AI’s Role in the Future Workplace | A Conversation with Indeed CMO Jessica Jensen

0:00What's up Vayner Nation. Welcome back to another episode of the Gary V audio experience. In today's episode, Gary sits down with Jessica Jensen, the CMO of Indeed. They talk a little bit about AI and social media and how it's all transforming. They also dive into tools like ChatGPT and how it's changing productivity in the workplace. This is a great episode for anyone looking to optimize their social media reach or even for people who are looking to figure out where to find their next job. I hope you all enjoy. I've never used AI before. What are the 10 things that I should first do if this is my first day on chat GPT itself?

0:34What it's doing right now is it's showing you how to be a prompt engineer. What AI is going to do is exactly what the tractor did. The day before the tractor was invented, a shocking percentage of human beings on earth worked on farms. As a matter of fact, what percentage of humans worked on farms prior to the tractor being invented? 80 to 90 % of the people engaged in farming and agricultural work. Are you kidding me? Attention is the number one asset. If you take away sleeping and you realize how many hours you actually have in your life and what percentage goes to work, it's shocking. My argument is if that's the case, please do something you like.

1:16Something you love, something you care about. At least palpable. It's got to be at least neutral. When it bleeds into toxic and negative and awful, I don't care how much you're gonna not like driving a regular car instead of a fancy car, or I don't care that you have to move out of a nicer neighborhood to a crappier neighborhood. I don't care if you have to sell your home and start renting. Get happy. You have to get happy. What are we doing here? Nobody's gonna care about how much money they made in their last breaths. It's just universally real. Gary Vaynerchuk, it is so great to be with you.

1:50Well, thank you for having me. It's great. So I'm Jessica Jensen, CMO of Indeed. And so we'll just start in by talking a little bit about how the world of social is impacting how we think about work. And as you are very familiar, there are all these new terms bandied about, right? Quiet quitting, workplace transparency, all of these fun things. What do you think about how social media is impacting the way that we all think about work? Look, social media has changed the actual world. And it's because it's really an empty vessel. The term social media refers to the seven to 10 platforms that are empty vessels that human beings, whether they do it for themselves or on behalf of companies, put into distribution for the world to see.

2:44And media is the most important part of forming people's perceptions and beliefs. and I mean at the level of the printing press. Right, right. When the printing press was invented, it was obviously for anyone, sorry if I'm getting a little history nerdy, but it's gonna answer the question. Take us there, take us there. The printing press is invented and it's profound. No longer is it people sitting around fires and telling stories and word of mouth, you now have something called the book. and the dominant entities that made books in the first decade of the printing press were religious institutions and we sit here hundreds of years later a very very obvious thing that i will say to people is that religion is a profoundly big impact on our society it's been weaponized for the worst of things and it's been an inspiration to deal with the hardest challenges and i would argue are the best of things when used properly So the printing press changes the world.

3:53The radio changes the world. The telephone changes the world. The television changes the world. Now the internet changes the world, but what it does is it creates an infrastructure that allows for where we are right now, which is social media. We've never lived in a time where people's opinions and the collective word of mouth can dictate people's perceptions. And we see this geopolitical. we clearly see it politically I don't think anyone's confused so when I think about how has it affected work the answer is in every way you can imagine right I have a meeting coming up with a client where there was a trend that happened on TikTok that was detrimental to them I can give you the preview, they're going to ask me how do we stop this and the answer is you don't we're not in control you can't 30 years ago, 40 years ago So if you're a big company and you hear a report is coming out, you could call the Graham family in Washington, DC, and they may not write that article in the Washington Post.

4:56You could call Walter Cronkite, like you could be his actual friend. Or let's go even more ridiculous, this is gonna be very palpable for a lot of people. If you were very close to Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner 40 years ago, you were fine. Right, right. And so what's happened is everything's changed because of it. And so the way it's changed work is the way that people perceive organizations. There are people who've literally applied to media because they said that they saw a piece of content on social media that showed the office vibe and they wanted to work here. Yeah. There are people that are.

5:40And so how is it? How is it impacted? that it's impacted tremendously from perception of institutions. And the other thing is done is, it is chipped away at productivity. Do I believe that most businesses are affected at the individual level of people extracting somewhere between five and 10 or 15 % of their work day because they're consuming content or this, that? The answer is sure. I mean, it's a different world. like there's only you know if you sat and did nothing at your old job in 1989 and you read the entire newspaper you eventually ran out of newspaper right and you'd kind of like get back to what you were doing and you would do that and you would do that at lunch right you know this i know this yeah now you know people are are connected at all times so look it's had enormous enormous impact on work and then on the flip side what i'm passionate about what we're passionate about in our relationship, it's a vehicle for outflanking your competitors just like the television was.

