When James Whitemore joined Indeed last year as chief marketing officer and lead of global marketing strategy, he was attracted to the mission: “we help people get jobs.”
“It’s really about being a guiding light in a time of great transition in the job markets,” says Whitemore.
Indeed’s meeting rooms at the office all hold an orange chair, which is designed to be the job seekers chair. “No one ever sits in that chair. It’s just a reminder that our mission is to help people get jobs,” Whitemore explains.
As the labor market is being transformed by AI, which has changed the skills required to land a job and the process of searching for a job, Indeed wants to be there to help. The brand has shifted its humorous tone to a more empathetic one and is going big with a new World Cup campaign called “Jobs Need People,” created in collaboration with 72andSunny. The effort is based on the idea that jobs need people as much as people need jobs. It will run on TV during the Fox broadcast of the games.
“The world of hiring is changing rapidly,” says Whitemore. “So many things are changing in our world from how AI is impacting jobs to economic changes, demographic changes. My vision for the brand is to be a guiding light that is helping people understand how all of these changes come together and what implications it has from a job seeker perspective and from a hiring perspective.
Whitemore is speaking at Brand Innovators Cannes Lions Marketing Leadership Summit @ Cannes on Wednesday morning at the Beach Stage. Brand Innovators caught up with Whitemore from his office in Austin to discuss the new campaign, the World Cup and Cannes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you are showing up for the World Cup?
We recently announced we were hiring Fox’s chief World Cup watcher. They are actually hiring somebody who will be placed in a glass box studio in Times Square in New York, for the six weeks of the tournament, to watch each game and provide social commentary on the game.
It’s the chief World Cup watcher hired by Indeed. You’ll see lots of out-of-home work. You’ll see the creative change to very unique, black-and-white execution, something very different than we’ve executed in the past.
Over the last few years, we’ve used a lot of humor in advertising and digital content. And I don’t feel that’s appropriate right now. There’s nothing funny about the job market. It has to switch to being much more empathetic, to understanding that a lot of the job markets are very tough right now. And positioning ourselves as a guiding light who can help people understand what is happening and help them make informed decisions.
Why is it important for your brand to participate in cultural moments like the World Cup?
It’s really about fandoms. You’ll also see us move outside of sports and into other areas where fandoms are very key. If you can really tap into a community that has a unifying passion and belief set and deliver genuine, authentic content, you will deliver results much greater than generic media programs. We use the fandoms to get to our job seeker audiences specifically.
The goal is to bring them into the sites, to create profiles and to apply for jobs.
It’s talking about people get a career in sports. What do people who don’t quite make it through academy programs do next? How do they plan their careers? All the way through to showcasing the security staff or concession staff at a stadium. We are showing the breadth of the employment ecosystem that exists in those fandoms. That content is well received by the audiences because they’re telling a story about it. The companies we work with will tell you that their job pages are the most trafficked segments of their digital properties. People are really interested in how they actually get into companies.
How did all these players get to be in the World Cup? What was their path to doing it? What is their support system around them that allows them to show up on the field and show up at their very best for 90 minutes? There’s thousands of people who sit behind those players, from relocation services when they move around the world to physical therapists to mental health services.
What are you doing to get attention in a fragmented space?
Things like the chief World Cup watcher will be part of every Fox broadcast. It’s not just the broadcast. It’s all of the social commentary and all of the way that plays into social channels, as well as in traditional broadcast media. Then the execution of signage within stadiums showcasing how people who are working at the World Cup got their jobs from Indeed to the stories of the players. And just pulling it all together as one. We have very broad media plans across social, traditional TV. It will be a big event for us.
There are a lot of conversations among job seekers around how hard it is to get past the AI scanners. What resources are you offering to empower job hunters?
There is a lot changing within the platform itself. We have to shift the positioning of Indeed from being a job search engine to being a matchmaking marketplace. Instead of having to come and search for jobs, people are building complete profiles, which allow them to be a searchable resource within the talent pool. A lot of work that we’re doing today is about how to build a profile in the world where AI is doing a lot of the candidate selection and how to differentiate yourself.
Historically a resume is a very work-focused one or two pages. It didn’t really talk much about your character or ambitions. What employers are looking for today is people who are adaptable, who are learners, who have emotional intelligence and those are not the type of characteristics that are easy to detect from a traditional resume. Employers are using all the intelligence we gather from the hundreds of millions of job postings to refine their search criteria so they can be better matched. It’s really teaching people how to interact with AI. It’s a little different now. But our advice to everyone is keep the humanity in the process. You cannot fully automate a job selection process. You need to have humans involved at the right time.
Can you talk about how your past experiences helped shape your perspective in this current role?
When you come from a tech background, you’re always trying to not talk about the tech because typically you’re selling to people who are not the practitioners of that technology. You tend to get very focused around talking about the business implications of changes in technology and how that impacts their business. In the past, we’ve talked about Indeed as the world’s largest job marketplace and how advanced our search capability is. But now, we have the ability to guide employers through a very dynamic labor market based on all of our hiring labs data and labor market research based on what we see from job seeker changes and demographic patterns.
We position ourselves as a strategic advisor to companies who are trying to understand the implications within their industries and geographies. It’s changing the narrative from Indeed as a job search to a matchmaking marketplace. All of the work that I’ve done in the past has been very focused on business outcomes and how technology helps people do whatever they do better. That’s the same conversation we need to have at Indeed. We are not just a source of candidates, it’s a source of great insights into a very dynamic labor market and a set of tools that help you bring the talent you need into the organization in a very effective way.
What are some of the conversations you’re looking forward to at Cannes?
The whole concept of fandoms is very relevant. I’m looking forward to hearing how others really work with their partnerships. It’s always amazing when you talk to the people who run the sports partnership programs, they’ll tell you that 50-70 percent of the people who they work with really do not leverage them as media companies. They think of them as hospitality events and executive engagement events. But those partnerships are, first and foremost, a media partnership. F1 is owned by Liberty Media. F1 just happens to be the content that they use to generate their audiences. It’s the same across soccer teams. Bringing my team along on our journey as we look at our partnerships and the fandoms first as a media company.
From a creativity perspective it’s the short format social content creator and really best practices if you are opening up your brand to content creators who really don’t want to be told what to do and say. How do you control that? How do you build a framework which allows you to have some control and set some brand standards and execution standards, but still allow the creators themselves to have enough flexibility to bring their personality out?
Are there any marketing challenges that are keeping you up at night these days?
How you plug into the power of the creators? How you allocate resources appropriately to it? How do we restructure the teams internally to work with them? How do you really measure the impact of those investments in comparison to programs that have very well-defined metrics and performance management processes? This is all new and emerging. We have to invent it as we go. I wouldn’t say it keeps me up worried, it keeps me up excited. It’s like, what do we try next?
