Indeed is
used to looking at both sides of the employment street, presenting millions of employers and hundreds of millions of job seekers. And while its new “Jobs Need People” marketing campaign may sound a little obvious, it came from an insight that was anything but.
“The category has mostly told one side of the story, that people need jobs,” says Jennifer Warren, Indeed’s vice president of global marketing. “The unlock was to
flip that perspective and remind us that the equation runs both ways: Jobs need people, too.”
She says the new work, from agency 72AndSunny, is based on the
growing feeling among applicants that the hiring process has become tougher. “We were already hearing in the market that job seekers want to feel seen, and employers want help finding the right people
without losing the human element in the process.”
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The campaign stems from research that the landscape really is brutally inhuman, with 81% of people who apply
to a job never hearing back from the employer. On average, job seekers spend six hours researching and applying, yet 53% assume they won’t hear back anyway.
To make sure applicants get that “hiring must remain human” messaging, it was important to make AI — an increasingly integral component in the hiring industry
— part of that conversation. Warren says this isn’t contradictory. “We don’t see the human message and the AI story as competing narratives; we see them as the same story from two angles.
Indeed’s view is that AI should reduce friction in hiring, not remove humanity from it.”
As hiring gets more complex and more impersonal, “the role of
technology should be to help people and employers find each other faster and more meaningfully. When we say ‘hiring must remain human,’ we’re not stepping back from AI. We’re defining what our AI is
for.”
Indeed, owned by Recruit Holdings, the Japanese company that also owns Glassdoor, is one of those relatively unusual marketers that have to send B2B and
consumer messages that reinforce one another.
“The broader platform is built around a two-sided truth: job seekers want to feel seen, and employers want help
finding the right candidate faster and with more confidence,” says Warren. “So even when the films speak in a more emotionally resonant way to job seekers, the employer is absolutely present
in the story and in the product proof behind it.”
Ads will run across TV, streaming, YouTube, and social media.
