Unlocking job market secrets through big data
For this episode of The CMO Show, we’re joined by Rachael Townsley, Director of Country Marketing (Australia) at Indeed. Their mission? To help people find jobs. It sounds simple, but navigating a complex and competitive employment landscape requires a savvy and strategic approach you’ll want to hear more about.
So, what are you waiting for? Press play and enjoy!
Hybrid work, shrinking talent pools and a technology revolution have created a labour market that’s both challenging to navigate and flush with opportunity. For Rachael Townsley, Director of Country Marketing (Australia) at Indeed, finding ways to connect people to their dream jobs (and employers to their dream candidates) has taken on new meaning in the age of big data and customer centricity.
“We invest heavily in local research – it fuels our audience understanding and supports all of our campaigns from an employee, job-seeker point of view”, says Rachael.
“But aside from all that, we work to apply the data we find into our audience segmentation. The insight it gives us into industries, age groups, and demographics is unparalleled.”
But deeper insights and audience segmentation are only a part of the puzzle. Thought leadership events help ensure Indeed has a voice in the industry conversation and are crucial to their success as a market leader.
“As a format, events work really, really well with our Australian audience. They help us drive brand awareness, they help us drive leads, and they're generally just such a great forum to deepen relationships with our partners and prospects,” Rachael says.
“The calibre of research, the speakers and the people that come and join us on stage, it does really position us as a thought leader and a strategic partner to those employers on their hiring journey.”
Want to hear more from Rachael? Hit play to launch into this episode of The CMO Show. Enjoy!
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producers – Rian Newman & Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones
Hello, Mark Jones here and you’re listening to The CMO Show, a podcast made for and made by marketing professionals, proudly produced in partnership with Adobe.
We’re stoked to partner with Adobe, a global organisation that is changing the world through personalised digital experiences.
We’ve enjoyed a long-term partnership with Adobe as one of its marketing agency partners, and it’s a great fit because the team really supports our mission here at The CMO Show to educate and inspire purpose-driven marketing leaders.
For this episode we’re delving into the ever-evolving job landscape. With priorities shifting, talent pools shrinking, and employee goals changing, the burning question emerges:
How do organisations stay ahead in hiring and retaining top talent? Our guest today holds the key to these insights and more.
Today, I have the pleasure of introducing our guest, Rachael Townsley, the Director of Country Marketing (Australia) at Indeed.
Now, let’s talk about Indeed. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re probably not paying enough attention.
Indeed is the go-to job search engine for both job seekers and employers. Their mission, in a nutshell, is to help people find jobs. And guess what? The marketing function at Indeed is meticulously designed to achieve just that.
In our conversation, Rachael sheds light on some of the more fascinating aspects of the Indeed marketing journey. We delve into topics like data research, competition analysis, and the unwavering commitment to customer centricity.
So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this insightful chat with Indeed!
Thanks for joining me, Rachael.
Rachael Townsley
Thank you for having me.
Mark Jones
Now, we should dive in to a quick couple of things about yourself, and one of the things I love about your résumé... We should stay on point with a conversation about Indeed by talking about résumés, right? Southern Cross Austereo, Pandora, Quantcast, a really interesting background in a bit of media, in a bit of research in ostensibly online businesses. What is it about that experience that you think shaped a bit of who you are today?
Rachael Townsley
Well, I think originally coming from the UK and a marketing career that was in television over there, I saw a new opportunity in a new country with a lot more sunshine and set my sights on this region. I think ever since moving to Australia I've always set my sights on roles that can afford me new opportunities, new challenges. As you just read out, a lot of them are different industries, so I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work across those. But I think one of the things that I've taken from each of those is just the importance of knowing your audience and your customer. And I think for me that's something that I really lean into here at Indeed and across my career, just audience first.
And on a personal side, and specifically moving to Indeed, and I've been fortunate to lead a number of marketing teams here in Australia, is the people first approach. At Indeed we invest in a lot of research in the space of wellbeing and diversity, equity and inclusion, and that's been something that's been really important to me, and it's something I've definitely invested in myself over the last few years.