6:44Procter & Gamble was the best at television in the early days. And literally 70 years later, we sit here and it's still the biggest consumer products company in the world. And that was because they had an incredible decade of outflanking everyone on television. I believe that we have now hit the era where the television has become the radio and social has become television. and whoever outflanks who in the next decade will have fruitful long-term impact on their brand and business. Totally agree. As you write in your book, it is a battle for human attention. Gen AI exploding. Some of it is crap.

7:19Some of it is great. People are overwhelmed and confused. What do you think the impact on the world of work is going to be? Is it going to make people more efficient? More overwhelmed? What's your stance? It's gonna make certain people more efficient. It's gonna put certain people out of business. Yeah. What AI is doing, forget about even generative AI. Generative AI, creative, like I'm talking just pure AI, intelligent, all of it. What AI is gonna do is exactly what the tractor did. I need everyone to hear this. The day before the tractor was invented, a shocking percentage of human beings on earth worked on farms.

8:02This is where history, like you can't even, as a matter of fact, watch this. I'm gonna do it while we're talking. I'm gonna make a meta moment. Watch this. What percentage of humans worked on farms prior to the tractor being invented? So I'm literally using ChatGPT while I'm answering your question right now. 80 to 90 % of the people engaged in farming and agricultural work. Are you kidding me? So what do I think? I think technology, planes, trains, automobiles, boats, television, the internet, phones, they get invented and they make us do different actions. What you and I do today for work. We're doing work right now.

8:48Yeah. And we used to do it super differently 25 years ago. That's right. I got the first laptop for sending documents and emails, and my cell phone was the size of a bread box. Yeah, your cell phone looked like this. It was this thing. It was my shoe phone, exactly. So what do I think? I think anyone who's putting their head in the sand and hoping this is a fad or that the government's going to regulate it are incredibly naive. Everybody should stop right now on a dime, download ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of them, and start tasting it. Start working. It is going to change the world in a way that you can't comprehend.

9:32And some people are gonna need to adjust their crafts. If you're a designer and you just design in Adobe, you better - Copywriter, designer, brand strategist. It's gonna change everything for everyone, researcher. So, you know, I think it's a big change. And so I think it's gonna make some people wildly productive. I'm gonna be one of those people. What I just did right there, I do all day long now. Yeah, integrate it into your workflow and your exploration and summaries. It's my co-creative strategist, I think with my AI. Totally. And so it's gonna be a big deal. And I want, here's the last thing I'll say on it.

10:15think of it as a tidal wave coming at you. Please use this meeting to grab a surfboard to ride the wave versus what I know a lot of you are doing, which is you're putting your head in the sand, and your entire strategy is this. Yeah, but let me, so I agree, couldn't agree with you more, but let me say this. The people who come out and say, just play with AI, just experiment, that guidance is not helpful to most people. right? I feel like we as an industry have a responsibility to give more concrete guidance. Use this tool in this way to do this. Save yourself 30 % of your time. Yeah, but I would say this though, comma.

10:59I think that's historically right. Now let me throw this at you. Watch this. Whatever is do this to this, how would I go about creating a ceramic wall outside of my yard. What's crazy, what's crazy about AI, I mean, it's insane what it's doing right now. It's literally breaking it down for me. Yeah. Oh yeah. What's crazy about AI, I actually agree with you historically, that's always been the case. Like, but with AI, it's intelligence. So you see where this is going, right? It's a little bit different than what you and I went through doing web 1.0, you're probably remembering, I remember too, I'm like, just go on the internet.

11:44And they're like, okay, I'm here, what do I do? Where are the people? They're like, I've been like here, whatever a human thinks, all they have to do is ask it. No, you're right. There is the creativity of it. Ready? Watch this. I apologize. I've never used AI before. What are the 10 things that I should first do if this is my first day on chat GPT itself? Again, this is the brain twist of what's going on. This is literally gonna break down what it's doing right now is it's showing you how to be a prompt engineer. Yeah. So again, I agree with you, but it's a brain twist. This is the first time ever where you just download it and you just verbalize it.

