This week we’re rolling out the first global brand campaign for Indeed. It’s a big step for Indeed because we’ve traditionally eschewed these types of investments. We’re not a flashy company. We’re purpose-driven and product-focused. We’re passionately focused on helping people get jobs.
“How the World Works” — Indeed’s first global brand campaign
Over the last decade, we’ve been lucky to grow at an amazing rate by helping more and more job seekers find the right job every year. Now, every month, more than 140 million unique users in more than 50 countries visit Indeed. We’re the number one job site in the world as well as the #1 site in the U.S., UK, Canada, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Italy, South Africa, and many other countries. We’re the #1 job app in iOS and Android in more than 20 countries around the world.
So why launch a brand campaign now? It’s a question that we’ve thought about a lot. The online job industry grew up with major job boards in every country, many of which made money by luring job seekers to small pools of paid postings using large TV-driven brand campaigns. Unfortunately, the industry has been dominated by humor-driven ads that mock the workplace and play to employee frustrations.
It’s in this context that Indeed has quietly grown to become the world’s leading job site by focusing on the needs of job seekers. As a search engine, we try to find every job in the world and show them to job seekers on our site — whether or not the employer is an Indeed customer. Today we have more than 16 million jobs on Indeed covering all occupations, roles, and levels. Most of Indeed’s growth derives from the fact that the product is simple, relevant, and comprehensive. We work hard to make the site easy for job seekers to find and use online or with their mobile device.
As we thought about diversifying our strategy to include brand investments, the decision came back to our purpose: helping people find jobs. 140 million people is an enormous amount of job seekers — but it’s a small portion of the world’s 7.2 billion inhabitants. There are still many more jobs offline than online. And there are still many people who don’t know Indeed. It was these factors that encouraged us to develop our first campaign.
In building our first campaign, it was important to tell the story in a way that felt authentic for Indeed, our clients, and job seekers. The campaign’s theme is ‘How the World Works’. It celebrates the importance of every job, and showcases how Indeed helps millions of job seekers and employers find the right fit. All of the creative elements within the campaign tell the story of how diverse jobs combine to make something work – from a simple cup of coffee, to the complex workings of the London Underground or the global stock market.
The campaign centerpiece is a television commercial which is a visual representation of the core campaign message. In the ad, the camera quickly turns from the staged advertisement to focus on the workers behind the scenes: the people that come together to make a commercial happen.
Here is the story of how the commercial was made, and what happened when we brought these amazing people together from around the world:
To source talent for the commercial, Indeed posted 26 job openings on its website – from accountant, to nurse, to mechanical engineer, to IT Consultant. It was a great chance for us to showcase what Indeed does best. Within 48 hours, a staggering 1,500 applications were received for the roles. Indeed then conducted more than 200 interviews in just 14 days resulting in a total cost per hire of $217. Once a selection was made, industry professionals from six different countries – UK, US, Canada, Czech Republic, Australia and Germany – traveled to Prague for filming and production.
While there are many more pieces to the campaign, here is the final commercial which will start showing this week in the United Kingdom, our first brand launch country:
As a company, we’ve come to conclusion that both product and brand awareness have an important role in helping people find jobs. As more people discover our product and as the product continues to evolve, we’ll be able to help more job seekers find the job that is the perfect fit and we’ll be able to help more employers find the right talent for their organization.
Like everything else we do, we’ll be measuring the campaign on many dimensions. One of the most important will be how many new people find a job on Indeed.
Science of Revenue 