As the world’s leading job site, Indeed spent two decades building its reputation around scale. “There is a hire made every 2.2 seconds on Indeed,” explained Angela Kesselman, who leads Brand Research and Insights at Indeed. “For 20 years, that’s how we talked about ourselves: we are scale. That was our differentiator.”
But the hiring landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Generative AI, economic volatility, and new competitors have fundamentally reshaped how both employers and job seekers approach hiring.
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“We knew that we needed to talk about ourselves in a different way,” Kesselman said to a packed session at the Quirk’s Chicago event. “It’s not enough just to know what are the functional reasons that somebody’s going to choose Indeed over somebody else.”
Before embarking on their next brand positioning, the Indeed team partnered with Protobrand to apply AI-powered behavioral science methodologies, focusing on the consumer subconscious.
According to Protobrand SVP Client Service John McGarr, the core challenge with traditional research is that consumers often cannot articulate the real reasons behind their decisions.
“The most important drivers of your business were something the consumer couldn’t really tell you,” McGarr explained. “Consumers can tell us lots of functional reasons why they might choose one brand over another, but they cannot tell you those subconscious drivers.”
Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, introduced the research industry to a clear scientific framework for decision making: System 1 and System 2 thinking.
Where System 2 thinking uses rational, methodical decision making based on hard facts, System 1 is automatic, emotional, and subconscious. System 1 thinking lives in the “hidden” brain, and often consumers cannot articulate the reasoning involved in this decision making. This inability to verbalize powerful drivers of behavior creates a challenge for marketing teams.
Instead of relying solely on direct survey questions, which would align with System 2 thinking, Indeed used Protobrand’s behavioral science methods to uncover emotional motivations operating beneath the surface. One technique, metaphor elicitation, asked participants to select images representing their feelings about brands and experiences. Another, narrative inquiry, encouraged participants to tell real stories instead of responding to traditional rating scales.
“That’s the gold,” Kesselman said. “What we want to get to.”
The research revealed nine emotional motivators shaping the hiring journey for both employers and job seekers. Importantly, these motivations often existed below conscious awareness.
“People are not able to say, ‘When I am looking for my next job, I really want to feel autonomous and like I’m in control,’” Kesselman explained. “They live in the subconscious, but this technique allows you to reveal that.”
The resulting insights transformed how Indeed approached campaign development.
“We are working on a new brand campaign right now that has the fingerprints of this work all over it,” Kesselman explained. “Those emotional tenets and the two or three that we’re leaning into are directly informing our content strategy and how we want to show up as a brand moving forward.”
Beyond messaging, Protobrand also helped Indeed prioritize which brand perceptions to measure and strengthen over time.
“The quantitative aspect to the data helped us chart where Indeed is going to build its lighthouse as a brand for the next several years,” Kesselman said.
For brands navigating increasingly competitive and emotionally complex markets, the lesson is clear: the future of effective marketing campaigns lies in uncovering the subconscious emotional forces that truly drive behavior. By combining AI and behavioral science, Protobrand helped the team at Indeed make impactful campaign decisions and move forward with confidence.
