LinkedIn vs Indeed for Job Seekers: Where Applications Land

LinkedIn vs Indeed comes down to what happens after you press Apply. Both are free for job seekers, and both split their jobs into two kinds: ones you apply to inside the site (Easy Apply on LinkedIn, Apply with Indeed on Indeed) and ones that send you to the employer's own website. In Huntr's 2025 tracking of 598,627 applications, Indeed jobs reached an interview stage 4.5% of the time and LinkedIn jobs 3.1% (Huntr). Indeed also tells you more after you apply, while LinkedIn is the better place to reach people. On the redirect path, neither site follows your application at all.

A disclosure before the detail: ApplyEze makes a competing product, a desktop app that applies on employers' own application forms. We have kept to what each company's help pages, filings and public reviews say, checked on 18 October 2026, and we say plainly below where LinkedIn or Indeed is the better choice.

The short answer

If you can use both, apply on Indeed and use LinkedIn to find the person who can move your application up the pile. Our best job boards guide covers boards with higher response rates than either.

Side by side

Sources for each row are in the sections below. One caution: Huntr counts a response when a user moves a job to the interview stage or later in their own tracker, and the mix of jobs on each site differs. A 1.4 point gap is a hint, not a law.

How applying works on LinkedIn

LinkedIn's help article is direct: "Depending on the employer's settings, you'll see an Easy Apply or Apply button." If it is the Apply button, "you'll be routed to that company's website or job board to continue the application process" (LinkedIn Help).

Easy Apply is a short form inside LinkedIn. You click Easy Apply, fill the pop-up screens, click Review, then Submit. LinkedIn "may prompt you to save your application information, including your resume and answers, to reuse for future applications", and can then pre-fill them (LinkedIn Help). Two details matter more than they look:

• "You cannot edit or withdraw an application once submitted through LinkedIn" (LinkedIn Help). Check the resume before you submit.
• "If the job is posted by a recruiting agency, your application may be shared with other clients of that agency" (LinkedIn Help).

The daily limit. "You can submit a set number of Easy Apply applications each day. If you reach this limit, you'll need to wait until it resets at the end of the day (UTC)." LinkedIn does not publish the number. "Rapidly submitting applications in a short time triggers a temporary pause on Easy Apply. This helps prevent automation and bots from flooding job postings", and LinkedIn "may lower a member's daily Easy Apply limit if we notice activity that seems inauthentic" (LinkedIn Help). Any tool that clicks Easy Apply for you runs into this policy. Our post on whether LinkedIn Easy Apply works covers what the button sends and what the survey data says about it.

What you can see afterwards. Your applications live under Jobs, then Job tracker, then the Applied tab, where you can open the job and review the resume you used, if you applied on LinkedIn (LinkedIn Help). For Easy Apply on a job hosted on LinkedIn, you get application updates when "the job poster opened and viewed your application on LinkedIn" or "downloaded the resume you attached" (LinkedIn Help; that article was last updated four years ago). Some job posts also show responsiveness signals, such as "Actively reviewing candidates" when the recruiter reviewed applications in the past two weeks. When the process "is managed outside of LinkedIn", LinkedIn shows "Responses managed off LinkedIn" and "the responsiveness data is unavailable" (LinkedIn Help).

How applying works on Indeed

Indeed's help center says: "Some jobs let you apply directly on Indeed. Others take you to the employer's website" (Indeed Help Center).

Apply with Indeed is an option employers enable. "When available, you'll find an 'Apply now' button instead of 'Apply on company site'", and for roles with the "Easily apply" badge, "your profile automatically fills required fields and employer questions" (Indeed Career Guide). Inside the form:

• A "Tailor your resume" step offers to customize your resume to the job, and you review and accept its suggestions.
• Employer screener questions are mandatory: "You must answer these questions before you can continue."
• "You can save your application as a draft and finish it later."

All three are from the Indeed Help Center. You still review and submit each one yourself.

What you can see afterwards is where Indeed is clearly ahead. Its My Jobs page sorts applications by status, and the help center says who sets each one (Indeed Help Center):

"Response seems unlikely" means "We don't expect the employer to reply." Indeed shows it when the employer has filled enough positions, or when an application has had no activity for two weeks. That is a useful signal to stop waiting and move on. One catch: the same page says the statuses Indeed sets itself appear only in its mobile app.

The limits are spelled out on the same page. "If you applied on another site, you may not see these statuses." "You can only view details or withdraw an application if the job was posted directly on Indeed." An application can also be missing from My Jobs if "You applied more than six months ago". And for the redirect path: "If you applied on the employer's website, Indeed doesn't send a confirmation email" (Indeed Help Center).

What you will know two weeks after applying

Put the two sites together and four apply paths emerge. This is the table to keep in mind when you choose which button to press.

For the two redirect rows, keep your own list: company, job title, date and the employer's URL. If no confirmation email arrives within a day, the application may not have gone through.

AI tools on each

Both sites now give job seekers free AI features. Neither submits an application for you.