12:32Do whatever you want, write a poem, get advice, plan a trip. I mean, you really can play around. But like I said, I just asked it, what do I do? And it's saying to me, why don't you ask a recommendation? What are the seven best restaurants in Naples, Florida if I have Crohn's disease? I mean, this is like, I don't think people understand what's going on here. How much you can do, yeah. I mean, look what's going on here. Yeah. Well, and what it means for SEO and search. It's just. It's a profound impact on your business and your contemporaries and your competitors. Search. Google search is going to look like yellow pages in eight years.

13:18Yep. Yep. Do you know what insane that is? It's shocking how many people are not talking about or quantifying the impacts of that. I think that's because two things. One, as you know, especially coming from BCG, there is a small group that definitely is doing that at scale. The best and smartest and brightest companies and individuals realize search and SEO and SEM is incredibly vulnerable in this new world. And then what you have is a lot of people head in the sand. I mean, I literally am thinking about M &A-ing, merge and acquisition, a search agency for my agency. Totally. I asked the founder a couple of weeks ago, right before Labor Day, hey, as we're working through this deal, what if this AI thing goes the way I think it might?

14:08His answer was, that will never happen. Oh, yeah. No, I've heard that. Self-interest. Yeah. And denial. Denial, lack of curiosity, and many other reasons why people who are watching this right now are not doing... I'm really happy I just did that. I hope what I just did... Oh, yeah. It's a great illustration of how broad and wide and nutty you can go. Okay. I'm going to take us a little speaking of head in the sand. You know, TikTok explosion. TikTok has overtaken YouTube in video marketing usage among brands. 67 % of people posting on TikTok versus 60 % on YouTube. Where do you think people are going to look for work and how?

14:53I think that, I mean, look, people are going to use Google. They're going to use more and more AI. And then to your point, and you know this, social media creative is the third part of that triangle of terror. You know, those three things for me is where this is all going. And so the companies that market well, because so much of what your platform, other optionality is, it's very utilitarian, it's not discovery. And we're, you know, obviously depending on how it's attacked. But like you, if I'm just living life as a normal person and I'm kind of indifferent about my job or slightly less interested, the reason you market for a living is it'd be great for me to see your value proposition be like, wait a minute, I should use that.

15:46More of that is happening on social than ever. I think YouTube, TikTok and all their contemporaries will continue to flourish. And you know this as well. Gen Z is not only having AI as an option, but Instagram and TikTok are massive search engines. Massive search engines. And so I think everyone on this call would be flabbergasted of how many times somebody typed into TikTok or Instagram in the last week. Who's hiring around me? How do I get a job? Looking for a job as an assistant. Looking to sell my services. Like it's certain audiences. It is a huge, huge proportion. And what's happening is, and this is the real impact for certain audiences, Gen Z and young millennials is what you're referring to.

16:37But what we're seeing is what Gen Z is doing is dragging young boomers and all Gen X and millennials into their behavior. Of course. That's why we're so active on TikTok. And we can't rest on internet search or the web as we've known it, right? Like if we aren't engaging job seekers and employers where they are, YouTube, TikTok, you know, everywhere, Reddit, and, you know, and we work with your team all the time on our creative strategies and execution and all these platforms. It's like if anybody thinks like traditional search is going to be the name of the game on Google in five years, I love Google.

17:24I have a great deal of admiration. But it's, you know, they're getting eroded. There's no question. It's going to happen fast. I love you right now. I've not seen that many executives have the gusto on this. And now look, Google's trying to put itself out of business, right? They want to make their AI the winner. Gemini and all that. But boy, is the search ads or organic SEO game in a very interesting predicament. Very precarious. Yes. Very precarious. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. One last fun question, then I let you go. So all these fun memes that crop up like demure and now people marking their cats and dogs safe from eating.

18:11How do you think businesses can leverage these kinds of This is where big fire, I like this question a lot. This is where big businesses get it wrong. They're so obsessed with brand and this elevated thing. They don't realize that the thing that truly, truly makes people buy things is relevance. Yeah. And so when you're a brand that knows that last night there was a silly meme that popped out of the debate or that you're just watching consumer trends, people, big brands get worried that they're just trying to jump on trends and it doesn't mean anything. But what it's doing is it's leaving deposits daily that we get you.

18:54Yeah. And we're alive. We live in your world. We live in your world. We're alive. we can make an, look, I think everybody will understand this. When somebody makes an inside joke, I've done a couple of things with Matt's cinema during here that connect us, we know. Or when I made, when I said I was a Jets fan, there's literally somebody watching right now who literally likes me more and is enjoying this more because she or he is also a diehard Jets fan. Absolutely. Relevance at scale. And so brands that know how to integrate something that's happening. Here's an example. Let's say you wanted to jump into the eating cats meme.

