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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian. I’m so honored to have with us today, Abbey Carlton, she’s the Vice President of Social Impact at Indeed. Welcome, Abbey, to the Impact Podcast.

Abbey Carlton: Thank you for having me, John.

John: Okay. Before we get talking about all the important and impactful work you and your colleagues are doing at Indeed, can you please share a little bit about the Abbey Carlton story? Where did you grow up? How do you get inspired to do this kind of very important and relevant work that you’re doing? And what does your journey look like?

Abbey: Sure. Let’s see. I grew up in the rural Midwest. I bounced around a bunch of different small towns. My dad was in hospital administration so he would for the Rural Regional Health Care system. So he would move jobs and that would mean we would move to a new part of the Midwest. This was sort of 1980s, early 90s. Even at that point in time, I wouldn’t have had the language to describe it then, but I really saw around me what it looked like when opportunities were starting to go away or maybe when there hadn’t been opportunities there in the first place. A lot of small post-industrial towns where folks were really reeling from plants going away or different jobs going away.

And so, I think I felt that around me from a pretty young age, and then as I grew up and I went away to college, I had the just good luck of finding myself at Cornell studying Industrial and Labor Relations. Very few folks from my high school left the state to go to college, I was in Michigan at the time, found myself in Ithaca, New York, which was a really big city for me at the time, and just started to feel like I had structures and ways to think about some of the problems that I had seen around me or some of the stuff that I was thinking about that I would start to call social justice but again didn’t have the language for, at the time, and that really set a course for me of working on jobs and economic opportunity, and looking at how important jobs are in a person’s life, in a family, in a community, what happens when jobs go away. And so after that, I just found myself in one job after the other getting to think about those questions in different ways.

I had the opportunity to work at the Department of Labor, I worked in the nonprofit setting, I worked in more of a think tank research setting, and then most recently, prior to coming to Indeed, I spent almost a decade at the Rockefeller Foundation where I led the foundation’s work on jobs in economic opportunity. So I got to think about some of these issues from the very privileged vantage point of being able to put resources toward them in some of our communities here in the US. And then, and I’m sure we’ll dig into this more, an opportunity came up to come over to Indeed and I grabbed it.

John: It’s fascinating your background on the public side, what made you want to go then on the business side of the equation and get out of the philanthropy side and that public side of the business?

Abbey: Yeah. Especially in my last couple of years at Rockefeller, we were thinking a lot about opportunities for folks to connect to work who were having a hard time. So, a lot of the same work that I have that I get to do now at Indeed, but so much of the work in philanthropy at least at that time. I left Rockefeller about five years ago to join Indeed and was focused on what we would call the supply side of the equation and thinking about what are the supports or the different training programs that somebody would need to be a good fit for a job.

And I think that that is super important and there’s a lot of good work that still needs to happen there, but it felt at the time, relatively little focus in the social sector was on the employer side of the equation. What must employers do to make more space for job seekers who are having a hard time connecting to work, what role might employers be playing in exacerbating some of those barriers and challenges? I started to really feel like there were so much opportunity to shape impact on that side of the equation that when I heard that Indeed was thinking about starting a social impact function and getting into the space for the first time, I thought I just had to, I have to go to this place that is so unique in that Indeed was then and still is the largest marketplace for talent in the world.

We have these incredible levers to be able to pull to help employers think about who and how they hire, and help job seekers get the right information they need to make an educated decision about where they want to go. The opportunity to come to Indeed and think about how we point all of this activity at some of those hard problems was just really exciting then and it’s still really exciting now.

John: It was an offer you couldn’t refuse.

Abbey: Exactly. And I had six-month-old triplets at the time, they’re six now.

John: Holy Toledo.

Abbey: I know. It was truly an offer I couldn’t refuse in that I said, you know what? Opportunities like this do not come along often, I have to do it and make it work and I did, but it was a pretty crazy time.

John: Abbey, where do you find time to work and sleep and eat and everything else? Triplets? I only have two children and they’re spread apart and they came at different times. Are the three your only three children at this point?

Abbey: I have an older son as well. I have an 11-year-old son and six-year-old triplets.

John: A mother of four.

Abbey: It’s wild. It’s a happy chaos.

John: It’s happy chaos. Well, good for you. That’s amazing. So, about six years ago or so, you moved over to Indeed, which, as you just said, is the world’s largest hiring platform, which is a huge, huge platform, obviously, and well-known around the world. Talk a little bit about ESG, and for our listeners and viewers to find Abbey and her colleagues of all the important and great work they’re doing in social impact, ESG, and everything else, please go to either indeed.com or indeed.com/esg. ESG, a fairly new acronym that has now become part of our vernacular, and it become normalized, what does ESG mean to Indeed, what’s its core purpose there in terms of executionable goals and how does that support the Indeed core mission of becoming and staying the world’s largest hiring platform?

Abbey: Yeah. Indeed’s mission is really simple, it is, we help people get jobs. One of the things that drew me to Indeed is that that is my mission as well. So, I had this opportunity, we have this incredible opportunity as a business to have a really big social impact through the core of our business. But when we think about our environmental, social, and governance commitment, so our ESG commitments, for me, and for our ESG team, that’s really thinking about how do we push on the edges of that mission to help even more people get jobs? Who is being left behind? And how can we use this marketplace, this engine for economic opportunity to make sure that they’re having better outcomes?

John: You’re talking about the historically marginalized in North America or anywhere in the world?

Abbey: Yeah. Indeed is a global talent marketplace. And so, just to put that into perspective for folks who might not know us as well. Every month globally, we have over 300 million unique visitors coming to Indeed looking for work.

