At Indeed, our mission has always been simple: to help people get jobs. While the way we do this has evolved over the years, it has always started with connecting job seekers and employers through matching. And matching at Indeed isn’t just about delivering a single recommendation, it’s about supporting people through the entire hiring journey.

For job seekers, that means helping them explore new career paths by connecting their skills, experience, and interests to opportunities they may never have considered. And surfacing roles that offer better pay, more flexibility, or a stronger sense of purpose. For employers, it means helping them find and engage candidates who meet their hiring needs, whether that’s for a single role or across an entire team.

Indeed’s AI-powered platform makes these connections at scale. For over two decades, our AI matching engine has quietly powered billions of connections between job seekers and employers — helping 27 people get hired every minute.^{Indeed data, 2024 average}

Our matching engine is built on a foundation no one else has: the world’s largest two-sided hiring marketplace across Indeed and Glassdoor, with over 3.3 million employers and 635 million Job Seeker Profiles.^{Indeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts that have a unique, verified email address} That scale gives our AI an unmatched advantage, providing a clear view of what job seekers want, what employers need, and what truly leads to successful hires.

But how does it all work? Let’s break down the basics of AI matching and how it helps job seekers find the right opportunity and employers find the right talent, faster. 

How AI matching works

While the technology is complex, the concept is simple: connect people to jobs based on fit, not just keywords. Every search, job posting, application, and hire fuels our system, helping us deliver faster, more personalized connections.

This process happens in three main stages:

1. Understanding the people, the jobs, and the work

Good matching starts with a deep, comprehensive understanding of both sides of the hiring equation.  

For job seekers, we look at skills, experience, preferences, and real-time behavior such as what they search for and the jobs they apply to. Job seekers share this information through their Indeed Profiles and tools like Career Scout, which serves as a personalized AI career coach. Last year alone, job seekers shared more than 4 billion unique data points across qualifications and preferences.^{Indeed data (worldwide). Qualifications can include skills, certifications, licenses, degrees, fields of study, and other facts that describe the job seeker’s capabilities and experiences. Preferences are sentiment data about job details, like job title, company, pay, location, remote type, job type (employment type), work schedule, and industry.}

For employers, we analyze job requirements, hiring goals, required skills, qualifications, location, and even implied attributes like “team leadership” or “remote work.” We gather this from the job postings employers share on Indeed and from tools like Talent Scout, where they can express what they’re looking for in their own words. Together, these inputs help us understand the role and the employer’s expectations, allowing our matching engine to identify candidates who are more likely to succeed.

Beyond this, our platform has an industry-leading understanding of the work itself. Across 900 occupations representing thousands of job titles, we analyze more than 10,000 attributes—such as skills, licenses, work settings, schedules, benefits, and pay. For instance, if someone is looking for a registered nurse position in Seattle, our AI understands differences between pediatric vs. acute care roles or day vs. evening shifts, helping them find jobs that best fit their skills and lifestyle.

2. Finding the right fit

With this deep understanding, our AI matching engine begins the process of identifying the most relevant opportunities and candidates. It’s not about finding every possible job; it’s about narrowing down millions of possibilities to find the right ones.

What this looks like for job seekers: First, we remove the clear non-matches based on a person’s qualifications and preferences from their recommendations. Even though people can choose to browse all jobs manually, if a job requires a specific license they don’t have, or they’ve specified “remote only” and the job is fully in-office, our system takes this into consideration. It then factors in all the signals the job seeker shares—what they click on, save, or ignore—to retrieve and rank the remaining opportunities and predict which jobs are the best fit.

For employers, the process is mirrored. Our AI-powered sourcing tools like Matched Candidates sift through over 350 million sourceable profiles to find candidates who match their “must-have” requirements.^{Indeed data (worldwide), job seeker accounts set to public that have a unique, verified email address} Our system then surfaces active and engaged job seekers who fit the criteria for open roles, helping hiring teams focus their time where it will be most effective.

The result is a curated set of recommendations—personalized for job seekers and precisely targeted for employers.

3. Learning from every outcome

This is where matches become connections. Job seekers see personalized job recommendations so they can find great fit jobs faster, and employers see qualified candidates they can easily invite to apply. And they can move forward in the hiring process on Indeed – whether that’s a person applying for a job, or a recruiter engaging directly with a candidate. 

Today, these AI-powered recommendations drive the majority of applications on our platform. 70% of sponsored applications now come from AI-powered job recommendations we make to job seekers. And when employers use our AI capabilities in tools like Smart Sourcing to help them find and engage with relevant candidates, they are making hires 40% faster. 

Most importantly, the system learns from every outcome. From a job seeker applying to a recommended job, an employer moving a candidate to the interview stage, and even when certain types of jobs are ignored, these are all signals that refine our matching engine. A successful hire is the ultimate confirmation that we got it right.

Every interaction refines the next match. This two-sided feedback loop makes our recommendations more accurate and more personalized every single day.

Why this matters

Matching is at the core of what we do. It’s how we help people find jobs faster and how employers hire more efficiently. 

Our platform isn’t just about delivering a single recommendation; it’s about facilitating the entire hiring journey. Our scale gives us tremendous insight into the labor market, our AI fuels the connections between job seekers and employers, and our feedback loops help us learn from every interaction.

With each connection and each hire, we learn how to make the process a little faster, simpler, and more human. That’s how we’ll continue helping more people find work that truly works for them.