This month, CareerXroads and its community of senior talent acquisition leaders - responsible for over 2.5 million hires annually in the U.S. - penned an open letter (see below) to recruiters and platform leadership at companies like Indeed and LinkedIn. The message: employers need control, clarity, and partnership in hiring tech.
Recent platform changes have escalated that need. In mid-2025, Indeed began phasing out single-source XML feeds managed by agencies or aggregators, requiring direct ATS-based posting via Indeed’s proprietary Job Sync or Job Update APIs. This shift disrupted long-standing employer workflows tied to budgeting, campaign strategies, and apply-optimization tools - all in service of a clear strategic objective.
Indeed has publicly stated its intent to move from a 0.5% “take rate” to more than 5% of a hired candidate’s salary. That kind of shift is not a feature update - it’s a fundamental business model change. It signals an effort to consolidate control of employer job data, dictate service provider usage, and reduce flexibility across the hiring stack. Employers must resist this - clearly and collectively.
Why Flexibility in Job Routing Matters
No two employers structure their job delivery stack the same way - and that’s by design. Some companies route jobs directly from their ATS to job sites. Others layer in agency services, compliance tools, editing platforms, or performance partners. The flow of data may be linear, complex, or adaptive to specific hiring needs.
Here are just a few examples we see across CareerXroads member companies:
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ATS → job site
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ATS → Agency → job site
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ATS → Recruitment Platform → job site
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ATS → Agency → Recruitment Platform → job site
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ATS → Recruitment Platform → Agency → job site
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Recruitment Platform → ATS → Agency → job site
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Recruitment Platform → ATS → Recruitment Platform → Agency → job site
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Agency → ATS → Recruitment Platform → job site
These variations aren’t accidental - they reflect innovation. They reflect how employers compete. They also reflect how candidate experience and compliance are maintained at scale. Recent moves by platforms to eliminate or restrict these flows in favor of one-size-fits-all models strip employers of that ability to adapt, optimize, and differentiate.
Indeed’s revenue goals are broadly thought to be the drivers of this shift. Industry analyses from sources like jobboarddocter.com and aimgroup.com confirm Indeed is targeting a move from a 0.5% fee to more than 5% of a candidate’s salary. That strategic pivot is not neutral - it changes how platforms treat employers, turning them into providers of data and signals, rather than strategic partners.
AIM Group, known for its deep research interviews with marketplace C-level executives, warns that recruitment platforms are moving to models focused on margin and control, not employer interest. Employers benefit from diverse routing options: agency feeds, compliance layers, job-editing tools, performance analytics. Platforms that impose a single flow undercut process innovation and funnel performance.
The Bigger Picture: Platform Economics Are Changing
While individual changes like feed deprecation or signal extraction may feel operational, they’re part of a larger commercial strategy that reshapes the employer-platform relationship.
Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Indeed, has publicly stated its intention to move its platform “take rate” from 0.5% to over 5% of a hired candidate's salary - a tenfold increase. These shifts aren’t just technical or procedural; they reflect a pivot toward tighter control of employer data, workflows, and job delivery infrastructure.
For employers, the stakes go beyond a single integration. This is about who controls your data, who dictates your apply experience, and how you’re allowed to reach candidates.
If you’re curious what this looks like from the investor lens, consider these sources:
And here’s a quick visual from their investor materials showing the scale of the HR matching market - and why platforms are positioning themselves to capture more of it.
Download the Letter
Letter Excerpt:
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.
Read the full letter here.
What Employers Can Do
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Download and share the letter with platform reps
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Audit your current job delivery process to identify any dependencies that may be affected
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Request a full list of signals and data flows from your job platform partners
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Push for contractual clarity on your right to choose vendors, control data access, and maintain apply configurations
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Assert your right to determine your own job delivery flow, tools, and service providers - and challenge any vendor practices that limit that control
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Contact us at: info@cxr.works
What’s Next
CareerXroads is conducting community discussions and panels (logged-in members register here to attend), and preparing to publish interviews, impact case studies, and industry commentary. We’ll also provide model contractual language to help enterprise employers push back.
If you'd like to contribute or co-author, please get in touch. A united voice now helps shape a fairer process later.
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