[Mizoguchi]

How come Indeed has so many employees? 15K doing what? SpaceX is sending people to orbit on reusable rockets that can land on a moving platform on the ocean, with 4K less people. How is this even possible? Are most of Indeed employees sales reps?

[fzeroracer]

SpaceX is a company with all of it's employees and testing in one geographical location.

Indeed is a global company spanning multiple languages and governments. This requires creating, designing and specializing for multiple languages and sensibilities. JP Indeed has additional integration with LINE. It's hyper specific to Japan but that integration is required for success. Multiply that by a few factors for operating in each region, having dev groups for each region, understanding and operating within the law within each region...

I always see these kind of comments to be remarkably ignorant because operating on a global scale requires a global workforce.

[Mizoguchi]

Excuse my ignorance. Still feels excessive for a global company. I worked for a handful of multinationals for many years and had the opportunity to live in many parts of the world including. .. yes, Japan. I know by experience a global workforce doesn't mean duplication of business units and language/culture is not an excuse to have them. Developer groups for each region? What? Compliance and legal is not necessarily as big as you would think, unless you are perhaps a pharmaceutical. In my latest company, a large manufacturing company with deals worth billions we handled compliance for the entire US and Canada out of a small office in Philadelphia with the support of a small legal firm from NY,if there were more than 20 guys in that office I would be surprised.

[orf]

Even with the 60 or so countries listed here (https://www.indeed.com/m/countries), that’s ~230 employees per country.

Still seems way to high, especially given the uneven size of some of the job markets in those listed countries.

[fzeroracer]

If you were to solely take into account job market size then China alone would dwarf the entire list and require a massive team to maintain on its own for what I hope should be obvious reasons.

And this ignores that the job market size isn't related to the complexity of integration. If you're doing business in China your data retention and storage is going to be massively different than Europe which is different than the US which is different than Japan which is different than Indonesia. These will require some form of backend customization and integration with the common UI framework they use for their site design. You need QA teams, you need lawyers, you need managers and live ops engineers and specialists and researchers to drive user retention and businessmen to reach out to companies.

Have you ever worked in a global team environment? Or perhaps talked to your coworkers working on similar products in other countries?

[orf]

Yes I understand the rationale behind “lots of bodies”.

As OP was rightly pointing out, there is a discrepancy here between output and size.

LinkedIn for example has many of the same issues and a lot more complex functionality. They manage to do this, compete with Indeed (and have a higher market share), with a relatively small number more people.

[fzeroracer]

LinkedIn has 21000 employees. Which is significantly more than Indeed.

[orf]

Yes, about 25%-30%. And they do way more, in a lot of geos.

Or are you saying LinkedIn has 14,000 employees just for their job board functionality, and only 6k for the other larger, more complex parts of their system?

No? So what explains the relatively small percentage difference in employees but a large difference in functionality and market share?

[cleverwebble]

LinkedIn doesn't have no where near the market share of job search / hiring in the US compared to Indeed. It's like, 2-3x less.

[orf]

We are not talking about purely US market share, because the argument being made is that the headcount is required to compete globally.

Job board popularity varies greatly by country, but from the look of it LinkedIn has more of the global market share of Indeed.

My point is that unlike indeed they do this without jobs being the core, 100% thing they are dedicated to. Even if they are slightly behind in market share the point still stands that LinkedIn is clearly doing more with less.

[NonEUCitizen]

Would anyone know how many employees they had pre-pandemic? (i.e. how much they grew recently)

[dddrh]

About 12,000 before I left in Nov 2021. There was a hiring freeze in place pretty quickly with the pandemic.