How Does Indeed Disposition Sync Work? A Technical Overview

In today’s hiring landscape, there is no shortage of data – but there is a shortage of clarity. Employers are inundated with activity, metrics and tools, yet what they truly need are meaningful, customised insights that cut through the noise and drive better decisions. 

That is where Indeed's Disposition Sync integration comes in. This integration collects data that provides employers with a bespoke, end-to-end view of their performance, helping them optimise their hiring outcomes based on their own trends and data rather than industry averages. 

At the same time, these insights enable Indeed to continuously refine its matching technology using real indicators of what leads to the hire. In turn, it creates better connections between employers and jobseekers. But how does it all work?

As technology revolutionises the world of work, it is natural for employers and partners to have questions about the new systems and data. To break it down, here are eight of the most common questions employers ask about Disposition Sync – from how it works to how you can leverage the data to hone your hiring strategy.

1. What is Disposition Sync?

Indeed’s Disposition Sync integration is designed to collect and synchronise disposition data from jobs with Indeed Apply from employers’ applicant tracking systems (applicant tracking system), back to Indeed. 

Disposition data refers to any status change or action a recruiter or hiring manager does with a candidate’s application, such as moving an application to ‘reviewed’, ‘interviewed’, ‘hired’ or ‘rejected’. This information not only improves visibility and transparency across your hiring teams but also communicates back to Indeed how well the candidate fits the role based on how far they got in the process.

 2. How does Disposition Sync benefit employers and jobseekers?

Disposition Sync uses important hiring signals to give both employers and jobseekers a better experience and outcomes throughout the hiring process.

For employers, it helps you reduce time to hire by giving you powerful insights into your entire hiring funnel. These include:

• How your hiring compares to others in your industry
• Visibility into your cost per hire

In addition, your job ads receive a Responsive Employer Badge, which results in increased performance.

For both jobseekers and employers, it provides a feedback loop in order to improve Indeed’s matching technology, leading to better matches and stronger connections across the marketplace.

This data is currently available through custom reports that your Indeed account team can make for you.

And coming soon: A self-serve dashboard to help employers pull data on specific roles, benchmark against industry competitors and refine hiring strategies.

3. Do employers have to share disposition data with Indeed?

Sharing disposition data with Indeed is optional. While applicant tracking system platforms that use Indeed Apply are required to build the Disposition Sync integration, clients of those platforms are not required to share disposition data with Indeed and have the explicit option to opt out.

4. Does disposition data include PII (personally identifiable information)?

The three main pieces of data that the applicant tracking system sends to Indeed are an Indeed Apply ID, status (i.e. ‘reviewed’, ‘interviewed’, ‘hired’ or ‘rejected’) and timestamp. There is no PII shared in transit – this is what many security teams want to understand. Since the Apply ID and user data originated from Indeed, we can link this back on the Indeed side to help improve performance. 

Indeed takes data privacy seriously and is committed to being transparent in how data is collected and used. You can read more about how Indeed approaches data protection.

5. Who controls disposition data once it is shared?

Employers remain in control of whether disposition data is shared with Indeed. Once the data reaches Indeed, Indeed is responsible for securely managing and processing the data to support hiring insights and improve job matching. The data is used only for these purposes and retained only as long as necessary under Indeed’s privacy policies and legal requirements.

6. Is Disposition Sync required for all jobs in an applicant tracking system?

No. An employer can send Indeed disposition data for all of its applications, but Indeed does not require it. And, importantly, Indeed does not require disposition data to be shared at all; employers can opt out of sharing it.

As hiring technology continues to evolve, Indeed knows that employers and partners want clear information about how platforms work together. Indeed will continue sharing guidance to help its customers make the most of the tools available to them.

7. Do Indeed-built integrations require Disposition Sync?

No. When our Workday, SAP and Oracle integrations were first built, we linked the activation of Indeed Apply and Disposition Sync for technical simplicity, not due to a business requirement. Based on customer feedback, we later separated these features. Today, Disposition Sync and Indeed Apply can be enabled independently, and one does not require the other.

8. What permissions does Indeed need from Workday to turn on the Indeed Apply and Disposition Sync integrations?

To enable Indeed Apply and Disposition Sync with Workday, it requires permission that allows us to search existing candidate records and create or update candidate profiles in your Workday tenant.

This permission lets Indeed:

• Search Workday to see if a candidate already exists, so we can append the new application to the existing profile rather than create a duplicate.
• Create a new candidate record when no matching profile exists.

Because of how Workday’s permissions are structured, this access is broader than the minimum we would ideally need. It technically allows Indeed to view and export candidate records. There is currently no narrower Workday permission that still supports the de-duplication behaviour that employers have requested.

We are transparent about this in our documentation. To run a Workday audit report and verify the data that our integration is delivering and requesting:

1. Select the ‘View User or Task or Object Audit Trail’ (UTO) task in Workday. 
2. Enter the ISU (integration system user) name you used for the integration with Indeed.
3. You can then view all web service requests performed by the ISU over the specified time period that resulted in any changes to data within your Workday system.
4. To view all activity related to the ISU, use the 'View User Activity' task within Workday and view all the calls performed. You can copy and update the default report to include the data our integration is specifically accessing.

By automatically reconciling candidate outcomes between Indeed and your applicant tracking system, the Disposition Sync integration gives your teams a single trustworthy view of your hiring funnel while preserving control over what data you share and how it is used. The result is faster, more confident decisions, better-matched candidates and a more transparent experience for jobseekers and hiring managers alike.

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.