For years, the résumé has been the primary digital calling card for job seekers. That model is changing as recruitment platforms use skills data, matching algorithms and artificial intelligence to help employers discover candidates before they actively apply. Indeed is encouraging job seekers to treat their professional profiles as a second layer of career visibility, arguing that a complete profile can make candidates easier for employers to find.
Finding a job increasingly involves more than sending a résumé to an open position.
Job seekers now have to navigate skills-based matching, algorithmic recommendations, professional profiles and AI-powered recruiting systems—all of which can influence whether an employer ever sees their application.
Indeed is putting more emphasis on that discovery layer.
According to Erin Ahart, a workplace trends expert at Indeed, job seekers with complete and current Indeed profiles are 90% more likely to move forward in the hiring process after applying and are more likely to appear in employer searches.
The figure comes from Indeed and should be viewed as a platform-specific claim rather than a universal measure of hiring outcomes. But the underlying shift is significant: recruiting marketplaces are increasingly designed to match people with jobs based on structured skills and preferences, rather than waiting for candidates to find and apply to individual vacancies.
That changes the role of the résumé.
A résumé is still useful for applying to a specific position. It provides employers with a condensed history of someone’s work experience, education and achievements.
A professional profile operates differently.
When candidates maintain a profile containing skills, experience, job preferences and other relevant information, matching technology can use those signals to surface candidates in employer searches and recommend opportunities to job seekers.
Indeed says its matching technology can use information contained in profiles to improve candidate discoverability.
“The more complete the profile, the better,” Ahart said, emphasizing the role of skills and preferences in helping candidates become discoverable.
The idea reflects a broader movement in HR technology toward skills-based talent acquisition.
From Applying to Being Discovered
Traditional job hunting is largely candidate-driven.
A worker searches for a position, reads the description, submits a résumé and waits for a response.
Algorithmic matching creates another route.
A platform can identify a candidate whose skills correspond with an employer’s requirements even if that person has not searched for or applied to the specific role.
That is particularly relevant in a labor market where job descriptions do not always map neatly onto people’s actual capabilities.
Someone with experience in customer service, for example, may possess communication, account management and CRM skills that make them suitable for roles they would not necessarily find through a narrow job-title search.
Skills-based matching attempts to bridge that gap.
Instead of asking only, “What jobs did this person previously hold?” the technology can ask, “What can this person do, and which opportunities require those capabilities?”
Large HR technology providers are moving in the same direction.
Workday, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other enterprise technology companies have invested heavily in skills intelligence, talent matching and AI-assisted workforce tools. The broader market is moving toward systems that can interpret skills and experience as structured data rather than relying exclusively on keywords in a résumé.
For job seekers, that means maintaining an online professional identity can become part of the job-search strategy itself.
AI Changes the Job Search Equation
Artificial intelligence is adding another layer.
Recruitment platforms can use AI to analyze job descriptions, identify relevant skills and improve candidate-job matching. On the worker side, generative AI can help people prepare applications, research employers and identify potential career paths.
The challenge is making sure the underlying candidate data is accurate.
AI cannot reliably match someone to the right opportunity if their skills, experience or preferences are incomplete or outdated.
That makes profile maintenance more important, not less.
A candidate who adds relevant skills, clarifies preferred locations or work arrangements and keeps employment history current provides matching systems with more information to work with.
The strategy also changes how job seekers think about discoverability.
Instead of optimizing a résumé only for the position being pursued today, workers can build a profile designed to remain useful across multiple searches.
That creates an opportunity for passive job discovery.
A person who is not actively applying for jobs may still become visible to employers searching for particular skills. In a competitive labor market, that can expand the range of opportunities available without requiring candidates to manually identify every opening.
The Employer Side of the Equation
For employers, AI-powered matching promises a larger and potentially more relevant candidate pool.
Recruiters no longer have to rely entirely on incoming applications. Searchable talent databases allow them to identify people based on skills, experience and preferences, potentially including workers who would otherwise never enter the applicant pool.
But automated matching also creates responsibilities.
Employers need to understand which data influences candidate recommendations and whether algorithmic systems introduce unintended bias. HR teams also need to distinguish between a candidate being algorithmically matched to a role and actually being qualified for it.
AI can narrow the search.
It should not eliminate human judgment.
For job seekers, the corresponding lesson is that visibility increasingly happens before the application.
A résumé remains an important document, but it is no longer necessarily the entire representation of a worker’s professional value.
Profiles, skills data and AI-driven recommendations are becoming part of the infrastructure connecting workers and employers.
Indeed’s advice is therefore less about abandoning the résumé than supplementing it.
The goal is not simply to apply to more jobs.
It is to make the right skills easier for the right employers—and increasingly, the algorithms connecting them—to find.
Market Landscape
The evolution of job-search platforms mirrors a wider HRTech shift from job-board search toward skills-based talent matching.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identified skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation, with 63% of employers surveyed citing them as a key challenge. The report also found that employers expect 39% of workers’ existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated by 2030.
That environment gives platforms an incentive to understand skills more granularly.
Indeed competes in a market that includes LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and employer-specific applicant tracking systems, while enterprise HCM vendors such as Workday and SAP are developing their own skills intelligence capabilities.
Indeed’s differentiation is its position as a large employment marketplace connecting job seekers and employers. The more complete the candidate data available to its matching systems, the more opportunities the platform has to create connections beyond direct applications.
For employers, this potentially expands talent discovery. For workers, it creates another reason to maintain a current digital professional profile.
The bigger change is conceptual: job searching is becoming less about finding every vacancy and more about making a candidate’s capabilities discoverable.
Top Insights
- Indeed is encouraging job seekers to maintain complete professional profiles so AI-powered matching can connect their skills with relevant employer searches and opportunities.
- The platform says users with complete profiles are 90% more likely to progress after applying, highlighting the growing importance of candidate discoverability.
- Skills-based matching can expose workers to opportunities they may never search for themselves, shifting job discovery from applications toward algorithmic recommendations.
- AI recruitment tools increase the value of structured skills data, but employers still need human judgment and governance when evaluating algorithmically matched candidates.
- The changing job-search model means résumés remain important, while professional profiles increasingly function as persistent, searchable representations of a worker’s capabilities.
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