Running a Global, Mission-Driven Brand with Indeed.com Global VP Jennifer Warren

0:00You are listening to and watching Builders, where I interview CEOs, authors, authors, and leaders about building businesses and careers. And today I speak with Jen Warren. She is the global VP at Indeed, which is the number one job site in the world, by the way. She runs brand marketing and creative. And Jen and I discuss AI investments that Indeed's making for job seekers and employers, how purpose-driven brands can withstand external changes, and the learning she's had on running global teams.

0:32Hi, Jen. How are you? Good to see you. Hi, it's so great to see you. I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. You got it. Thanks for being here. So you are with Indeed, the number one job site in the world. Would you tell the audience your role when you joined and what your role is? Of course, I would love to. I joined Indeed almost eight years ago, and I think I have the best job in the world, which is helping all people get jobs everywhere. And my specific role within that is just that of making sure everyone understands what Indeed does as the leader of our global brand marketing team. And so really just a great job in attracting job seekers to Indeed and employers to Indeed, which is pretty easy to do as we offer something that everybody cares a lot about.

1:25And I want to ask you a bunch of questions about Indeed and positioning a little later on in the conversation. But before, I feel like I need to talk about generative AI because it's, without a doubt, the most talked about topic in marketing. And before we get into maybe applications of AI on your team, maybe we can talk about it in the context of your industry. So helping workers find another job, helping employers find great people. I'd love to get your perspective on challenges and opportunities. As an example, in five minutes, maybe, I could have ChatGPT write a cover letter for me. you know, write a job description.

2:02Where is this a good thing and where is this problematic? Where is this a bad thing? That is a great question. We obviously spend a lot of time on that. I would say I am very optimistic about AI in job search and helping people hire. For us, when I think about what we're trying to do is help all people connect with better work. And so using Gen.ai, for example, we recently launched a new product called Career Scout, which is an agent. We're excited about it because it enables everyone to feel like they have a recruiter at their service. One of the things that makes it so unique and how it really improves that job search experience is it can really get to know you, your skills, what you're interested in.

2:50So it goes beyond just searching for, hey, I want to be a chief marketing officer in New York. You know, it can ask you and understand what's important to you as it relates to a culture of a company, what skills you have and how that might even transfer to other industries and offer up things you might have never even considered for yourself. but that technology helps us better match to those jobs that could be a better fit for you in so many different ways and across a lot of different dimensions, which we wouldn't have been able to do before. Same thing on the employer side with job descriptions and understanding what skills are important.

3:31So it really helps us better match people. Getting to your question or the point you raised around resumes and job descriptions, I think that's an area where it's great and that it can really help you if you're not a marketer and you don't have the skills, position yourself in the most favorable way. Though I would say that the risk in that is that the same way I think about it as it relates to being a brand builder, you've got to make sure that it doesn't look like everybody else's. And I think there's a risk, when you're using AI to write resumes and job descriptions, everything just starts to look the same.

4:12And so I would say, same way I think about brand building, you have to still make sure you know what makes you unique and really is going to stand out. But I think they're great tools to leverage. You just have to keep that human element in there. Did you know that Builders is sponsored by business.com? I'd love to tell you about a new free membership from business.com for small business decision makers. It's called business.com plus, and it's designed to address the pain in selecting new products and services. What is the pain you might ask? It's things like knowing which vendor is best for your specific business, negotiating pricing, having access to someone who can answer questions for you.

4:53The new membership business.com plus handles all of that with a dedicated advisor, pre-negotiated pricing and solutions tested and reviewed by experts. Check it out at business.com slash plus. That's business.com slash P-L-U-S. How does someone who's maybe not actively looking for a job, maybe they're not out of work or anything like that, but in the back of their mind, they think there's something potentially better out there and they're willing to put in the time to figure that out over months or years. How would somebody get started with this? I think it was called Gen AI. Did I get that right?

5:32Yeah, it's actually called CareerScout. And thank you so much for asking. It's funny, I didn't even tell you any of this in advance. But one of the things that I'm most excited about is the ability for CareerScout to be that agent and find jobs for you. And so having and going to Indeed and using CareerScout, and I will say it's kind of been early launched and we're continuing to build on it, but really giving us all your profile information, answering questions. The more you go back and use it, the more it knows about you. And then we will just start sending jobs to you. It also enables on the employer side for them to reach out directly to you through a sourcing and screening tool that we have on the employer side.