Mark Jones
it's interesting, you see when a marketing leader moves to a new organisation that's outside of previous experience it's often a good thing, right? Because you're bringing an outside in perspective, but those common set of tools. One of the things that I also noted was your time spent with The Marketing Academy, so you're a Marketing Academy scholar, what was that like?
Rachael Townsley
It was life-changing.
Mark Jones
Yeah? Tell me more.
Rachael Townsley
So I've just graduated, I graduated in November from the nine month program. It's such a phenomenal program, I think I didn't quite realise how much impact it would have on me, not just as a marketer or as a leader but actually as a person and benefiting my life holistically.
But I think where I actually took some of the most growth was from the mentoring. So having access to senior leaders and senior marketers across Australia was just phenomenal, being able to tap into their wisdom, their expertise and their knowledge in different aspects has actually really opened me up to new opportunities and given me new ways of thinking about things, and lots of learnings that I can also pass on as a mentor myself. So just so thankful and grateful to have been part of that journey with 29 other amazing leaders.
Mark Jones
Yeah, I'm so happy for you. Sherilyn Shackell, who's the founder and global CEO of The Marketing Academy was on The CMO Show in 2023, so she will be delighted with your testimonial there.
To draw a couple of threads, you've really been having an opportunity where you can explore the lifestyle aspect of being a CMO through the academy, and at a professional level you've also been growing. And I think there's an opportunity for more balance for CMOs, I think if I look back over the last couple of years a lot of the CMOs we've spoken to really have had it a little bit lopsided, almost too much work, not enough lifestyle, and I'd be interested in your journey on that.
Rachael Townsley
Yeah, and it's definitely a journey, and it's a journey that I would say I'm still on if I'm quite honest. I think over the past few years balance has been very blurred, because we used to be able to pick up, walk out the door, go to the office, do the 9-5 and then leave, close down the laptop, or back in the day the desktop, and be on our way. Whereas when COVID hit everything that we did with work, it was in the four walls of our house. So it became ever so easy to have dinner, come back, check something else, and put my son to bed, come back, "Oh, I'll just check what Europe are doing or if I need to action something." So I actually personally quite struggled in those early days of navigating back to work after maternity leave and figuring it all out.
Personally, my mental health and wellbeing I would say took a dip, and that's something as part of The Marketing Academy that I really worked on. So finding exercises to just analyse where you're at and where your balance is at. And take a look at it holistically across say a month or a quarterly period to assess if you're spending the time where it's best spent, where it's going to add the most value to you. And sometimes that might be on your career, and that's okay, that's okay to focus on that as a working parent, and sometimes it might be more family focused. But I think taking stock of that and being able to draw conclusions and put change in place, that's something that's really helped me.
Mark Jones
There is a really fabulous connection between that story, your story, and that of the ESG aspect to Indeed. And we should talk a bit about Indeed, this idea of diversity, inclusion, more opportunities, it's one of the themes that I've seen in the reading that I've done on Indeed. It seems to be an opportunity to... The brand globally seems to be focused on, "How can we think a bit differently about this whole job search space?" So what are your thoughts on that?
Rachael Townsley
I think at Indeed one thing that I love about the company is our mission, it's so simple yet so powerful, which is we help people get jobs, and that's all people. So actually, as part of our ESG focus globally, we've committed to helping 30 million job seekers facing barriers globally get hired through Indeed. Locally to Australia and specifically within the marketing org that I'm in and on my team, we've invested over the past four years into research from the Australian perspective on both the job seeker and employer front into diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
So over the past four years we've ran annual research, and the findings are phenomenal.
If we're making comparisons to the research that we launched Australia wide, we were doing pretty well, but there's still a way to go. And I think across Australia there's still a number of people that don't feel like they belong in their workplace, and that's not okay, that's not okay. If you show up to work you should feel empowered to bring your true, authentic self and do your best work every day. So that's a journey that we're on, both internally to make sure that everyone at Indeed feels inclusive, but also with our employers as well.
