You Attracted the Candidate. Indeed Sold Them to Your Competitor.

You own an ABA practice, which means you operate in one of the toughest labor markets in existence.

Here is the market you are hiring in. According to the BACB, in 2025 employers posted 132,307 jobs requiring BCBA certification, a 28% jump over the prior year, against roughly 83,600 active BCBAs nationwide. Many of those 83,600 are not looking. And you have likely seen the TYGES Behavioral Health Recruiting report estimating the field would need about five times its current BCBA workforce to meet actual clinical demand, with more than half of U.S. counties having zero BCBAs practicing in them at all.

Now imagine attracting a candidate in that market with your money, your brand, and your network — then paying Indeed to receive that candidate, and helping Indeed market your competitors’ jobs to them.

That is the trade a lot of ABA owners make every single day, and I do not get it.

First, the everyday version.

I cannot go a day without seeing an employee of an ABA company share an Indeed post to my LinkedIn feed instead of their own careers site. Their network — people who trust them, people they personally influenced — lands on a marketplace where a competitor’s job is one click away. That is your company’s effort and your money, spent filling someone else’s funnel.

If your careers site works, this is a training problem, and it is yours to fix. Maybe the Indeed link was just what was handy. Maybe someone was browsing jobs on the clock and a social share felt like penance. Either way, a 15-minute conversation and one approved link fixes it. The next one is not fixed in 15 minutes.

The worst infraction.

An entire company running Indeed as their Applicant Tracking System (ATS). There is no excuse for this. A working ATS can be built in an afternoon. Ask Jason Pistulka, who deployed a lightweight one for a client in that same time frame. And before the build-versus-buy crowd comes for me: if a lightweight build is not your appetite, there are dozens of off-the-shelf systems at every price point, most of them cheaper than a single month of unfilled caseload. Which brings up the number you should actually be looking at.

Run the math on one open BCBA req. Every BCBA you cannot hire is a supervision ceiling. RBTs you cannot deploy. Authorized hours you cannot bill. Families who sit on your waitlist while another provider returns their call. That is not a talent-acquisition-only issue. It is capacity you are paying rent on and cannot sell.

For years, robust cash flow covered up poor operational execution in ABA. With reimbursement rates getting trimmed, that cover is gone. Sloppy practice now carries a price, and hiring is where it shows up first.

So pull your Indeed invoice from last quarter. Then ask your team how many of those applicants became hires. If nobody can answer the second question, you did not buy candidates. You bought applications, and you paid a marketplace to introduce your candidates to the practice down the street. Still not convinced it matters? Let me walk you through applying to one of your own jobs.

What it looks like from your candidate’s side.

Assume the candidate does not already have an Indeed profile. Before they can start an application for your company, they have to build one for Indeed. It is a workflow that showcases none of your EVP, benefits, clinical model, caseload expectations, or supervision structure. Just data collection, so a marketplace can farm your candidate out to other employers and charge you for the privilege.

The profile build was so long I could have watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Hyperbole, of course, but you get the point. And that was before the poorly written employer screening questions, which I will spare you.

Along the way, as a first-time user, I was prompted (see what I did there) to hand over the data Indeed needs to target me with solicitations. Location. Compensation. Job titles. Plus a button to make myself discoverable to other employers, served right before the final button to submit my application (this was not the first time I was prompted to turn that on either).

Ten minutes and several pages later, my application was finally in. Then I checked my email. Three messages, all stamped the same hour and the same minute. Two job solicitations. One confirmation that my application had been received. The solicitations arrived first.

Indeed marketed two competing employers to me before your company could confirm I had applied. Good news for me as a candidate. Considerably less good for you as the owner.

But like a late-90s infomercial, there was more.

Thirty-one minutes later, two more opportunities hit my inbox. Neither was for the company I had just applied to. I ran the same test on a second job and got the same result: roughly 30 minutes, two more solicitations.

That is the product. Your candidate is the inventory, and you are the one who stocked the shelf.

Now picture an RBT candidate doing all of that on a phone between sessions. They do not finish. And you never learn they existed. You cannot manage a pipeline you cannot see, and you are the only person in your building with the authority to change that.

What to do about it.

1. Own the destination. Every post, share, QR code, text, mailer, and carrier pigeon points to your careers site. Make it policy, not preference.
2. Deploy a real ATS. Built or off the shelf, either one beats renting your candidate experience from a marketplace that sells your competitors the same aisle. Price it against one month of an unfilled BCBA req, not against zero.
3. Apply to your own job. On your phone, time it by minutes and clicks. If it takes more than five minutes, you have found your next project.

Remember, you are competing for clinicians and technicians who have their pick of employers. Your application is the first honest look they get at how your practice operates. Right now, a lot of you are showing them someone else’s brand, and paying for the privilege.