19:35And look, politics is a dangerous place to go, so I would never recommend brands do it. But let's just play it because it's a ridiculous one. If you went into and said 49 % of bosses are liked more if they have a cat in their office, if you did that today, that alone would have a relevance. It hooks on to the broader context. It just makes you feel alive. I would argue that it's similar to someone who's charismatic. You know, sometimes somebody who's not very attractive lands a very attractive partner, and you're like, how did that happen? Let me give you the answer. It's called charisma. I mean, the only other one is money.

20:17It used to be money. It used to be money. Now that's how it is. Listen, on both sides, it's money and fame, but I promise you, if not that, the only other one that's a little more hidden, it's called charisma. And that, I would argue that one could call it, actually, you know what, Matt, make a note. I like this. I think if brands thought of it as not like hijacking trends or like just trending for the, trying to jump on trends for the sake of trends and they thought of it as charisma marketing. Showing your flair. Showing that you're alive. That you're listening and you're - So much of what you do as marketing, you want to sell them, buy our stuff.

20:58People don't trust corporations. Showing some sort of charismatic side because you have a pulse and you know what's going on. Being a good dinner date. You know who the best dinner date is? Someone that knows what's going on in the world and you're talking about things. And so that's how I see it. This will then dovetail to my next question. As you know at Indeed, we are extremely committed to helping people overcome barriers to employment. So if you're LGBTQ +, a woman, a person of color, a vet, disabled, whatever has inhibited, criminal record, whatever has inhibited people from economic opportunity through work, we are fighting to champion to help those people break through.

21:39How do you see social media helping us help those people and or marginalized groups leveraging their social power to change the fabric of work and change how society shows up at work? twofold. One, it is remarkable how y 'all do it. It's why I'm proud to be a partner. I think you do really, you really deliver on that hyperbole, right? You were just talking and where my brain was going was, it's amazing that she's can say that and actually back it up. People say it, but then humans get involved and make subjective opinions and subconscious bias and many things kick in the way your product is built delivers on what you said crazy so i think for y 'all as marketers and this is the model and you know this and obviously it's such a progressive model it takes a few minutes for every client to fully get there but at our best when we're at our best and when y 'all are at your best as a partner to us we can win on relevance to different consumer segmentation.

22:51So we can make a TikTok that is going to make a Gen Z progressive individual, whatever progressive issue they have, view us in a different light. We can also go to YouTube shorts and work on making a piece of content for CIOs, chief intelligence officers. And so I think social at scale makes creative that's relevant to its audience, whether you're into rock climbing or micro bruise, rock and roll or football, video games or thrift storing or fashion. If a brand or company makes creative that you see, that gives you a hat tip to, I see you, we see you, you will win. And I think again, your point of differentiation and something, actually it's funny, this question, sometimes when I do these kinds of things with partners, I literally just made a mental note I could see Matt Sittermer in the backstage and like I'm literally probably gonna text him while you ask a question because I multitask or after the video and I'm gonna say to him hey we need to double down on that one part because like that promise that you can deliver on because of the way your product works which is different than other products that do job stuff works I think that's a huge point of differentiation and I think for anyone who feels hey I might not get this gig because it's stacked against me, it speaks to why your product continues to grow.

24:17Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We're super focused on skills first hiring and people being seen for their capabilities and what they can bring to a job, not where they went to some fancy college. It's a massive point of differentiation. And I would argue, forget about ideology. and altruism. Because it sounds great. You know, look, I was born in the former Soviet Union and because of my religion, my grandfathers were persecuted. So I'm very affected by this concept. Sure. But put that aside. Now let me put on my entrepreneurial operating hat. You need the best people you can find everywhere. And I can tell you as someone who wants to win, I promise you any opinions I have on society are left on the door when I go on the field.

25:10You could have three heads. You could be a New England Patriots fan. You could be from outer space. You could stop working after second grade. I kind of did. You can literally do anything for me to win, like a team. Right, exactly. I want the best players on the merit of the work. Totally. To your point, I don't want to be affected by Ivy League this. MIT or from this city. By the way, you're talking to somebody who made mistakes in the reverse. I was so cynical as an entrepreneur and someone who invested in startups that I would, this is going to make some people smile or go, hmm, there was such an era when I was doing angel investing in Silicon Valley that, especially after Mark Zuckerberg hit big, the Harvard thing, every kid that was at Harvard and Stanford, you basically by default thought they were capable when 99 % weren't.