Mark Jones
So when it comes to applying for a job at Indeed are there different filters that you apply to the application process to make sure that you pick up a more diverse set of candidates for example? I'm just wondering about how the research comes through into practical processes that we all use.
Rachael Townsley
So I have a role on my team called a talent strategy adviser, and the role of the talent strategy adviser is very much as a consultant. So goes along to client meetings alongside sales and can support on things like just that. So looking at job ads to analyse where there might be challenges with inclusion, or they're using certain words that sway to a certain group or agenda. So we do that on a one-on-one basis with our clients, but I think as we move through the next year or few years I also believe there's going to be technology that helps to support these efforts for our employer partners as well.
Mark Jones
That's great. It's really good to hear that that's part of the journey. More broadly, tell me about your job now. What are some of the challenges that you're facing? I think Indeed's been in the marketplace here in Australia for a little while, obviously it's a huge global brand, what's the journey been like? And if we think about the country manager part of your marketing role, give us a bit of an insight into the challenges and the opportunities that you're seeing.
Rachael Townsley
I always like the global-local approach as well when I sit in a country or it's also known as field marketing team. I'll start with the opportunities. I think having a global presence and working for a global company has so many benefits. For us sat in country marketing here in Australia, we have access to marketing experts all around the world, we have a large marketing team at Indeed and we're lucky to be able to leverage specialists to support us on our region. Which is great because it expands the skill set and capabilities of our local team. It also gives us the opportunity to expand and test new campaigns that might've worked in other regions, which is great.
So that's the global opportunities. And I guess one of the challenges that we have specifically in this market is we have strong competition, so we need to differentiate ourselves, and just leaning into global strength isn't enough. So we do need to build out and make sure that whilst we ladder up into global marketing goals and strategies that we have the Australian overlay, from our audience targeting, to the messages that we put out there, to the campaigns that we produce, to really ensure that we're connecting with Australians in an authentic way with topics that matter to them, whether they're an employer or a job seeker.
[STING 1]
Mark Jones
Something that's of interest to me is that you're both a B2B and a B2C marketer, and I'm interested in your thoughts on that, because obviously the B2B is engaging with employers. For example, here at ImpactInstitute we have used and use Indeed and other marketplaces, but you've also got the B2C audience. So how do you make a distinction between the two? And what are the best strategies that people could learn from?
Rachael Townsley
Yeah. Well, thank you for being an Indeed user, always great to meet our clients. But yeah, we've got a pretty sizable audience because the Australian workforce is around 14 million job seekers or workers, so that's one group on its own, and then we have over two and a half million businesses. So with our mission to help all people get jobs, it's quite a big group, so we do have to hone in on our targets. Now, how we do that, we start with broad targeting, we split our audiences into three core segments, so we have job seeker, which is our B2C, and then we split our B2B into SMB and enterprise. We are a platform for all, so it's important that we're building awareness with all of these groups, but then our other categories and our other segment targeting falls under those three categories. So it's really important for us, we are a two-sided marketplace, so we have the job seekers, we have the employers, and we need the experience for both to be positive.
So if job seekers come to us we need to have the jobs for them, but we also need to be providing a strong candidate pool for our employers as well. So our efforts for B2C and B2B, while separate in many instances, also align. So where we see an imbalance in one industry say, we can balance it out from the other side, whether that's through growth marketing efforts or life cycle, to bring more employers to the platform or more job seekers in those specific industries. So despite the distinct and different needs and motivations of our different audiences, there is a commonality that exists, whether you're a B2B employer in enterprise or SMB, at some point you're likely to be a job seeker or looking for career advice, and we help people with both of those things.
Mark Jones
So you need to focus on brand awareness for both sides. It sounds like there are some really targeted campaigns going on to make sure that you've got the right mix of different people, as you say, by segment or opportunities, right? You've got to have the right number of employers and the right number of employees, which of course would be common to all of your competitive set, but I'm just wondering what you might be doing specifically to fix that imbalance. If you identified, for example, construction and you say, "We haven't got enough employers in construction, we've got heaps of candidates," what would you do that's quite unique?
