Kill Your Indeed Habit: What Job Ads Actually Cost You

Jason Pistulka spent over 25 years in HR and recruiting — including roles at Microsoft, Stora Enso, and CUNA Mutual Group, then a decade at HCA Healthcare (2014–2025), rising from Sr. Director of Talent Acquisition to AVP of Talent Acquisition Strategy, Operations & Candidate Engagement, where he led a national recruiting team of up to 600 people, managing over 40,000 open requisitions and more than 125,000 hires a year. Since 2019 he's run StratTech Talent Consulting and Advisory, and currently advises a long roster of HR tech companies — including Joveo, Fountain, Match2, and Sense — on product strategy and go-to-market. He also offers free Google for Jobs audits and has made “kill the dependency on Indeed” something close to a personal mission statement.

This one's a full teardown of where recruitment advertising money actually goes. Jason opens with the thing that amazes him most: most companies can't answer the basic question of what their ad spend is doing, because they're still relying on a candidate-filled dropdown menu nobody takes seriously. From there he walks through his own viral audit of Walmart's career site — 14 million visitors a month, a resume-matching tool so broken it gave Jason's high-school-diploma son and a senior finance executive the exact same job matches, and no working Google for Jobs at the largest private employer in America.

He doesn't spare Indeed either: this is the guy behind the widely-read “How Indeed Is Losing What Little Trust It Had of Both Candidates and Employers” article, and on the show he goes further, on record, calling out Indeed executives directly for dressing up a minimum spend requirement as “candidate experience.”

The back half turns practical and a little unhinged in the best way: Jason walks through how to actually audit ad spend (source tracking, cost-per-quality-application, conversion by channel), reveals that Bing quietly drove 11% of his traffic with better engagement than anyone expected, and then — because apparently a slow weekend calls for it — describes building a fully functioning ATS with automation from scratch in about ten hours, just to prove that the technology isn't the hard part legacy vendors want you to think it is.

In This Episode:

• Why most companies can't answer “what did that ad spend actually do”
• The Walmart career site teardown: 14M monthly visitors, no working Google for Jobs, a resume-matching tool that gives everyone the same jobs
• Jason's viral takedown of Indeed, and why he says “the soul of Indeed rotted some time ago”
• The AI Apply bot problem, and why one of Jason's clients turned off Easy Apply entirely
• The 11%-of-traffic channel nobody believed in (hint: it's Bing)
• The ATS Jason built from scratch in one weekend, and what that means for legacy vendor pricing
• Why ERP platforms like Workday, Oracle, and UKG consistently fail at recruiting's transactional volume
• Ashley's Talent Outside the Box segment on data hygiene vs. data integrity

About the Guest:

Jason Pistulka is the Founder & Principal Consultant of StratTech Talent Consulting and Advisory, where he advises employers and HR tech companies on recruiting operations, technology design, and workforce strategy. A 25+ year veteran of HR and recruiting, Jason previously led talent acquisition strategy and operations for HCA Healthcare, managing a national team of up to 600 recruiters responsible for 40,000+ open reqs and 125,000+ hires annually.

Connect with Jason:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jasonpistulka
• Website: strattechconsulting.com
• Newsletter: The Talent Strategy Brief (2,496+ subscribers)

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• StratTech Talent Consulting and Advisory: strattechconsulting.com
• The Talent Strategy Brief — Jason's weekly newsletter
• Article: “How Indeed Is Losing What Little Trust It Had of Both Candidates and Employers”
• Article: “Walmart is the Largest Private Employer in America. Their Career Site is Broken.”
• Book: Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality — out October 2026, by Desiree Goldey. notapersonalitybook.com
• Talentless at RecFest USA and HR Tech Conference this fall — Ashley and Desiree are speaking and hosting