6:18So you really can look at it as the more you can tell the Indeed Scout about you, it is constantly going to be out there searching for opportunities that match what you're looking for and sending them your way. So it's a pretty cool offering that we now have. Yeah. And on the flip side for the employer, even in my current role, we receive a lot of applications. When I was at Amazon, I'd open up something for my team and would have a thousand applicants in what felt like moments. and you want to be responsible in thinking about everybody who's coming and applying, but you literally don't have the time.

7:06And so the flip side, you're helping employers get matched to the right person. Absolutely. I would say it'll work the same way on the employer side and help screen and source candidates. Again, it's by really understanding. So you, for example, what are you looking for from your employees? What are the skills that are going to be important to you? And going a little bit deeper in that. And then by leveraging this technology on both sides, learning everything we can about a job seeker, everything we can from the employer, then we will be able to better match and screen those candidates for you.

7:48So it's really something that's going to work on both sides to improve that matching experience to make it easier for that hiring manager to make sure that you are able to still look at your top candidates that match all of that criteria and that we've already filtered for you. And then you can just spend your time really interviewing and deciding who is the right candidate for you and spend less time going through the piles of resumes. That's cool. I wonder if, let's say you have, maybe you're already thinking about this, already do this, I'm not aware of it, but you have months or years of experience helping a company hire.

8:29And maybe you know after that hire, 3, 6, 9, 12 months, what the satisfaction of that hire was. and using that to determine who might in the future be a good culture fit or work fit or whatever. Is that concept baked in there at all? You know what? I'm like, I think we should hire you tomorrow because yes, I know that it's what the team is working on and thinking about because to your point, I mean, the benefit in the technology is that it's going to continue learning. And we do ask our employers to tell us when a hire has been made, we can track, you know, when you have that interview and you're using our platform so that we can constantly learn.

9:14So yes, I think what you're mentioning is a really important point. And the more employers use us to hire and the more signals we're able to collect to know who are they interviewing, who did they make an offer to, the more we can learn and continue to improve on that matching. So that's a really smart, you know, insight on that. That'd be really cool. I can think about HR software that we use for folks who are current employees. And these platforms are starting to learn and make recommendations based on the trends that it sees because hiring is hard. And yeah, I really like that. Yeah, it's hard and it's important, right?

9:53To get that right candidate. No, no question. um i want to shift gears a little bit and talk talk about some macro things going on i've been asking recent guests on the podcast to to comment about how like economic uncertainty through something like tariffs might impact their business but it struck me that in the employment industry i'm not sure if it's called that but like one of the big changes over the last four or five months has been the government stance on DEI. And without getting into the politics of it, when something changes based on government policy or whatever, how do you lead and make decisions when there are swift changes like this?

10:35That is a great question and an important one. And thank you for not having me get into the politics. But I would say, first of all, I feel fortunate as a leader to work for a company that has a very strong sense of who we are, our mission, our values. And our mission is helping all people get jobs. We are very focused on that. One of our values is belonging and inclusion. And I feel fortunate in that even though there are all these different policy changes and things shifting all around us. Our purpose and our values have not changed. They're not going to change. And that really has helped from a leadership perspective to have that North Star for decision making.

11:26I think it also helps that there's not one person at Indeed, if you ask them what our mission and our values were, that wouldn't immediately tell you what that is. So it also is a great guide for every single employee at the company as it relates to decision making. So I guess I would start there by saying, if you know who you are as a company, what you stand for, it really helps provide that guide for decision making, even during the roughest times. And I think as leaders, it's important to reinforce that with your employees, because of course, we all wake up every morning and wonder what's changed and what the news is going to say.

12:04And so you have to have something that's going to keep you steady. And that is the thing that keeps us steady. As a, it's a great answer. As a leader of a global brand and how a brand is represented and talked about and everything like that, I'm curious as a company of your size, like what are like the canonical like documents or things that you work back from? You know, do you have a tight brand guidelines or brand messaging framework? All of it. Okay. We do. It's a great question. And, you know, our mission was one of the things that absolutely attracted me to Indeed. And I start there because you don't even need a brand guideline for that.

12:48It is literally on people's T-shirts. It's everywhere. It's on our home screens. And so that is just we're here to help people get jobs. But then as the leader of our brand team, we also have a brand guideline starting with our mission, our promise we're making out in the world, connecting all people to better work and our values. And then, of course, we do evolve it and even put out some guidance around this time to say like our mission remains the same and we're going to continue focusing on these sorts of things. And so it is important to ensure that everybody at the company is aligned behind those same guidelines.