Rachael Townsley
I've got a great example. If we look at the past few years, healthcare as an example has faced many skills shortages. So if we take nursing as an example, this is one of the fields where we've seen the share of postings on Indeed continue to grow. So there's a real need for registered nurses in this country. In the past we've tapped into International Nurses Month to run email campaigns to try and bring nurses to the site to look for employment opportunities that might have registered nurse in their résumé. We'll also invest in digital acquisition efforts to, again, specifically target in a certain industry.
And one of the good things for Indeed is we have such an enormous global footprint that where we need to rely on migration to fill some of the skills gaps, there's the opportunity for us to reach candidates in other markets too, try and sell in the Australian lifestyle as it was sold to me, and try and fill some of those skill gaps that we have. From an employment standpoint, we invest heavily in account based marketing, and again, we focus on specific clients and industries at different times. We work really, really closely with our sales team there as well, and our aim with this is really to support our employer partners to provide information, insights, trends data, and obviously the solutions to really help them in the industry that they're in.
Mark Jones
Yeah, that's really interesting. What's the role of data in all of that? Quite clearly you've got to be mucking around with all sorts of different levers that you can pull on in both of those dynamics. How do you use that in your decision-making? Presumably you've got all sorts of research and different inputs that you could consider.
Rachael Townsley
Yeah, we do. There's so much data, and I think that's an opportunity and a challenge in itself, right? I can speak personally to how we use this in my team, in country marketing. So we do invest really, really heavily in research locally, it's what fuels our audience understanding, it also supports our campaigns. So the work that I mentioned in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and also, last year, at the back end of the year we launched Workplace Wellbeing. This not only gives us insight into how people feel from an employee, job seeker point of view, but it also lets us segment that data to pull insight from industries, from age groups, demographics, which is really, really interesting.
We also have our economist, who leads our platform called Hiring Lab. So we stay really close to the pulse of what's going on within the economy, and we have a first look at that, seeing that from an employment standpoint with the activity on our site from both the job seeker and employer point of view. So again, we really do lean into that. And from the marketplace perspective, looking at job volumes versus job seekers searching, again, we do lean heavily into that in our market planning as well.
Mark Jones
Is that a local economist?
Rachael Townsley
It is. It is, yes.
Mark Jones
Yeah, okay. So how would that translate from a hiring perspective? So is the idea that in addition to brand awareness and above the line marketing work to bring more people to the platform, those who are already engaged are looking for insights, they're looking for the best ways to position their hiring, their job ads? Is the idea that the best thought leadership wins?
Rachael Townsley
I'd hope so, because we love thought leadership.
Mark Jones
Yeah, right?
Rachael Townsley
But I think we are so lucky to have our economist on the ground, he is in demand from marketing, from sales. What we find in speaking to our partners is they want to stay ahead of the curve, they want to know what's coming next, and we have a lens into that. So a lot of the content that we work on is very much around the future of work, and whether that is job seeker insight, whether that is economic trends, whether that is technology, we want to be at the forefront of that conversation. And we have an event series called FutureWorks which is all about that and taking that positioning to market and leading that future of work narrative.
Mark Jones
That's actually quite exciting. I noticed you had that, it was in person and virtual, in September last year, 2023.And you were responsible for that. Can you give us a quick overview of the event and what you did and what you took out of it from a professional point of view?
Rachael Townsley
Yeah. Well, let me take it a step back. So the Indeed FutureWorks brand launched in 2022 as a global marquee event in the U.S., and the event that you're referring to in 2023 was our second event in the U.S. How we have brought that to Australia and where we've seen value is we've taken that marquee event on the road. So we launched our first local FutureWorks event at the back end of 2022, with our second instalment coming actually in a few weeks' time, so it's all hands on deck and we're very excited.