LinkedIn. "AI-powered job search is available to all LinkedIn members worldwide", lets you "describe the role you want in your own words", and replaces classic job search, which LinkedIn says it is "gradually retiring" (LinkedIn Help). LinkedIn also lists some filters, including verified jobs and sort by most recent, as coming back later. Job Match gives every job seeker a summary of how well they fit a listing (LinkedIn Help). Premium Career adds deeper "AI-powered insights on job posts", Top Applicant jobs and 5 InMail credits a month (LinkedIn Premium). Whether that is worth US$39.99 a month is its own question, answered in is LinkedIn Premium worth it.

Social Media Today reported in June 2026 that LinkedIn was rolling out a Premium tool that can "pre-fill key application details on behalf of members", with users still approving every field (Social Media Today). The LinkedIn help articles that report cites returned errors on 18 October 2026, so we could not confirm its current status.

Indeed. Career Scout is "a free personal AI-powered career coaching tool", built into the Indeed site and app. It "can help customize your resume and save updated versions to your Indeed profile", and you "can also practice with mock interviews and review feedback after each session". It drafts, and you decide: "Ultimately, you decide what to submit and how to represent yourself to employers" (Indeed, updated 6 October 2026). The same page claims Career Scout users "find and apply to jobs 7x faster", a median against users of the Indeed mobile app. That is a vendor claim from Indeed's own data, not an independent measure.

Indeed's free AI does more of the application work because it sits inside the apply form. LinkedIn's is mostly about finding and judging jobs.

Scams and spam

Both companies are real and free to use: LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft (LinkedIn) and "Indeed is a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings" (Indeed). Scammers still use both. Job scams are a real and growing cost. The FTC reported that losses to job and employment agency scams rose from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024, while the number of reports tripled (FTC, 10 March 2025). Much of the jump came from "task scams", where you are paid small amounts for simple online tasks and then asked to deposit your own money: "About 20,000 people reported these scams in the first half of the year, compared to about 5,000 in all of 2023" (FTC Data Spotlight, 12 December 2024).

What each site tells you to watch for:

The reviews line up with this. On LinkedIn's Trustpilot page, fake job postings and people preying on desperate job seekers are a recurring theme. On Indeed's, the recurring complaints include scam calls after registering and messages from people claiming to be Indeed asking to move to WhatsApp (LinkedIn on Trustpilot; Indeed on Trustpilot). The simplest defence works on both: find the job on the employer's own careers page before you share anything. Our ghost jobs guide covers the related problem of real-looking postings that nobody intends to fill.

What users say, from two kinds of source

All figures were seen on 18 October 2026: LinkedIn on Trustpilot, LinkedIn on the App Store, LinkedIn on Google Play, Indeed on Trustpilot, Indeed on the App Store, Indeed on Google Play.

The two kinds of source disagree by design: Trustpilot gathers people with a grievance, and app stores prompt people who are using the app. The themes say more than either score.

LinkedIn's Trustpilot complaints lean toward Premium and accounts: billing after a free trial, unexpected renewal charges, account restrictions even for paying members, fake job posts, and no way to reach a human. Indeed's are mostly about applying: applications that vanish without a reply, scams and impersonation, job alerts for distant cities, sudden bans, and a tracker that lost data. Indeed's Trustpilot split is also unusually polarised, with 38% five-star and 42% one-star reviews, against 87% one-star for LinkedIn.

The third option: the employer's own form

Every comparison above ends in the same place for a large share of jobs: a button that hands you to the employer's careers site. There you fill the employer's own form, usually on an applicant tracking system such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or Workday, and neither LinkedIn nor Indeed follows what happens next.

That form is often the better door anyway. CareerPlug's 2025 report, covering more than 60,000 small business owners and over 10 million applications, found that job boards produce "an average of 60% of applications" but "do not produce hires at nearly the same rate as other sources", while "Company careers pages are a hugely successful source of hires, but an underutilized source of applicants overall" (CareerPlug). The employer's page also holds the original posting, so if a job has gone from it, it has probably closed, whatever the board still shows.

A practical routine:

1. Search on Indeed and LinkedIn as you do now.
2. When a job redirects, bookmark the employer's careers page it lands on. That page often lists roles the boards have not picked up.
3. Tailor your resume to the posting before you fill the form, since the employer's form takes whatever file you upload.
4. Log it yourself, because no board will.

This is the part ApplyEze automates. It watches the career boards of more than 100,000 employers directly and completes applications on 12 platforms: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, JazzHR, BambooHR, Rippling, Pinpoint and Recruitee (Workday and Oracle need a connected application inbox). It does not use LinkedIn Easy Apply or Indeed's form. Each application gets a resume written for that posting, plus a cover letter when the form asks. Your employers, job titles, dates, schools, degrees and certifications come from your own record. ApplyEze brings the posting's named skills and tools onto your skills line, even when your own record does not list them. There is no step to remove one before a live run, so use a dry run to see what it writes, and be ready to discuss anything on the page. It runs on your own machine in a browser you can watch. New accounts get 50 free credits, once per email address, with no card, and a credit is used only when an application is confirmed as submitted. Listed plans are Starter at $19 a month for 700 and Pro at $99 a month for 3,000, while LinkedIn and Indeed cost nothing, so use the free sites for searching and for people. ApplyEze is for when the bottleneck is the forms.

If you are also weighing a third board, our ZipRecruiter vs Indeed comparison applies the same tests to ZipRecruiter.