Q&A: Indeed, Paul D’Arcy

To coincide with the launch of job site Indeed’s new TV ad, Marketing Week caught up with senior vice-president of marketing Paul D’Arcy to hear how the brands is growing awareness and developing its user experience.

Job site Indeed is on a global brand-building charge. The company, which describes itself as “the world’s number one job site” with 150 million monthly users, launched its first TV advertising campaign last May using the strapline ‘How the world works’. It is building on the theme this month with a new animated commercial that is running in several international markets, including the UK and USA.

The spot deconstructs an existing short film from animation studio HouseSpecial to highlight the different jobs that went into making it.

Indeed differs from other major job sites by acting as a search engine that trawls online job boards and company career pages to provide listings. Employers can also post jobs for free on Indeed or buy sponsored listings on a pay-per-click basis.

Q. What is the thinking behind the latest advert in Indeed’s ‘How the world works’ campaign?

Paul D’Arcy: The campaign theme is a celebration of the great things that happen when people come together to do a job. We started with what we thought was just an incredibly beautiful piece of animation from an award-winning team, and we worked with them to go all the way back to the raw materials. So in the 30-second spot you see how layers upon layers of work are added – from the initial drawings, to the animation, to the addition of the sound. What begins as just an idea turns into something very special and beautiful.

We’re into the third wave of this campaign in the UK, but it’s all tied around the same theme. So while the current spot is about ‘how animation works’, in print last year we had ‘how newspapers work’ and in some of our outdoor work we looked at ‘how the Underground works’.

Q. Why did Indeed decide to launch this campaign last year?

Paul D’Arcy: We just celebrated our 10th anniversary, but for the first nine years the company never did anything that looked like brand marketing. Instead we focused on innovation, the product and getting into as many markets as possible.

Today we’re in 55 countries and have about 150 million monthly users, but we realised that even with all that traffic, there are many people around the world who don’t know us. We’ve picked four very strategic markets – the UK, USA, Germany and Australia – to make the first set of investments and we have an ongoing commitment to raise awareness there.

Q. What results have you seen from the campaign so far?

Paul D’Arcy: In the UK we’ve seen a 70% increase in awareness among job seekers, a 100% jump in awareness among employers [according to consultancy Greenberg’s brand tracking] and enormous increases in the size of our social communities – more than 1,000% growth on both Facebook and Twitter. Traffic to the site is also up about 30% year-on-year as a result of the campaign. Our research shows that once people try Indeed, we quickly become their preferred job site because they can find all the jobs in one place.

Q. How do you approach buying TV slots for your adverts?

Paul D’Arcy: We want to have a very broad reach because we’re targeting all professionals. We also want to ensure that we’re affiliated with the kind of shows that are consistent with our message.

When you look at the history of job site advertising in the UK and around the world, it has been very negative and has really played on people’s frustrations around work. We see work as an area of hope and celebration and so we wanted to bring a very positive message to the space that looks at the good things that happen when people come together to do a job. We tend to look for programming that’s more positive and fits with that.

Q. How does Indeed seek to offer a strong user experience?

Paul D’Arcy: We’ve made it very easy and intuitive to search for jobs on Indeed, starting simply with the ‘what’ and ‘where’. For more and more jobs we have ‘one-click apply’, which means that once you store your CV on Indeed you can apply for a job with just one click.

We also know that jobseekers increasingly prefer to use mobile devices, with 57% of UK searches on Indeed now coming through mobile, so we work with organisations to help make their jobs pages and the application process mobile-optimised.

Q. How do you inspire creativity within your marketing organisation?

Paul D’Arcy: It’s important to create an environment where ideas can come from anywhere in the company. Many of the best marketing ideas may come from other teams. As a global company we also want ideas from as many places around the world as possible.

We set goals and objectives – the most important being to measure the number of people who are hired as a result of visiting Indeed. That’s our foundation but we want to give our teams as much flexibility as possible in how they achieve our goals. We have a real test-and-learn culture that encourages people to innovate and experiment. At any one time on the site there are about 100 different tests running that are all designed to make the experience on Indeed better.

Indeed’s latest commercial deconstructs an existing animation film to highlight the different jobs that went into its production

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