26:07I actually recognized that and went the other way. I missed out. On some real talent. Yeah. On some real investments because I demonized if you went to 10. I know what you mean. Yeah. I overcorrected too far the other way. And I had a wish in hindsight that I could have just seen the pitch deck because the second she or he walked in and said, I was out. Yeah. Right. I didn't think they had the gusto. And I was the reverse. Yeah. It came from wealthy parents, so they don't have the grit. And I made mistakes. And so the concept is profound. Yeah, it really. Well, I've changed. I mean, I used to do, I was with Boston Consulting Group.

26:48We did all our recruiting at Harvard and MIT and Stanford. And I finally reached, you know, 10 years into my career. I'm like, well, sure. Are there some quality, amazing people at those institutions? Of course. But also at University of Oklahoma, SDSU, and people who never went to college. And by the way, they have a criminal record. Like - It's just like anybody who's a human being knows it to be true. But we don't operate that way always. At scale, you know, it's funny. I'm sorry to bring this up again, but I just love the National Football League, even though I'm a little depressed, my Jets lost on Monday night.

27:25You know, there was a long time, let me use somebody I hate, Josh Allen, cause he's the Buffalo Bills quarterback. We went to a very tiny school and 25, 30 years earlier, 40 years earlier, he's going to have a very hard time getting drafted because he was from a small school. But then they started really focusing on the NFL combine, the data, and they could see his strength and his speed. And yes, he didn't play the hardest competition, but they could run the math, the tangible things, and emotion was being left at the door. No longer was it that. And so, I think that that is something that the business world should pick up on more.

28:08I think more businesses, more businesses should be all in in the way y 'all do it. Because I do think recruiting in HR and bosses and managers and CEOs, me included, we're human beings and we are affected by some of those data points, which will throw us off from the mission. Yeah, I agree. All right. So we've talked a little bit about our own philosophies and approaches evolving as we get older and possibly a centimeter wiser. So in the past, you've been accused of promoting hustle culture and even this word that makes me a little itchy, struggle porn. but you you've had an evolution of your thinking now and now talk very often about the importance of kindness and patience tell us about that that journey of evolution for you i think to the outside it's actually really funny that matt cinema who works with on your business he was the only employee i brought over from wine library my my dad's business to me i know he started it's funny that he's here because he's truly one of the few humans on earth that's going to really, really know how real what I'm about to say is.

29:23The outside perception is that there's been an evolution. I can sit here right now and I'm going to say this very simply. I continue right now with my gray hairs, believe that hard work is one of the equations of success. I'm aware that I use the word hard work now instead of hustle because the word hustle has been demonized and positioned in a way that was never intended. my first book that I wrote right there the green one yeah crush it it's called crush it but in that book verbatim it says if you are unhappy then you should consider putting in extra hours to change the course of your life but in that book that I wrote in 2008 it says if you work nine to six and you make sixty three thousand dollars a year and you are very happy then you've won life.

30:14Yeah, exactly. What has evolved is I am a byproduct of my thesis. I create creative that is contextual to the time. When I first hit the scene, we'll resonate. When I first hit the scene, we were in 2008, nine and 10 and people didn't have jobs. And I knew that the internet was gonna win and that you could be an influencer and a creator and make money. So my point back then was, hey, you've got to use 6 p.m. to midnight if you are miserable, if you are suicidal, if you're living your life for the end of the day, you're dead, you're working too much. So work harder in the short term to get you off the poison is a job that's paying for your mortgage or your debt.

31:01That was the version that people, as a matter of fact, this is actually fascinating. The human that wrote the Medium article that said I was the poster child of hustle porn, literally wrote me an apology message years ago saying I used you for my own advancement. Actually, you know what actually happened? You might find this interesting. I on a podcast went into deep, deep double click on how I got positioned that way by some, a lot of people watching right now that are being like, I don't even know this. There was a period to your point where people thought I was the poster child of hustle porn.

31:35and it was because there was a medium article written that I was the poster child of hustle porn. In that article, he wrote 30 things that were not true. And it was devastating to me because if you look at my content from 2006, seven, eight, nine, 10. I would not reflect that. I didn't speak about kindness and patience is a reaction to where we are now. People are lacking kindness and lacking patience. In 2008, there was more civility and there was more, there was less jealousy and envy. What there wasn't was people didn't have opportunities and there was a gold mine called the internet. So I was loud.