Engagement Farming is Poor Customer Service Indeed

I keep getting these emails from Indeed. It's my own fault: I have an account, and Indeed has at least one of my resumes on file. It's a good resume too: I know that because ChatGPT told me so.

Somehow, in spite of doing everything right ChatGPT told me to do, I still do not have a full time job, and honestly, what Indeed is doing right now is not helping.

This appeared in my inbox this am. Apparently I could be a strong fit for this position, but also, quite apparently, not.

What is going on here? Let me speculate:

Indeed measures how often you interact with the platform. In business terms, it measures engagement. If you do not engage, the metrics go down, and then it is very apparent someone is responsible for figuring out how to get you to start to engage with the platform again.

A great way to drive engagement, on a job site, would be to use machine learning (it would not even have to be AI) to identify a job the candidate might like to apply for, and send it to them.

That seems to be what is happening here: find a job, email it out, drive engagement. Bonuses all around!

Also pretty apparently we are in an age of AI, where employees are incented to develop AI tools to 'help' customers. On a job site, again, it seems pretty apparent a tool that can, in an automated way, identify and rate opportunities that are a good match, so they can nudge the customer in the direction of greater potential success and away from opportunities they are more likely to fail at – that seems in theory like a pretty great idea.

What would not be so great is if those two teams did not talk to each other. If the engagement farming emails went out showing well written explanatory text and a nudge-button below it that is basically screaming in all caps "APPLYING FOR THIS JOB IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF YOUR TIME!"

At which point the customer reads the email and thinks 'well, if they cannot find a good match for me, I'm never going to find one searching for it on my own."

The net result of the millions of dollars they no doubt spent on the capability to even send that email now being that customer engagement is even lower than it was before: why engage with a platform when it is telling you directly that engagement would be a waste of your time?

Weirdly, these emails are making me trust the AI much more than the humans in this loop, if you can find any. The AI is providing, if not an honest assessment, at least an accurate one. That is helpful to me. What Indeed is doing is not really helpful at all.