13:33One of the things I always say when I'm giving talks at Indeed is even though I lead brand and I have a team of brand marketers, like every person in the company is a brand marketer, whether they want to be or not. And they have to go represent our brand. And so we want to make sure everybody sort of is singing from the same song sheet, which also gets me to the messaging question that you asked. We also have a messaging document that's called the song sheet because there was a time where we noticed, you know, the sales team was saying something a little different than the marketing team, which was saying something, you know, different from another team.

14:08And we were like, you know, we need to be singing from the same song sheet. And so really all constantly, you know, making sure we're getting aligned on our messaging. And as things evolve, that continues to evolve. So it's hard to keep documents like that updated. But that's another benefit, I think, in AI. There are a lot of different tools now where you can put your brand guidelines in. And then if people are creating content, it kind of already knows these things. So I'm looking forward to that. It'll make all of our lives easier, I think. Yeah, it's so important to be consistent the larger the, I mean, any organization, but the larger the organization.

14:45Because if every function or group operates a little bit differently, it creates this weird sort of telephone thing. And when it gets to the end customer, it's like not what has been proven to be the best. You mentioned AI with your team. So I kind of want to segue to that. How have you decided to lean into AI first tools? Where are you investing most? And where are you taking kind of like a wait and see approach? And sort of like as a following question to that, When you're hiring now for your team, what's your expectation that someone coming in is already well-versed in these types of tools?

15:26First of all, I'd say we are leaning very heavily into AI. I think the wait and see moment from my own perspective is over. You know, when it first launched ChatGPT, it was absolutely like, OK, we want to make sure we do this carefully. We've got to meet people where they are. I remember at a team offsite talking about it. It was all new. And I was like super excited. And half the room was looking at me a little bit like I was evil. You know, the other half was excited. And I realized in that moment, this is like a deeply personal thing. And, you know, people are thinking about, well, what does that mean, you know, about my job?

16:09What does that mean to the world? And so I would say at that time, it was more wait and see, meet people where they are. And of course, none of us, we were all figuring it out at the same time. But my perspective now is that waiting and seeing gives other people and other companies a competitive advantage. And I don't mean go out and do things irresponsibly, but you should be testing things, trying things, getting your teams as knowledgeable as possible and giving them goals around it. One of the hard things for sure was, okay, what do we focus on? You know, at first it was like, everybody use it.

16:49And then it's like, oh gosh, you've got to really think about your workflows and focus people in. And so one of the first areas we identified was content creation and production. You know, for a company like ours, where we're talking to all kinds of job seekers about all kinds of jobs, being able to personalize that content more for the industry, testing all kinds of different versions we know is a big opportunity for us. And so my whole team, as well as other content creators around Indeed, are getting trained right now on a tool called Pencil that's going to enable us to create content and scale it a lot quicker.

17:29And we're using another tool called VidMob that is helping with creative optimization and really getting the team's insights on what's working for who. The other area that I'm really excited about, we're using a lot of places, but just to focus like research. You know, there's so much research we want to do and always wanting to learn about our customers. And the other day, my head of research, Angela, who's brilliant. she tested out this new tool, research tool that allows you to do focus groups. So she did like 50 focus groups with like an AI, I guess, avatar of some sort. And within 48 hours came back with like a report and that would have never happened before.

18:14And she's so diligent. She wrote her own report. She watched the videos because she wanted to first compare that she could trust it before she even read the report. And she's like, it was like 90 % what I would have written. So anyway, there's things like that I'm excited about because I think it's really going to enable us to scale a lot of our efforts. So, yeah, we're all in. That research example is kind of mind blowing to me. You know, you think sometimes about AI 10Xing something. That's like a 100X. I'm sure like you, we've done focus groups. You know, I remember doing a focus group. You know, you go to London, you go to Dallas, you go to Tokyo.

18:52You, you, you know, you spend two weeks, you go spend two weeks doing it and, you know, and, and it's like, it's like the, the fact that you can get so much insight so much faster and you're, you're taking out kind of like the, like the, the, the parts. And, but, but then probably your, you said her name was Angela, her, her, um, like she's spending her brain power on what questions do we want to ask? How should the report be synthesized? How do I communicate it? So she's up leveling up leveling her skills at the same time she's making the research faster. I'm glad you said that, because that's a really important thing to mention is that the human element is critical.

