Job Title Best Practices and ATS Quality Guidelines

When posting a job to third-party job boards you should only use the common job title.  A basic job title will result in more search hits than if you include the location and other details in the title.  

Indeed has started to flag jobs that include other information in the job title, so there's a chance your job won't get posted if you do not follow the following guidelines or worse get flagged at an organization level and none of your jobs post).  Note that this only changes the job title on third-party job boards and doesn't change the ApplicantStack job title.

$!"?* should not be included in the job titles.

Do not include location, salary, hours, and do not have your job title listed in all capital letters.

The following is Indeed's Best Practices article:

ATS Quality Guidelines
At Indeed we do what’s best for job-seekers and aim to provide the best job-seeker experience.
Our goal is to display unique, quality job postings that are as close to the original hiring source
as possible. The Search Quality team is constantly evaluating listings to ensure that our quality
guidelines are met.
The jobs we receive from various ATS’s must undergo a review process in order to be included
within our organic listings. Below are some of the general guidelines that our Search Quality
team looks for when reviewing jobs to include in our organic listings. Please note that these are
just general guidelines and they may vary per country. Indeed reserves the right to reject any
company or particular job for failure to meet our quality standards.

• Each posting should represent a real and currently available job
• Simply put, the job should be a job. We do not allow postings such as product/service advertisements, training courses, business opportunities, or especially fraudulent listings.
• Detailed job descriptions
• Clear titles and detailed job descriptions result in higher conversion rates. Job descriptions should contain more than a couple of sentences and preferably include items such as a company overview, day today responsibilities of the role, qualifications needed, etc.
• Unique, nonduplicate jobs
• Duplicate listings, among multiple sources or within a single source, will not be approved for organic visibility. It’s confusing for jobseekers to see multiple versions of the same job from different sources. We do our best to filter out duplicate listings and highlight the single source that provides the best job seeker experience.
• Location specified
• All jobs should contain both a city and state, and locations should not be included within job titles. If the job is posted outside of the United States, please include specific location information.
• General recruitment/location blasted jobs
• General recruitment jobs typically include some of the following characteristics:
• identical descriptions in multiple locations, mentions of hiring for multiple roles in one job posting, mentions of no experience necessary or flexible hours, and references self employment and commission only salaries. These types of jobs are not suitable for organic visibility on Indeed.
• Reposting of jobs
• The longer the job stays posted, the further it will fall in our organic search results. Reposting the job very frequently to have it placed higher in our search results is not accepted. If the jobs start to see a significant decrease in traffic we recommend sponsoring the job.
• Short/easy apply process
• In general, the application process should be short and simple. Jobs should not require the job-seeker to pay any registration, application, training, or signing fees.

Listed below are also some additional guidelines for Staffing firms:

• All new [to us] staffing firms default to sponsored only visibility. Staffing firms have the ability to sponsor their jobs, which will appear in Indeed’s sponsored search results.
• Duplicate listings will not be approved for organic visibility. There are many instances in which staffing firms post on behalf of direct employers and these employers often are already posting their jobs directly on Indeed.
• Jobs posted by the direct employers take precedence over those posted by the staffing firm. If the employer would rather their jobs be displayed from the staffing firm, written confirmation from the direct employer is required to begin the review process. The core requirements will still need to be met.
• Staffing firms should brand jobs with their company name as opposed to that of the direct employer they are hiring on behalf of. Job-seekers should be aware that they’re applying to a job posted by a staffing firm rather than one posted by a direct employer.
• We encourage staffing firms to specify within the job description which company they are hiring for.

Indeed is committed to improving the quality of our search results and ensuring that we continue
to be the world’s best job search engine. Please note that content posted on Indeed should be
compliant with our Terms of Service, which can be found here.