Job Spotter App: Extra Money From Taking Pictures

Job Spotter is an application from Indeed.com that lets you earn Amazon gift credit for taking pictures of hiring signs. This has been a fairly simple way for us to make an extra $20 – $40/mo without much effort by taking pictures of hiring signs at businesses you frequent or may walk past.

What Is the App and How Do I Use It?

Job Spotter is an app from Indeed.com, a recruiting and hiring service. Indeed sells their recruiting and job posting services to businesses needing to hire people. Job Spotter is a way for Indeed to generate leads for their salespeople to market their services and they’ve decided to crowd source this information from anyone and everyone who will use their app to take pictures of hiring signs.

As a user of the app, when you open it up it defaults to your camera. The first picture you take is of the hiring sign. The second picture you take is of the storefront of the location, which needs to include signage showing what the business is. Then hit submit and it’ll either upload the information or give you a network error if the cellular data is poor and you can upload it later. There are no limits to the number of submissions you can have.

How Does It Pay?

Job Spotter pays on a points basis, with each point being worth $0.01 in Amazon credit. I’ve had submissions range from a low of $0.05 to a high of $2.34. There are a lot of variables to how much each submission earns, but generally first time submissions pay the most and smaller businesses pay more. Once you submit a picture, Indeed reviews the submission and rewards points anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours after the submission. They report the earnings to inside the history screen and totals in your wallet. You can get to the history screen by cancel under the submit photos button when you open the app. Here’s what the submissions screen looks like:

Finding New vs. Existing Signs

There is a map feature that you can use to see the number of submissions that have been sent in an area. The map also shows dark green vs. light green dots, with the dark greens indicating it will be a higher value sign if you go past the building. These are likely from businesses that have either only had one picture taken and Indeed wants to validate the lead or businesses where the last picture taken was 30+ days ago and the company wants to know if its a live opportunity. Here’s a look at a map view around a popular beach area.

What Are Some Tips After Two Months?

• Enjoy the additional walking more than the money. The biggest benefit to us from having Job Spotter is it has encouraged us to walk an entire area if we are already there. We’ll now go and walk the entire strip center at a grocery store area and grab one to two extra signs.
• Smaller towns/areas tend to pay more. I’ve used the app in multiple areas and have found smaller areas tend to pay more than bigger cities. There tend to be less users on the app so the number of pictures a single sign has received is less.
• Heavily trafficked tourist areas may be disappointing. There were a couple areas we went to that returned 5pt after 5pt sign, then when I reviewed the history of that sign and saw 27 submissions!

• The worst thing I’ve had happen in a highly trafficked area is received four duplicate rejections in a row. There must be a feature in the application that prevents a group of three people from all submitting the same picture at the same time. I likely had another job spotter walking the same block around the same time as me.
• Don’t attempt to take a picture from your car. I got one rejected in an attempt from the passenger side of our jeep. That side window will score an automatic rejections.
• Inside signs pay more. Not everyone is going into the business and signs placed inside vs. outside get less traffic. I scored a 200+ point sign in a busy tire shop where a similar outside sign at the repair shop down the street only earned me 15 points.
• Non-retail pays better than retail. Some of my highest scoring signs have been a senior living center, a local school hiring bus drivers, and a not for profit providing services to disabled individuals. Biking through an industrial area (if its safe) can provide some nice returns.
• After 30 days, you can submit the same location a second time. This is especially useful when a store near where you’ll be anyways is always hiring.
• Unreadable signs will occasionally be frustrating. You need to be able to get something in the picture stating the business’s name and the building. This is easy for retail storefronts but can be more difficult with other businesses. There’s a local HVAC contractor that doesn’t have a logo on their building and I’ve been unable to get a submission accepted.

Wrapping It Up:

There is zero chance I’m going to get wealthy using Job Spotter. The extra $20-$40 per month we’re earning is at best nice pocket change to apply against something I might buy anyways. I think at best, if someone was strategic and spent a full day on a bicycle once a month, they could earn $80 – $100 in that day and offset some spending. If you have to start using your car/gas, the returns would go to zero almost immediately. The bigger benefit we’ve experienced is getting in more steps in places we would have been anyways. We are early retirees with more time on our hands, its become a fun game to play when there’s a small item on Amazon we’ve been eyeing to purchase.

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