Tearing the Paper Ceiling with the World’s Largest Jobsite, Indeed

Removing barriers to connect job seekers and employers

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As the world’s largest job site, Indeed facilitates connections between over 350 million unique visitors per month across 60 countries and 28 languages — all with the ultimate goal of helping people get jobs. The company’s work is rooted in the belief that talent is universal, but opportunity is not, and that job seekers everywhere should have equal opportunity to find fulfilling employment that suits both their skills and their aspirations.

In that spirit, Indeed joined the Tear the Paper Ceiling coalition as part of their commitment to helping 30 million job seekers who face barriers get jobs by 2030. Supporting job seekers who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs) such as on-the-job experience, community college, military service, and bootcamps or other workforce training programs, is a unifying mantle for Indeed’s efforts to help often-overlooked job seekers get a fair shot. 

“With over 3.5 million employers on Indeed’s platform, we have both a responsibility – and an opportunity – to lead the way in advancing equitable hiring practices in ways that make the hiring process work better and more efficiently for job seekers and employers alike,” said Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, Senior Director of Global ESG Programs & Partnerships at Indeed. “Being part of the Tear the Paper Ceiling is, in many ways, an extension of work that Indeed has been doing for years to fix outdated, inefficient hiring approaches. We’re excited to build on that work and join a group of like-minded organizations seeking to match STARs with great employers.” 

Indeed’s contributions to tearing the paper ceiling include the company’s own internal practices. For their own hiring, Indeed has removed degree requirements for over 700 different job profiles to date, which has led to the hiring of hundreds of workers based on their skills. Among other professional development opportunities, the company’s internal technical apprenticeship program, BOOST, provides accelerated training and on-the-job learning to prepare employees from non-technical roles and backgrounds for a new career in software development.

As the world’s #1 job site, Indeed also has a unique understanding of the skills employers require and leverages that knowledge to help employers implement a skills-first strategy and match with candidates. For example, the company is optimizing a number of products to better serve STARs. Their free AI Job Description Generator aims to streamline businesses’ ability to overcome one of the most common barriers to implementing skills-based hiring – the drafting of skills-first job descriptions. In addition, Indeed launched Skill Connect, a product that allows job seekers to more easily showcase the skills and training they have received through alternative pathways and match with the employers who need them. 

Indeed’s commitment to removing barriers for both its workers and job seekers using their platform is a critical addition to the growing momentum to tear the paper ceiling and help the labor market to work better for everyone. They are already helping the Tear the Paper Ceiling coalition take critical steps toward making skills-first job search experiences the norm for millions of job seekers and employers across the U.S. and around the world.