But for us as a local marketing team we see so much value in this. As a format events work really, really well with our audience here, they help us to drive brand awareness, they help us drive leads, and they're generally just such a great forum to deepen relationships with our partners and prospects. But in terms of the value that they bring, we see more than just marketing metric value. From a marketing perspective, with the calibre of research, the speakers and the people that come and join us on stage, it does really position us as a thought leader and a strategic partner to those employers on their hiring journey. And it's a powerful platform for sales too, there's something to be said about face-to-face interaction when we're operating in this virtual world, so it's definitely opened up new opportunities for us.
Mark Jones
That's great. Well, keep us in the loop on how that goes. And I think from a thought leadership point of view but also that customer perspective you were speaking earlier, the events business, of course there's not a lot new here but it's always about the execution. And I've been fascinated over the years to see how different companies use customer events as a way of building momentum, driving sales, creating great experiences, making sure that you're top of mind, all those sorts of good things. Well, what's on your horizon for the rest of the year? . What's top of mind, obviously beyond FutureWorks in a couple of weeks? What's on your radar? What's the wish list?
Rachael Townsley
So we're very much in the planning phases for the year ahead. We do have our three year plan in place and we're about to be entering the second year of that. So what we'll be doing, as we've discussed today, is we're going to be leaning into the data, we're going to be seeing what worked for the year that's just gone, and what learnings and insights we can take into the year ahead.
For us, what comes from an employer point of view, we want to continue to be front of mind with our partners and prospects, and we'll do that in a number of ways, but watch this space because we're in planning. And from a job seeker point of view, we're going to need to be continuing to build awareness, to bring new job seekers to our platform. And at the end of the day, really just helping job seekers find their next role, or helping them with career advice and then fueling the candidate pool with really strong talent for our employers, and we'll be doing that through marketing support as well.
[STING 2]
Mark Jones
Can I go back to another quick point before we begin to wrap? You were talking before about the customer centricity and I'd be just interested to expand on that a little bit.
Is there a customer experience strategy or a people first strategy that's part of your marketing plans or your marketing strategy? It's something I noticed you commented on earlier was particularly important as a thread throughout your career, I'm wondering about how that might apply at Indeed.
Rachael Townsley
I think I can look at it in a few different ways as it pertains to how we work here at Indeed. I mentioned earlier we had this broad targeting with our core segments, but for us we have our budget, we have our resource constraints, so for us we really do need to hone in and make every dollar count. And the more we know about our audience the better we can do that. So from our long-term strategy, we look at the market context, we look at what we can expect to see over the next few years, and then we'll look at where those biggest opportunities lie for us for longer term growth within those segments, and we'll build our goals and aspirations from there.
But we need to consider the external factors that can really impact the labour market within that year, so things like looking at specific industries and doing deep dives on those, or it might be the size of an employer, or looking and going down the persona based research route. So that we can really take insight, better understand their challenges, their motivations, and how we best reach them and help them with those. The labour market can be volatile, industries can grow very quickly, but they can also fall quite fast, and we've seen that over the last few years, so we need to be able to pivot our efforts there as well.
Mark Jones
Yeah. One of the things I'm taking away from your experience is the people within an industry segment, you're obviously playing across so many segments, being able to then get down to really understand what are the drivers within each segment is quite key when you're working at the sort of scale that you guys are, so that's great. Well, look, thank you, Rachael, so much for being my guest today, fabulous to meet you and for joining us on The CMO Show, and all the best with your marketing efforts in 2024.
Rachael Townsley
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Mark Jones
It's a pleasure. That was Rachael Townsley, the Director of Country Marketing (Australia) at Indeed.
During my chat with Rachael, one idea stood out: the critical role of data. Specifically, how you can translate data into actionable insights.
Understanding industries, age groups, and demographics is essential, but the real magic lies in applying this knowledge to your market.
A big thanks to Rachael for being part of this episode of The CMO Show, brought to you in partnership with Adobe. Hope you enjoyed it – until next time!