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Ad Age Marketer's Brief
Why marketers chase active demand and miss the passive majority, with Indeed's CMO
00:19:48
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hi, I'm Brandon Dorer, creativity and media Innovation reporter at Ad Age. Welcome to another edition of the Marketers Brief Podcast, our weekly discussion of news and trends that have the industry buzzing. Indeed recently pivoted its marketing strategy to focus on fandoms by targeting select groups. The job platform is aiming to capture the attention of consumers who aren't immediately looking for jobs. It targeted soccer fans through its Chief World Cup Watcher campaign, where it basically hired creators to watch World cup games and make content. And it made workers the focus in its Jobs Need People campaign. On the latest episode of the Marketer's Brief Podcast, Indeed Chief Marketing Officer James Whitemore talks about introducing the new marketing strategy. He shares how he balances new and old tactics, brand building and performance marketing, and how he introduced a new direction to the brand when he joined last year. He also shares tips for marketing to consumers with AI and economic anxiety. Here's that conversation now. James Whitehorn, welcome to the Marketer's Brief Podcast.
- [01:22]
B
Thanks Brandon. Nice to be here.
- [01:23]
A
It is great to have you here. Thank you so much for for joining us. I want to chat about a variety of things with you, but I thought we could start by talking about Indeed's marketing focus and how it's been changing lately and how it's targeting has been changing lately. Its target consumer. Lately it feels like Indeed's campaigns have been focusing more on people, right? The people who work and specific groups of people who work. A couple of recent examples I have in mind are the Jobs Need People campaign that rolled out over the summ, as well as the Chief World Cup Watcher campaign which you guys kind of closed out fairly recently as well. We have covered both of those campaigns, so listeners should check out the campaigns on our website so they can kind of see what we're talking about. Follow along, see the visuals of the work as we're chatting here. I want to maybe start by talking about the Chief World Cup Watcher campaign sort of as an example of how Indeed has been shifting its marketing strategy to focus more on fandoms versus kind of going broad and targeting like wide groups of people. Can you just talk a little bit about how you have sort of been making that change in the roughly like year or so since you kind of stepped into the CMOC at Indeed?
- [02:34]
B
Yeah, certainly I certainly can. And phantoms I think are very important. Again, think of it from a job seeker perspective. It's very easy to identify people who are in active job searches. There are so many signals and you know that current job seeker demand for people who are actively in searching for jobs, really easy to identify through search orientated programs, social programs, etc. But the key for our marketing campaigns is not just to look at people who are actively in the search for a job right now, but, you know, looking for the future demand and looking for people who may be passively open to opportunities rather than actively searching. Because you want those passive job seekers into the marketplace, because you want to be able to present them with suggestions and opportunities they may be interested, invested in. And you want the future demand because you know there are people that are going to be entering the workforce in a couple of years from now and you want them, when they start looking for, for work, to be thinking of indeed, first and foremost, people who are currently happy in their roles. That may change. Kind of like, you know, it's much more about future demand. And I always believe that, you know, to capture that future demand, you need to plug into the channels and communities where those people participate. And your fandoms are a great example of that. Whether it's sports, entertainment or music. Plugging into those fandoms and actually becoming relevant as part of those fandoms is really key. Yeah, all of the work that we do with our partnership, it's audience driven first and is based on the relevance of the content that we can work with to think about future demand from those audiences.
- [04:25]
A
Can you give just a little bit more clarity about how this approach kind of differs from how indeed has typically marketed and what it's kind of marketing goals have have been in the past? Of course, recognizing that you've been in for a year or so. But yeah, just. Just curious, kind of like how this approach differs from how indeed has, has typically kind of set its marketing goals.
- [04:43]
B
Yeah, well, you know, previously for, you know, maybe the last 10 years, the focus has always been around identifying people who are in active job search and bringing them into the marketplace to search on opportunities? Well, over the last year that has changed completely. The platform has moved from a job search marketplace to a matching and sourcing marketplace where we are presenting proactively to job seekers recommended opportunities rather than relying on them to search for new opportunities. So as I said, you move beyond the active job seeker to the passive, curious, open minded. You are looking more at kind of like people who are in the latter stages of their education or vocational training. Rather than being actively searching, you are looking at people who are potentially reentering the job marketplace after kind of like your life change. And you are trying to identify that future demand rather than the Current demand, which is such an important shift.
- [05:56]
A
Can you talk a little bit about why you made that decision to be a little bit more proactive with getting the brand out in front of people maybe before they immediately need the services? Because I think it's a common critique I sort of hear of like modern marketing strategies generally is that they're a little overly focused on, right, like that immediate conversion, that immediate sale without kind of giving the brand a little bit of room to breathe. Can you talk about making why you made that decision?
