Early in April 2018 Indeed emailed me (as they had others) to confirm that they would no longer be offering traffic. I knew this had been coming.
It was time to pivot to a new marketing model. Or, rather, if we had not already pivoted to a new marketing model, I wouldn't be here writing this.
Luckily, we'd felt exposed by a strategy that relied on paying other jobs businesses for traffic for some time. And, frankly, there was nothing unique about what we were offering - everyone bought and sold traffic. Doing something different had made sense to us for a few years and we were underway with it.
Indeed's strategy to become a jobs board was ruthless, but luckily we'd anticipated it. And, of course, it had become common knowledge that, sooner or later, they would cut ties with every jobs board.
By April 2018 we had already reduced our Indeed spend dramatically and also our Adwords spend and spend on other aggregators too: since the early noughties we had started investing in content instead. As we reduced spend in one, we increased spend in the other.
By the time we cut our relationship with all aggregators we had quadrupled traffic from organic search. We were free!
We have also built a new revenue model out of our experience. We now enjoy helping employers in health and social care raise awareness among passive candidates.
Nurses.co.uk offers a far better user experience now too. And, just as important, our small team enjoy what we do each day far more than we did when we were simply buying and selling traffic.
We love meeting new recruiting teams in health and social care, listening to their needs. It's a challenge for many as we are in a sector with severe skills shortages. But we have knowledge of the sector, as well as content marketing, and we bring that experience to every relationship.
We don't offer programmatic as that can be done by others. And we don't sell traffic to other job boards - again, employers can get that elsewhere. But we do offer a unique approach to candidate awareness and application generation and would love to chat to TA professionals in our sector about it if they're interested in finding out more.