Open Letter to Platform Leadership Teams
To: [Platform Name (Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.)] Leadership Team
From: [Company Name] - Part of the CareerXroads Talent Acquisition Community
Subject: A Unified Call for Transparency, Partnership, and Accountability in Recruiting Platform Practices
We are a collective of senior talent acquisition leaders from many of the world's most recognized and respected employers - united through the decades-old CareerXroads (CXR) community. Together, we are responsible for well over 2.5 million hires annually in the U.S. alone.
We are writing to you today with a shared concern that affects every employer in our space: the growing lack of visibility, consistency, and partnership in how recruiting platforms operate and evolve.
We recognize the scale and complexity you manage. We appreciate the innovation your teams continue to bring to talent acquisition. But we also believe the relationship between employer and platform needs to be rebalanced.
Recent changes to data sharing, signal use, and integration practices have created risk and confusion for our teams.
In particular, the increasing use of ATS-connected APIs to extract hiring signals - including changes to candidate statuses and highly sensitive data like background check results - raises serious ethical, regulatory, and legal concerns. Many of us were not aware that this level of operational data was accessible to third parties or being shared outside our organizations. In some cases, it is being used to adjust job visibility, performance scores, or generate inferences about our hiring teams or processes.
These signals were never intended to inform external algorithms, nor are they to be used to enable third party platform systems. They are internal markers of progress and accountability. Using them to shape job rankings, suggest performance gaps, or trigger visibility changes represents a significant overreach. It also reflects a broader pattern: key changes are made without explanation, timelines are unclear, and rules are inconsistently enforced.
The recent removal of support for single-source job feeds illustrates this challenge clearly. For many employers, those feeds are tied to carefully managed budget flows and campaign strategies. Removing the ability for employers to determine their own job management process - including forced transitions to ATS-only ingestion without clear alternatives - has upended workflows, caused delivery failures, and created new dependencies that were neither vetted nor chosen by our teams. Unilateral and opaque changes like these erode trust and slow innovation.
Beyond data signals and feed restrictions, we’re also seeing employer workflows actively constrained. The removal of technologies that improve employer-side apply rates, the restriction of job editing tools, and limitations on how job data may be routed to your platform all have real impact - not only on our operational efficiency but also on candidate experience and total funnel health.
Employers take different approaches to job distribution. Some push directly from the ATS. Others rely on agencies, job marketing platforms, or layered compliance and optimization tools. In some cases, jobs move through two or more intermediaries before arriving at your platform. This variety is not an accident - it’s how we manage cost, meet compliance requirements, and compete.
Recent decisions to eliminate these flexible routing options in favor of a single, mandated flow - typically optimized for platform revenue - stifles innovation and reduces our ability to meet our own hiring needs. The right to choose how, where, and through whom our jobs are distributed must remain with us, the employer and your customer.
As a community of enterprise talent leaders, we are calling for change that reflects the complexity of modern hiring ecosystems and respects employer control. Specifically, we ask for:
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Full transparency on what data is collected, stored, and used across platform integrations
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The ability to opt in or out of specific signals, particularly those unrelated to apply flow or candidate experience
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Clear documentation and public lists of supported integrations, with known limitations
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Consistent implementation of platform policies and enforcement across all vendors, partners, and customers
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A transparent roadmap for changes that affect job visibility, delivery, or ranking, with appropriate lead time
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A meaningful path for enterprise employers to provide input before major changes are deployed
It is time for a reset. One that acknowledges the reality of modern hiring ecosystems and places control back in the hands of those responsible for it: the employers.
Talent acquisition leaders are not simply buyers of advertising or software. We are stewards of brand reputation, compliance, equity, and experience. We take that responsibility seriously, and we expect our platform partners to do the same.
We would welcome a dialogue with your team to discuss these concerns in more detail and to help shape a better path forward.
To understand the context and additional content being discussed by our CXR community, visit: [LINK TO BLOG]
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Title]
[Your Company]
Part of the growing network of leaders with the CareerXroads Community