- [06:21]
B
Well, I think it's one of the most common mistakes that people can make is that you don't invest enough in that future talent pool. For us it's, you know, about building the talent pool that the clients our employers, you know, access and people who are in active job search, like I say, very easy to identify. But you know, people who are passive of the job seeking, open, curious to new opportunities. We want them in the marketplace too because we want to be able to present to them opportunities that may be of interest. We want to be able to show them what the next step in their career may be or kind of like what tangential kind of like opportunities may exist based on their past experiences, et cetera. So it's all about kind of like moving beyond the search to being able to match people with opportunities that would be of interest to them and have them build profiles and indeed which are sourceable by our employers. So it's a very different way of thinking about how you target that audience and it's just an entirely different shift in the tactics. We keep working all the programs which are designed to reach the active job seekers, very kind of like, you know, very big investments in that, but it's moving beyond that.
- [07:37]
A
You mentioned that the brand is still investing in those, those older programs and actively like reach in reaching people who actively like looking for that next job. Can you talk a little bit about sort of balancing an old marketing strategy while introducing a new one and kind of keeping both going? Like did you have to kind of pursue just a budget increase to just do more marketing across the board or. So how do you kind of juggle like to introducing a new focus and keeping the old marketing focus alive at the same time?
- [08:06]
B
You know, indeed marketing is a very large scale marketing, budgets and teams all around the world and that element of performance marketing intercepting current demand for people actively seeking a job, That's a science, pure science, that we can predict exactly when we hit in any market around the world. The limit of your Google programs, your meta programs, your Apple programs and how much should be invested and how we look at the cost of a acquisition versus the lifetime value. It's a science. And so we will continue to invest the maximum of the performance thresholds in each market around the world. And then we look at okay for the remaining investments and the more top of funnel and forward looking investments, how the investments in that top of funnel improve the performance of the lower funnel programs. And again, it's a very scientific approach and we run blackout tests and we run holdout tests in different markets to really show that if you invest across the funnel, you can improve the performance and the return on investment in marketing, period. Whereas if you just over rotate to lower funnel demand capture type of tactics, then the whole model becomes less efficient. So it's a science and something that we work to prove all the time.
- [09:34]
A
Can you talk a little bit about how maybe indeed measurement strategy has changed to accommodate this broader focus? Right. As you're sort of launching this campaign, these campaigns that are not focused on sort of immediately finding someone or pairing them with a job, is it more of a focus on just getting people to create profiles? What are sort of like the, the metrics and how do you measure the, the success of some of these campaigns?
- [09:56]
B
Yeah, if you think about the future, kind of like, you know, demand and people who are not necessarily right now active in job search. And then the key metrics become like quality of profile completion and the sourceability of that profile. Can our matching engines actually use that profile to match the person with potential opportunities? And then you start looking at apply starts. And when we actually present opportunities to a candidate, do they actually go through the application process and start and apply? So historically measurements have been much more about clicks. You know, kind of like did they click on a job listing? Did we get, you know, eyeballs on a job listing now? Kind of like it's much more about the quality of the profile, the matchability of that profile, the quality of the profile and the apply start type of process rather than just clicks.
- [10:52]
A
Gotcha, gotcha. I have one more question I wanted to ask on this before I want to get into talking about the Jobs Need People campaign. I'm curious because you've been, you joined in June 2025, right? A little over a year ago. Can you talk a little bit about like tangibly when you kind of step into this new organization in this new role and you have this idea for like wanting to nurture the brand more and doing that alongside some of the existing performance work, kind of tangibly like how you introduce the new focus to the organization and maybe like change the direction. Right. That the, that the ship is steering in. Because I think it's something that I'm sure loads of listeners and marketers have to have to think about all the time as they are thinking about stepping into different roles in organizations.
- [11:37]
B
Yeah, and the way that you do I think is very dependent on the kind of like the culture of the company and indeed is a product led, performance orientated company, period. And I think you adapt to that. So firstly, all of the work that we'd be doing to evolve the campaigns, to evolve the audience targeting, looking more at the future demand rather than current demand, is tied with product. The product has evolved significantly. The key shift is moving from a job search engine where you are basically selling an advertising business where our customers are paying for clicks on their job, for eyeballs on their job. You fundamentally shift the business model to a sourcing and matching marketplace where you are giving our employers advanced tools to be able to source candidates rather than being passively waiting for candidates to click on their job. So the platform shifts. So how does marketing have to shift? Well, you have to move beyond the active job seekers who will be clicking on jobs. You need to build a large talent pool that may be more passive, may be more open and curious. And so tying it to product strategy is really, really key. And then in a performance based company, data speaks and to be able to build the tests, to be able to actually base all of the investment models on proven data. And when you operate in 60 plus countries around the world, you can run kind of like very structured tests between your performance programs and your top of funnel programs across all your different channels of execution from social through traditional media, etc. So really just building that test model model that is the foundation of all of the investment recommendations. So tie it to product and base it on data and test and iterate type of models has been the key to bringing the company along with us.
