Job postings were down in 2025, but employers still struggled to find the right skills for their open positions, according to Indeed’s 2026 U.S. employment and recruiting trends. Report.
This paradox is the focus of James Whitemore, who joined Indeed as chief marketing officer in June 2025, the same month former CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba. income to run the company again.
Whitemore told Business Insider that companies and candidates need to reorient how they share information, add more detail and nuance to posts and profiles, and move toward natural language to power AI.
These changes are at the heart of two new AI tools the company rolled out to job seekers and employers in September, called Career Scout and Talent Scout, as well as an API integration for employers, called Indeed Connect, which is launching in January 2026.
Whitemore also discussed how Indeed’s marketing team uses AI to maximize its first-party data, as well as its strange experiments with synthetic audience testing.
The following interview is edited for length and clarity.
Business Insider: What do employers need to know about recruiting with AI tools?
James Whitemore: We’re trying to shift the whole conversation from job search to a more proactive conversation, where a potential employer searches for and selects the right candidates, rather than leaving candidates to search for the job.
So first, when you’re looking for candidates, how do companies build their profile? Many large-scale employers use very complex search strings to search for candidates.
With our new tools, you no longer use search strings. You use real-language descriptions of skills, personality traits, and training. It is essential to teach employers how to use the tools and how to research, describe candidates and the type of people they are looking for.
Then, for AI tools to work effectively, there is much more continuous communication on the candidate, so much more provision sharing about who progressed in the interview process and why some people were eliminated versus others who progressed. This way, you can constantly teach platforms what has worked for them.
So putting all of this together can be automated?
Yes, we call it Indeed Connect, which is basically a API-to-API integration between Indeed platforms and the company’s HR technology stack. The benefit that employers bring is that they can use these screening and search tools across multiple candidate sources.
Most large employers have their own candidate databases and search through other third parties, but you can use a consistent set of search tools for all of those candidates, not just those coming from Indeed.
Job seekers are frustrated with the hiring process. What do they need to know to stand out in AI-powered research?
You want to be as searchable as possible when employers use advanced search and selection tools.
The key is to make sure you have a well-rounded and well-rounded profile, and that this profile goes beyond your CV. A CV is a historical look back at what you have done in the past. What most employers really care about is what you are capable of doing in the future.
When I think about our own team, we’re looking for someone who understands marketing, but also multitasking people who understand a business process, who can be used effectively across multiple tasks.
Resumes generally don’t highlight soft skills. It’s important to complete your profiles and talk about what motivates you and what you’re passionate about in the “about me” sections, so that as these profiles are reviewed, you are much more likely to come across as an adaptable and curious person.
What are some other best practices for job seekers today?
To be successful, you need to be very focused on the type of job you want. Applying en masse to jobs that aren’t a good fit for you will lead you nowhere but frustration.
Plus, it’s okay to constantly search. The concept of “come and get a job when you need it” is not the right way to think about it. You need to be passively open to understanding what jobs are open to you on an ongoing basis, rather than just coming in for a job when you need a change for whatever reason.
This is the concept that Indeed is evolving into, from a place where you come to look for a job to a place where you expose your skills, your abilities, your ambitions to potential employers, and those employers can find you when they need someone with your skills.
How is Indeed’s marketing team using artificial intelligence?
Marketing is one of the disciplines most likely to be transformed by the use of AI tools. An important part is understanding and segmenting audiences in a way we’ve never been able to do before.
At Indeed, we have rich first-party audience data. We know who people are, their work history, their education, their salaries, and much more data that many CMOs have to work with.
Being able to take that data and compare it to third-party databases – this technology is evolving rapidly. Then you need to be able to take these audience segments and run them against mass media databases, in order to understand exactly where these people are consuming content across digital, print, radio and television.
The ability to test messages with a synthetic audience is also fascinating. We perform synthetic marketing testing over traditional testing, and synthetic testing is just as accurate. You can then take this data and feed it into content engines, to produce personalized content for audiences at scale.
It’s amazing how this is constantly evolving, so quickly. Part of the message to the team is that marketing needs to be at the forefront of AI. We work a lot with our vendors, getting them to demo their platforms and talk about their roadmaps.
How do you manage the variety of marketing AI systems and vendors?
I am currently interviewing a Senior Director of Marketing Transformation who will lead this group. It is very important to have someone who is really relevant to lead the discussions.
We didn’t call it “head of AI” because it’s really about looking at processes, workflows, how we work with others within the organization, and all the tools and technologies, that are so important to get right.