Hospitality Hiring Requires Options. Here’s Our Recommendation for an Alternative to Indeed When Listing Your Open Roles
In the restaurant industry, your staff is essential to your business. Unfortunately, with high turnover and small teams—you can’t afford to be understaffed longer than a couple of weeks.
Many employers turn to the mega-job site Indeed when they need to hire, thinking it’s the best and most cost-effective solution to hospitality staffing.
And sure, your jobs will get traffic and applications (no hate, it is one of the world’s largest job sites), but you’re also likely to pay way more than you intended and end up with unskilled and inexperienced candidates.
You deserve options.
There are alternatives to Indeed that are tailored to hiring in the hospitality industry and built to connect you to more skilled candidates.
To help you get started, we’ll compare Indeed to Poached—the largest hospitality employment site in the nation and the only place to connect with skilled hospitality professionals for full-time employment and on-demand staffing needs.
Job Post Pricing
Indeed Job Post Pricing
- Free 30-day job listings for non-promoted job listings
- Pay Per Application for sponsored job listings
Poached Job Post Pricing
- $59 per 30-day job listing with light promotion
While Indeed offers free 30-day job listings, you’ll have to sponsor your job post to get anything from it. That’s where things get pricey.
When you sponsor a job listing, Indeed charges per application. You’ll see an estimated cost per app before you commit based on the job location, job title, and number of active people looking for jobs in your area.
We’ve heard from talking with our customers that the cost per applicant can be anywhere from $65 or more—WHICH IS OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE.
With Poached, employers purchase individual 30-day job listings for a flat $59 per job post.
Poached offers a Job Boost for a flat $25 each for those needing a little extra promotion. You can boost as often as necessary to increase your job’s promotional budget across the partner network. The Boost also brings your listing back to the top of the Poached Job Feed, providing renewed visibility.
So which is more cost-effective?
If you’re running on tight margins, like most restaurants are, Poached is likely the more cost-effective solution to get applications. Indeed puts on a front of free, but the costs quickly add up when you need to fill a position.
Quality of Candidates
Indeed Candidate Pool
- General job board covering all industries. You will likely get a mix of experienced and non-experienced applications.
- You are paying for a quantity of applications vs. quality.
Poached Candidate Pool
- Niche job board for the hospitality industry. You will likely get a mix of applicants with experience in hospitality and people who explicitly want to break into the field.
- You are paying for the quality of applications vs. quantity.
Indeed covers all industries, so your candidate pool will likely be a mix of hospitality and non-hospitality folk just applying for whatever they find.
We commonly hear this from our clientele, which makes it harder to swallow that per-application fee.
Poached only allows food and beverage businesses to post on their site. In turn, only food and beverage professionals use their site to find jobs—or people explicitly looking to break into the industry.
They have over 1 Million hospitality professionals registered on their site nationwide, and through internal data, they see that most have an average of 8 years of experience in the industry.
Since it’s a niche job board for a specific industry, you’ll find a more qualified hospitality candidate on Poached.
So which job site is better?
By far, if you’re looking for skilled labor or a team member dedicated to the line of work you’re hiring for, Poached is the site for you. Indeed can be a good option for entry-level positions, but again, you run the risk of applicants just mass applying.
On Poached, whether entry-level or highly skilled, your job is being promoted to people who are seriously looking to work in the hospitality industry.
Additional Features
Additional Features on Indeed:
Employer Dashboard: Free for registered users, Indeed offers a dashboard with applicant tracking features.
- Track jobs and applications throughout the hiring process
- Manage jobs and applicants across locations.
- Contact candidates and schedule interviews through the Indeed dashboard.
Indeed Resume: A monthly subscription that gives employers access to active and passive job seeker resumes on Indeed and lets employers contact up to a certain number of job seekers based on their subscription.
- A Standard subscription is $120 per month and gives employers 20 contacts per month.
- A Professional subscription costs $300 per month and gives employers 100 contacts.
Additional Features on Poached:
Poached Dashboard: Free for registered users, the Poached dashboard offers an applicant tracking system that gets up to 60% more resumes than other ATS.
- Track jobs and applications throughout the hiring process
- Manage jobs and applicants across locations.
- Contact candidates and schedule interviews through the Poached Dashboard
- Automatic interview reminders and confirmations sent to candidates
Poached Shifts: An on-demand staffing tool allowing employers to book vetted and experienced hospitality workers for temporary staffing needs.
- No upfront costs. Employers pay the hourly rate they advertised, plus a $39 service fee after the shift is worked.
- No contracts or subscription fees
- Access to a database of resumes gives employers control to browse and invite workers to join a roster and book shifts.
- No conversion fees if offering full-time employment to a booked worker.
National Posts: An add-on to the 30-day job listing, the national post promotes a single job nationally and is helpful for those recruiting in multiple markets or needing to fill a niche role.
- $200 add-on to the 30-day job posting price.
- Promoted nationally
- Applicant Tracking Tools to help organize applications nationwide from a single job listing.
Depending on your needs and budgets, Indeed and Poached offer great features to take advantage of.
The benefit of the additional features on Poached is that they’re tailored to hiring in the hospitality industry. As a site built by hospitality professionals, the folks at Poached understand how difficult it can be to staff in hospitality. They pride themselves on the understanding that employers need more flexibility and support to cover everything from full-time to temporary staffing needs—and that they should have a single platform to manage all their hiring.
The Indeed Resume is also helpful because employers gain access to a database of millions of resumes (although not all have hospitality experience). It can be a great way for hiring managers to be proactive in their candidate search and encourage those to apply who might not otherwise.
It is pricey, though, and might only be a realistic option for some employers in the restaurant world.
Why Use Poached as an Alternative to Indeed?
If you’re looking for an alternative to Indeed and run a food and beverage business, you should use Poached. Their pricing is straightforward, and their tools are built to combat common pain points specific to the industry.
You can manage all your hiring needs from a single platform. With over 1,000,000 registered hospitality professionals looking for work in the industry, you will find a more qualified candidate than on Indeed.
If you’re tired of paying per application and looking for better candidates for your business, check out Poached today!