Indeed recently took its contest to a new level by hosting a duel between University of Texas at Austin (UT) and University of Illinois.  Contestants battled it out for four hours online, keeping up with results using Indeed’s dynamic online scoreboard. In total, 58 contestants were involved from both schools.  Most are currently undergraduates enrolled in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

The exercises for the contest were developed in-house by Indeed software engineers, who include both recent UT graduates and previous contestants from the renowned global programming contest ACM-ICPC World.  Contestants were presented with a set of logic and mathematical problems and were challenged to write computer programs in Java, C++, Python, or PHP capable of solving each problem. The winners were the programmers who were able to solve the most problems in the least amount of time.

The overall winner for the night, in a nail-biting finish, was University of Illinois, but the highest-scoring contestants from each school went home with desirable prizes including Apple iPads, Amazon Kindle Fires and gift cards.  We’re also very excited to share the news that five of the contestants will be joining the Indeed team at the end of the 2012 school year.

Are you a software geek interested in working at Indeed?  We are hiring!

If you are a software developer who’s passionate about building innovative products that scale to tens of millions of pageviews a day, Indeed is looking for you.  Indeed offers smart developers a complex development ecosystem with short release cycles. Every week sees the new release of multiple products that meet the growing needs of millions of jobseekers worldwide. Apply today at https://indeed.jobs

The scope of research is impressive, consisting of 2011 calendar year hiring data from 700+ employers (including 10 of the Fortune 500 and 50 of the Fortune 1000):

• 222,308 job postings
• 9.3 million applicants
• 147,440 interviews
• 94,155 hires

Automated source tracking provides the most accurate metrics for determining recruitment marketing return on investment. Because this report is based on automated source tracking data pulled from the SilkRoad OpenHire Applicant Tracking System (ATS), it is the most accurate and comprehensive research available on the effectiveness of recruitment marketing.

Among the report’s most compelling findings:

• Employers say interviews and hires are the most important measures in determining the quality of a recruitment marketing source.

• Indeed provides employers with more interviews and hires than any other external recruitment source:

• Indeed provides employers with more interviews than any other site:

• Indeed provides employers with more hires than any other site:

• Indeed is the top external source of hire in 6 of 7 major job categories:

Administrative Services, Customer Service, Engineering, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Information Technology.

We encourage you to read SilkRoad’s report to get the latest data on recruitment source effectiveness and insights on measuring the results of your recruiting strategy.

Visit ads.indeed.com or contact us today to maximize the impact of your recruitment advertising.

Naturally, we are also thrilled to see that Indeed is the #1 source of external hires, with 72% more hires than the next biggest source. We reproduced SilkRoad’s chart here:

*SilkRoad blog post, March 2012

We have been dismayed that for years the only source-of-hire studies were based on inaccurate survey data. SilkRoad’s study is a breath of fresh air in an industry that often lacks analytical rigor.

We look forward to seeing what else SilkRoad finds in its data and hope it inspires other Applicant Tracking System providers to conduct similar studies.

The Dublin office is an integral part of our international growth strategy, bringing Indeed’s sales and client services teams closer to our growing client base in the region.

More than 60 million job seekers come to Indeed each month from around the world and the new office will allow us to continue offering the best job search experience possible to EMEA job seekers.

Indeed co-founder Rony Kahan met with Ireland’s Minister of Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation, Richard Bruton, in January to discuss the office opening and our plans to hire 50 new employees in Dublin this year.

The new jobs at our EMEA headquarters are in sales, client services, business development, finance and operations. For information about Indeed’s job openings in Dublin, go to http://indeed.jobs.

IDA Ireland, the country’s agency for industry development, has issued a full press release available here.

Today, Indeed Resume comes out of beta. Employers can contact job candidates for only $1 each. Searching for candidates and viewing resumes are free. There are no signup fees, no subscriptions, and no contracts required. You only pay $1 for the first message that you send to each candidate, making Indeed Resume the most cost-effective solution for contacting job seekers.

Search millions of resumes on Indeed today and get 50 contacts free, no credit card required.

“As the new year began, Americans turned their focus to career services and education. Traffic to Job Search sites grew 27 percent in January to 24.2 million visitors. Indeed.com Job Search ranked as the category leader” – comScore Media Metrix, February 17, 2012

Indeed’s own data show the types of positions job seekers searched for last month. Our January Industry Employment Trends show retail jobs received more job seeker clicks than any other industry, with 18 million job clicks.

Healthcare was the second most popular industry for job seekers, with 17 million clicks in January. Job seeker traffic to education jobs grew faster than any other industry, with a 26% increase in the number of clicks.

In January, traffic to Indeed.com was up 31% over December 2011, making us one of the fastest growing properties on the web, according to comScore.

All companies with jobs on Indeed have a Company Page. To claim and customize your Indeed Company Page, click on the “Business Owner?” link to get started. Claimed pages appear to job seekers as “Employer Verified.”

Take a look at these examples to see how you can make your Company Page your own:

• GEICO
• Qualcomm
• American Express
• Motorola
• Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

Indeed Company Pages receive millions of visits each month, so claim your Company Page today.