- [13:48]
A
I want to talk about the jobs need people campaign as well. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to focus on workers and how workers can help companies versus just kind of the the other way around. Especially with the backdrop of right, you have all these AI matching tools but the campaign is very much not like hyper focused on on the products and talking about how people are using the products is very, it's a very human centric campaign focused on people's jobs and how they do their work. Can you talk a little bit about why strategically that decision made sense to lean it in that way?
- [14:24]
B
Well, firstly, you know, the work is a very human thing. It's, you know, people. And 95% of the world's jobs are people jobs. They are healthcare, they are education, they are retail, retail, they are hospitality, they are construction. Kind of like, you know, the majority of the world's jobs are still people jobs. Now there's a lot of jobs that are changing for sure. And there are a lot of industries, including marketing come like, you know, which is being impacted by kind of like technology changes. But, you know, essentially people are at the heart of work. And if you look across the different audiences and understand what their mindset is. Right now, from a job seeker perspective, people are feeling very unseen. They're using kind of like AI tools to generate resumes and cover letters and they're losing the personal kind of like, aspect of kind of like, you know, applying for a job. They are getting ghosted. They're sending out 200 plus applications and not hearing back. And it's kind of like all they want is to be seen. And the message to a job seeker is that the way for success is not to go apply for as many jobs as you possibly can, but to make yourself searchable and sourceable and to build profiles which move beyond the traditional resume so that the right jobs can find you. From an employer perspective, then there's two camps of people. Basically. There's those people who, despite kind of like everything that's happening in the labor market, still have a really hard time finding qualified candidates. There's a chronic labor shortage in health care, for example, and so much competing opportunities for a relatively restricted labor marketplace. And for those people, they want to be able to proactively go out and source the right candidates and not have to rely on people coming and finding them. So it's all about matching and enable them to source. And then there's another group of employees who are inundated, who may get thousands of applications for any one role they post. And you know, if you talk to the talent acquisition people in those organizations, kind of like they can't deal with it. You're actually processing. All of that is draining. And so they are turning to AI tools which are basically dehumanizing the process. And they know it's wrong because at the end of the day, you hire a person and they need a personal connection with a candidate before they hired. So all we're trying to do is kind of like resolve those tensions in the marketplace and say, hey, you need humans in this loop. You need to hire a human. You need to use the tools to effectively identify the talent that you need. And from a job seeker perspective, you need to use the tools to identify kind of like the opportunities that you should be applying for and then let your human out, connect people to people, and it's a much better hiring process.
- [17:33]
A
Yes. I'm curious if you think there are lessons that other marketers can take away from this campaign, regardless of what category they're in about marketing to consumers with like I was kind of talking about earlier in the conversation. Right. With maybe AI anxiety, economic anxiety, perhaps like a confluence. Right. Of the two, just because I would imagine that obviously this campaign is very focused on job searching and your business, but I would imagine maybe there's a lesson or two for other marketers in different categories about reaching kind of this consumer base that you guys were focused on with this campaign.
- [18:06]
B
Yeah. And I think nothing new here. I think you really have to understand the mindset of your audiences. And you know, if you look at the way that our campaigns have evolved over recent years, previously there was a lot of humor being used to try and make light of the job application type of process. And it's humor is not appropriate right now. You have to recognize that they're kind of like a lot of people are in a pretty dark place place when they think about finding a job and it's got developing the empathy and the emotional connection with those people and just say, hey, come like, yeah, we're here, we've got you. We can show you where the jobs are. We can help you understand how skill sets are changing for those jobs. We can understand in your current role how you fare against others in similar type of positions, whether you're paid fairly or not, whether your work experiences on par with others, etc. And just be a guiding light to help people through a period of great change. So tapping into that based on the understanding of where those audiences are is really, really key. But I think every marketer understands that.
- [19:11]
A
All right, James, I think that is all we have time for today. I just want to say thank you again for joining us here on the Marketers Brief.
- [19:18]
B
Yeah, no, it was a pleasure. Thanks, Brendan.
- [19:25]
A
That was James Whitemore, chief Marketing officer at indeed. I'm Brandon Dorer, creativity and media innovation reporter at Indeed at age. I'd like to thank our producer, Lauren Giardio and invite you to subscribe to the Marketers Brief podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, we promise to keep it brief.