Job Site Indeed is Assembling a New Kind of Team to Maximize Localization Impact

With more than 200 million unique visitors every month and more than 6,000 global employees, job site Indeed.com covers the global job market well. At the time of writing this article, there had been 10,293 new jobs listed on the portal in the last seven days.

“Job search is a very personal and important part of everyone’s lives and requires a high level of trust,” says Frank Hensgens, Managing Director DACH at Indeed.com. “This is why we want to make sure that we help make job search as easy as possible and it requires that we deliver localization with a high degree of quality in every country we operate in.”

Currently, job seekers can search for jobs at Indeed on the web or mobile in over 60 countries and 29 languages.

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Connecting people to opportunities requires localizing services for many countries, according to Hensgens.

“The actual site is the most visible example, which is composed of many different services and web applications, including job search, resume creation, resume search, job posting, and company pages. We also localize our mobile apps (Job Search, Employer) as well as content for marketing, sales, legal, internal training and communications, and client services,” he shares.

Marketing communications also represent a significant portion of Indeed’s translation efforts, in the form of videos, presentations, brochures and digital marketing.

“It is very important for Indeed to show that we understand the local markets and you cannot do that without speaking to people in their language,” he says.

“For example, if someone is searching “CV” instead of “resume,” it is very necessary that we use that local terminology on our website. We want to show that we might be an American company, but we have local employees providing insight into the needs of each country,” he explains.

Growing Internationalization

Aside from its expansive jobs database, Indeed is also known for providing insights into local job markets.

In August 2018, Venture Beat, for example, cited its report on the most popular entry-level tech jobs in the US. In Canada, BNN Bloomberg, published a report based on its study that marijuana job ads were on the rise ahead of legalization. The New York Times also quoted its economic researcher in its jobs report for July.

Hensgens affirms that the localization team has grown a lot in the last three years to support the rapid growth and international success of Indeed.

“We use extra resources for certain big, complex projects,” he says.

Because of this expansion, the company has also secured more resources and expanded its set of tools.

“We use XTM as our TMS (translation management system) and we’ve invested in internal tools to aid in the functional testing of our website, including editing tools for our internal SMEs, automation for functional testing, and an A/B testing tool for text that allows non-programmers to set up simple text A/B tests,” Hensgens shares.

“Our big goals in the near future are to improve our in-context review processes and find in-context translation/editing solutions,” he adds.

Content Effectiveness Team

The most important part of any localization effort is ensuring the quality of the translation. But Indeed believes that “translation quality doesn’t happen by default.”

“So we take care to manage it actively,” says Hensgens. 

Indeed does this in a variety of ways, including looking at the source language for ease of translation, putting in place a language quality management program, conducting A/B testing, and looking at what users tell them.

“We recognized the need for a team that would focus on content effectiveness as the ultimate measure of quality, and are in the process of building it,” he says.

Indeed’s localization operations manager says that it might sound counterintuitive, but the transition from thinking about quality in linguistic terms to a focus on content effectiveness has helped them focus on what helps job seekers and employers connect with each other.

“We are very excited about the impact that the Content Effectiveness team can have on our international growth. This will be a multidisciplinary team of content marketers, copywriters, and linguists, specialized in cross-cultural communications, who will be ensuring that our localized materials have maximum impact for each of the markets we serve,” he explains.

Indeed is currently hiring for this team, which will be based out of Dublin, Ireland, and Tokyo, Japan.

MT to Create New Types of Work

Hensgens says that the company has begun experimenting with machine translation for very high volumes of text, and it has helped them deliver on content that would have been impossible to turn around in the short time frame required.

“However, there is still substantial post-editing that is necessary to make it sound local and natural,” he shares.

“Academia will need to adapt to the new reality and train professionals for the different types of work that MT post-editing requires”

Indeed sees that the industry is already feeling the impact, so Hensgens says they expect machine translation to continue shaking the industry.

“Academia will need to adapt to the new reality and train professionals for the different types of work that MT post-editing requires,” he says. “We also foresee more differentiation between post-editors and specialized translators for niche subject areas or specializations.”