christmas?” on a discussion board I frequent, I was the first to answer; I said simply, “A job.” I was surprised to see how many other people on the board chimed in that they too wanted a job for Christmas… I finally started seriously looking for a job in mid-November. At John’s suggestion I began using indeed.com and found a number of jobs for which I was really a good match. One of them was with Corinthian Colleges. I got the call a few weeks ago for an interview and was called back a few days later for a second interview… I start December 31st…

What a great way to end the year!

If your applicant tracking system isn’t providing this information to you, you should ask for it! Sometimes the data is there - somewhere - but not surfaced unless you request it. You also need to check the quality of this data. If it derives from candidate self-selection using drop-down menus - of the “which website did you find this job on?” variety - it will be inaccurate to the point of being useless. At least one survey has shown that candidates simply do not pick the right source when faced with these menus - they tend to pick the top one, or the brand with which they are most familiar, rather than the site where they really found the job. To be meaningful, tracking the source of candidates has to be done automatically. Luckily, the technology to do this is simple.

At Indeed, we encourage all companies to add a tracking token to their jobs so they can see which applicants come from our site - both from our unpaid (organic) results and our sponsored results. Please contact us to get this set up at no cost, then talk to your applicant tracking system provider to make sure you can access this information. You should also do this for all the other websites you advertise your jobs on. There’s no better way to figure out the ROI of your recruitment advertising campaigns.

Indeed.co.uk is the most comprehensive search engine for UK jobs, with hundreds of thousands of jobs from hundreds of UK websites, and includes most of the tools and functionality of our US site.

You can search jobs anywhere in the UK using our familiar ‘what’ and ‘where’ search boxes. Location options include town, city, county, postal code and country (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).

Indeed.co.uk joins Canada.indeed.com as our third country site.

Give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback.

So, we try to do whatever we can to help you include your jobs on Indeed and we’ve identified the following best practices that can mean the difference between success and failure:

- Give each job its own web page. This is essential because each of our job search results links to a specific job web page. Web pages with multiple jobs or a list of jobs won’t work. Each job must have its own unique URL and we don’t include jobs posted to your site as PDF or Word files – HTML only.

- Include essential job information. Your jobs are more likely to appear in our search results if each job listing on your site contains separate fields for job title and location as well as a detailed job description. Your job listings must also include a prominent apply online link or email address.

- Track candidate source. If you ask job seekers where they found out about your jobs, make sure Indeed is included as an option. Bear in mind this unlikely to be an effective way of tracking the source of your candidates – it’s much more accurate to track it automatically. You should talk to your ATS or job board software provider to set up automated tracking so you can tell where your candidates are coming from and measure the performance of your recruitment advertising channels.

- Provide an XML job feed. This is the fastest way to include your jobs on Indeed. It should include the details of all the jobs on your site and be updated each time new jobs are added. Here’s a sample XML job feed that you can use.

Take a look at our Indeed is Hiring page for one possible way to prepare your own jobs for inclusion on Indeed and let us know if you have any questions.

Pay-per-action typically means pay-per-applicant in the recruiting arena, and this is true for our current PPA beta testers, who are tracking applications they receive from their sponsored jobs on Indeed.com and are paying only for those applicants. PPA advertisers’ sponsored jobs appear above and below Indeed’s organic results just like our pay-per-click (PPC) sponsored jobs. Our organic results remain entirely unpaid and ranked strictly by relevance.

Advertisers sponsoring their jobs on Indeed on a PPA basis can specify any kind of online action that is important to them. Receiving a candidate application is normally the simplest kind of action, but some advertisers may choose other kinds of action - paying only when candidates complete an online questionnaire or create an account, for example.

Initial indications from our beta testers are that cost-per-applicant pricing is an attractive alternative to cost-per-click. Please contact us if you are interesting in participating.

We’re also working with these providers to help their clients track when job seekers find their jobs on Indeed, and to enable those users to sponsor their jobs on Indeed to drive additional candidate traffic on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.

Our latest press release details Indeed’s recent integration with four industry-leading services: Hodes iQ, HRsmart, Job VIPeR and SmartPost. Some benefits to their clients from these integrations are:

• Streamlines the process for recruiters to include their jobs on Indeed.

• Provides critical applicant tracking metrics so recruiters can measure conversion rates and cost-per-hire from Indeed.

• Makes it easy for recruiters to buy PPC recruitment advertising on Indeed by sponsoring their jobs.

Many thanks to our new partners who have chosen to include Indeed as an option for their clients. By making Indeed’s job search even more comprehensive, it is also helping job seekers.

This is a comment from ITConversations from last July, discussing a GeoRSS presentation by Mikel Maron at last year’s Where 2.0 conference. Today we’re adding GeoRSS location data to our RSS and OpenSearch job search feeds. GeoRSS is a simple and powerful way to include location data in any RSS feed. All it took on our part was adding an element to our job search feed results like this one:

    <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>

What prompted us to do this was a recent addition to the Google Maps API, which allows anyone to add a GeoRSS-based overlay to a Google Map, such as the one below, with two lines of javascript code:


var gx = new GGeoXml("http://www.indeed.com/opensearch?q=%22web+2.0%22");
map.addOverlay(gx);


Another neat trick is that you can paste the URL of any RSS feed containing GeoRSS locations straight into Google Maps, and it will plot the locations on the map — no programming required! Here’s an example:

"Web 2.0" jobs in Google Maps

If you’re interested in developing a location-based mashup, some good places to start are the Google Maps API and the Google Maps Mania blog.