Employment is growing, particularly in the private sector, which has added jobs for 22 straight months and grew faster in 2011 than in 2010. There are plenty of reasons for job seekers to be optimistic, irrespective of the sector they work in.

Indeed’s own data indicate that, in December, there were 50% more jobs advertised than a year prior. Our Industry Employment Trends show that healthcare is not only the biggest employer but also the fastest growing, up 52% in the last 12 months. Rising demand for preventative care and an aging baby boomer population will continue to create opportunities for health services professionals. Education and transportation were the runners-up, with 48% and 39% growth, respectively, in the last year.

Our Top 10 Job Trends were dominated by information technology specializations, including mobile technologies. Another growth area is the energy sector, which saw a sharp rebound in the number of jobs.

Job creation can be limited by discrepancies between supply and demand – often it’s hard for employers to find candidates with the right skill-set. This is where Indeed can help. Indeed Resume, a free and open resume search engine, was launched in 2011. Over two million resumes are searchable by employers and we expect that figure to grow significantly in 2012.

Last year, Indeed drove billions of visits to job boards and corporate career pages. The majority of applicants and hires generated by this traffic were delivered to companies for free through our organic search results. In addition, more than 25,000 customers sponsored their jobs on Indeed, paying for additional traffic to their jobs, resulting in hundreds of thousands of hires. More than 50,000 job seekers told us how Indeed helped them get a job.

Indeed’s most recent job posting data suggests that job growth will continue in 2012, albeit at a modest pace. We expect traffic to our sites to continue to grow, as we make our job search results more comprehensive and more relevant in each of our 53 country sites.

We’d love to hear your feedback and wish you all the best for a successful year ahead.

However, interesting growth trends occur throughout the job market. A notable example is the increasing global demand for energy, which has resulted in a growing number of job postings containing keywords related to fossil fuels, renewable energy, and sustainability.

Fast growing fossil fuels job trends include: Oil, shale, crude, frac, and natural gas.

The top locations for the keyword search oil are:

Houston, TX
Oklahoma City, OK
Denver, CO
Dallas, TX
Tulsa, OK

Engineers, geologists, and drillers are among the positions in the oil industry with the most job postings available right now.

The increase in job postings with the keywords sustainability, solar, wind, and renewable shows that a growing number of career opportunities are being created in these areas of the energy industry.

Prominent examples of sustainability job opportunities include the development of energy efficient buildings, products, and communities.

Enter any keyword into Indeed’s Job Trends search box to see its trend.  Click Find Jobs to view current postings.

Have you identified job trends that you’d like us to share with job seekers?  Please let us know.

We started expanding internationally in 2005, and now have sites in 53 countries and 26 languages. In every market, we have gained the loyalty of job seekers by putting their interests first and providing the best possible job search experience. With more than 50 million unique visitors and one billion job searches per month, Indeed’s sites are now the most trafficked job sites worldwide according to Google Adplanner.

In 2005, we launched Sponsored Jobs, allowing advertisers to feature their jobs and only pay when job seekers click to find out more. Because jobs are included in our search results for free, we allowed advertisers to pay for performance rather than inclusion – the first time a job site had offered auction-based pay per click job advertising. With more than 9,000 companies sponsoring their jobs, Indeed is the leading pay-for-performance recruitment advertising network and the most cost-effective source of candidates for thousands of companies.

Beyond our own sites, tens of thousands of partner websites have integrated Indeed job search, reaching more than 40 million additional unique job seekers and passive candidates, and generating hundreds of millions more job searches every month. Job search is also an increasingly mobile activity, and Indeed’s iPhone and Android Job Search apps are the most widely used by job seekers globally.

Our revenue comes from advertisers, but our success depends on providing the best possible experience for job seekers. Our efforts to improve job search are ongoing. Some of these are visible, like our addition in 2008 of search by salary – a unique feature allowing job seekers to find all jobs that pay a given salary based on our estimates. Others are invisible, such as the algorithmic improvements that we roll out continually to give job seekers even more relevant search results.

With data over time from half a billion job postings, our Job Trends yield unique insights into the job market, including the fastest growing skills and the cities with the most job postings per capita. As Indeed’s traffic grew, we added job search and click data to reports like Industry Employment Trends. We also combined government unemployment figures with our data in Indeed’s Job Market Competition index.

This year we launched our most significant new product to date: Indeed Resume. This open resume service allows job seekers to upload their resumes and make them freely searchable by employers. With over two million resumes already, Indeed Resume has gained considerable traction with both job seekers and employers. Ultimately, it represents Indeed’s transformation from job search service to a global marketplace for jobs and recruitment.

Through all this growth, we never lose sight of the fact that our users are people, that our services touch some of the most important aspects of their lives – their jobs and their livelihoods. Many of the stories behind the jobs people find through Indeed go untold, but we are gratified to have received more than 50,000 personal stories to date.

It has been a successful seven years for us. Our organization has grown to over three hundred employees and five office locations: Austin, TX, Mountain View, CA, New York, NY, Stamford, CT, and London, England. If you are interested in joining our team, take a look at our open positions.

Most importantly, we’d like to thank everyone who has helped us succeed, including job seekers, advertisers and publisher partners. As always, let us know if you have any feedback so we can continue to improve our services.

Paul & Rony