19:31And in this in this case and all of these cases, right, even in the creative case, it's like the creative team has to come up with the concepts and we want them coming up with the concepts. They still have to judge it from a taste perspective, you know, and and improve it based on their own skill set. But, yes, same thing on the research front. She got to think about what are the most important questions? What are the implications from this? And no one really loves having to do a lot of the administrative work that that sometimes comes along with that. Totally. So before you were at Indeed, you were not at LinkedIn.

20:10before that monster.com before that, before, before that, another job site, you have been CMO at iconic brands like Radio Shack and, and Sprinkles cupcakes. And I kind of have two questions about this. Like, like one, how, how do your experiences help you help you translate into Indeed? It's also, maybe this is more of an observation, but it's, it's, it's interesting in the context of what you're suggesting back at the top with career agent, you don't have to be in an industry to get a job in an industry. You can translate like Sprinkles and Indeed are pretty different companies. Very different.

20:46Yeah. Very different from selling cupcakes to jobs. You know, it's funny. I never even thought about it in terms of how it translated. I think I was more worried about it was my first role at a tech company and that was global. But in terms of the actual job when they reached out to me, they said, we need someone to help us build our brand. We don't have much of a mature brand function. We're just kind of getting started. We need someone to help us build our brand. I'm like, oh, I can do that. And they were a mission-driven brand. And I got my start on the advertising agency side, working at GSDNM.

21:27And the founder, Roy Spence, and a good friend of mine, Haley Reshing, wrote the first book on purpose-based branding. And so for me, I'm like, oh, this company has a mission. I know how to take all of my past experience building purpose-based brands. And that translates into what Indeed needs my help with. And at the same time, I'm going to learn some things that I've never done before. So to me, that's always the perfect opportunity to be able to bring value to the table, but also learn at the same time. That's a great answer. You mentioned Indeed's Global. what's been, I don't know if sprinkles, where they were, but what's been the best part about leading marketing across the world?

22:11And what's been the thing you've had, what's been the hardest learning curve part of that? Oh, yeah. I love leading globally. Personally, I find it very rewarding to now have friends all over the world. I was in our parent company, Recruit, is in Japan. I was on a call with them last night, a good friend there. And so it's just fun to make all these connections and learn about different cultures. The rewarding thing from an Indeed perspective is when you go out and talk to people about jobs, you realize what you're delivering is universally needed, appreciated, no matter where you are. And so there's a universal connection across countries.

22:53One of the learnings is, which I'll share, because I think it's kind of a funny story too. When I first started, one of the first brand challenges was you need to go help us fix Japan or figure out how to grow our brand in Japan. We've not been able to find a campaign that works. And so I was like, okay, I mean, I didn't have a lot of, I'm sorry, not Japan, Germany. And so I'm like, okay. And so we hire a new German agent. see. We brief them. Here's what we're all about. And they bring us these campaigns and all of them. I'm like, what in the world? You know, did they not hear the same briefing we gave?

23:30But one of them, for example, was leveraging characters from they had a show that was similar to the office here in the US and they were making fun of our name. They were like, indeed, what kind of stupid name is that? Typing on their computers. I-N-T-E-E-T. That's so dumb. And I'm like, guys, He's like, I'm not going to spend money to go and tell people our name is dumb. And afterwards, the leader of the office there calls me and he's like, Jennifer, it's so funny. Trust me. Trust me. Germans are going to absolutely love this campaign. And to become more culturally relevant here, we need to use this kind of humor.

24:06The name doesn't make sense in German. And that's going to really be game changing for us. So anyway, I had to trust him. And we move forward with this campaign, spending money, making fun of our name. And it was the most successful campaign probably that we've ever done, ran for several years. Of course, we evolved the concept, using those characters and all of that. And so anyway, probably my biggest learning was that someone in the country is going to know a lot more than you are. And so I always defer to trusting them with these big decisions. That's a really amazing story because it is true when you get like a marketing campaign idea in front of you and you maybe haven't gone through all the cycles of thinking about what it is.

24:53It could be a mascot. It could be this, what you're talking about and the why. It can be hard to want to put your butt on the line and spend money there. It was a really cool story probably early on in your tenure and indeed too where it was maybe a little risky. It was very early, which was good that I got that learning early, I think, because then I was able to apply it to the work elsewhere. Yeah, I love it. Well, Jen, thanks so much for chatting with me today and being on the podcast. Really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as well. Thank you for having me.

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