Guides / Indeed, LinkedIn, or the company site

Should I apply on Indeed, LinkedIn, or the company's website?

Short answer: find the job on the company's own careers page and apply there. Here's why that's not just superstition.

Where job listings actually come from

Companies don't type their openings into Indeed one by one. A job is born inside the company's hiring software (the same "applicant tracking system" that collects your application), gets published to the company's own careers page, and from there gets copied outward: pushed to job boards the company pays for, scraped by sites like Indeed that crawl the web for listings, and reposted by third parties of varying quality.

That's why you see the same job in five places. One of those five is the original — the company's careers page. The other four are copies, and copies have problems:

• They go stale. When a job closes, the careers page updates immediately. The copies can linger for weeks on other sites, collecting applications that go nowhere.
• They lose detail. Salary ranges, exact locations, and application questions are often stripped or mangled in the copying.
• Some aren't legitimate. Reposted listings are where scam "recruiters" operate — the ones that ask for fees or personal information. A listing on a company's own domain can't be faked this way.

Does it matter where I submit the application?

Usually, all legitimate routes end up in the same pile: whether you click Apply on LinkedIn or the careers page, the application lands in the company's tracking system either way. You don't get bonus points for the route itself.

The reasons the careers page still wins are practical:

• You're applying to a job that still exists. The single biggest waste in job searching is time spent on listings that already closed.
• You see the real posting — full requirements, real salary band, real location policy — so you can judge fit before spending an hour.
• "Easy Apply" is easy for everyone. One-click applications attract enormous volume, which buries you in a deeper pile. The friction of a real application form filters out the spray-and-pray crowd.
• Some jobs never leave the careers page. Plenty of companies — especially outside tech — don't syndicate everything. Board-only searching misses those entirely.

So what are Indeed and LinkedIn actually for?

Discovery. Aggregators are genuinely good at telling you a job exists — that's the whole product. A sensible workflow is: discover wherever you like, then verify and apply at the source. Search the company name plus "careers," find the listing on their own site, confirm it's still open, and apply there.

The annoyance is that this turns every application into a two-step scavenger hunt. That's a real cost when you're applying steadily — but it's still cheaper than cover letters written for dead listings.