John: Wow.

Abbey: And we have millions of employers globally who are coming to Indeed to try to find talent and that actually equates to every minute more than 20 hires happening on the

platform.

John: Incredible. That’s incredible. Go ahead and talk about that core mission of helping people who have been typically left behind.

Abbey: Yeah. So, a couple of years ago now in 2021, we and our parent company, Recruit Holdings, said that we want to come out with a set of bold 2030 ESG commitments that really do what I mentioned that just embody our mission and push on the edges of our mission. We have commitments for each of those areas – environmental, social, and governance. I lead our social commitments on behalf of the company and those are two big goals, both for 2030. The first is to help 30 million job seekers facing barriers get hired by 2030.

The second is to shorten the duration of job search by 50%. So, when you asked about who we are thinking about when we look at that 30 million, we started this work now a couple of years ago, so that list will grow and grow as we think about how these challenges play out in different markets across the world, but a couple of groups that we are thinking a lot about right now, our job seekers who have some type of criminal record. In the US alone, there are over 70 million adults who have a criminal record, and that can create all kinds of challenges when trying to find a job, keep a job, and achieve economic stability.

And then, we’re also thinking a lot about people who have built their skills in what you might call non-traditional ways. So they don’t have that college degree necessarily, but they have the skills and ability to do the job and they’re finding that it can be a really hard thing to connect to the right job and move up when employers are screening using things like degrees to screen for talent. Obviously, you can imagine across both of those groups, you have a wide range of different demographic groups, genders, etcetera. But those are two big employment barriers, in particular, that we’re thinking a lot about.

John: Yeah. About 30 years ago or so, I was living in Los Angeles during what was then called the Rodney King riots which are now called the LA riots and I happened to meet Father Greg Boyle and we co-founded, he was of course, always the leader of it. We co-founded Homeboy Industries. At first, it was Homeboy Tortillas, which then evolved into Homeboy Industries, but why I bring all that up is Father Greg Boyle had a great tagline, which was very important back in ’93 – helping gang-impacted youth and folks that had potentially run-ins with the law and record, but it’s just as relevant if not more relevant today. His tagline was – Nothing Stops A Bullet Faster Than A Job.

And boy, I’ll tell you what, a job really, as you said earlier at the top of the show, can change someone’s whole outlook on life and give them a sense of purpose and give them a sense of community and belonging and the jobs are so valuable. Those are two very important buckets of folks. But another bucket of a group of folks that I’ve gotten to meet along the way because I’ve actually been partners with a young man who was blind, legally blind, and started a business with him is disabled people. I didn’t realize this, the United States has what? About 62 or 63 million people are disabled but again, historically forgotten and marginalized by society. Is that another group of folks that are getting more and more access through great platforms like Indeed?

Abbey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think for us, we have a multi-layered approach to thinking about really all of the groups that were talking when we talk about folks who have some type of disability. There’s obviously the piece about making sure that our platform serves individuals with disabilities well. You need to be able to come and use Indeed in all of its functionality to be able to look for a job. Then there’s a piece where whether it be skills-based hiring or hiring if you’re someone who has a criminal record or someone with a disability, it often will come down to some of these same core questions of what is really important to you when you are looking for a job and how can we understand better which jobs, which employers have those things and make it easier for you to find them.

On the employer side, obviously, if we look out a little bit longer, we want to think about how do you change employer behavior, how do you help more employers do some of the things that those best-in-class employers are doing – the great fair chance policy or this really holistic disability accommodations. But we know that this is really variable across jobs. So, if I am somebody, for example, who has a criminal record, the thing that might be most important to me might not be pay or location, it might be but it might be – does this employer conduct a background check or not, or do they have a fair chance policy in place? So if we can understand what matters the most and then start to collect this information from our employers, we can do what Indeed is designed to do, which is to make great matches between job seekers and employers but we can do it with a set of information that we might not have looked for or thought to collect before.

And so the same is true coming back to your question about folks who have a disability. There might be a different set of questions that really matter and if we can understand those and lift those up and make them, we say, discoverable for our job seekers, then we think people are going to be able to find the job that really is the right fit for them for the things that matter the most for them.

John: Really, in essence, Indeed from a macro perspective is trying to democratize the process of job finding and level the playing field.

Abbey: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

John: That’s just wonderful. An unbelievably lofty goal, 30 million people who face barriers, etcetera, and being more inclusive and using your great platform to do this, what are some specific models that you’ve used or opportunities that you’ve done that set you apart from both your competition and also our historical hiring practices.

Abbey: I think if we come back to one of the two examples that we were talking about, you think about two-thirds of adults in the US who don’t have a college degree and have been skilled through whether it’s learning on the job or through a workforce development program, or some other means, we are thinking a lot about how as a whole platform, we move in the direction of helping employers and job seekers match on skills on the things that really matter and start to remove some of those proxies that might have been used in hiring practices prior that we know aren’t serving us particularly well. A college degree, in most cases, is not a very good proxy for whether or not someone can do the job. And yet, it’s a shortcut.

It’s something when you have many, many candidates in front of you and you need to make choices, you can understand why some of these shortcuts might have historically been used by the clients who use Indeed, and by Indeed. We are a company of over 12,000 employees globally and up until a couple of years ago, we had degree requirements, I don’t know if it’s the majority, but many, many of the jobs that we have working at Indeed. So one of the things that we did early last year was to remove those degree requirements from a majority of the job profiles for jobs at Indeed because our perspective is that if we are going to go out into the world and help our clients think about removing bias and barriers and hiring that we really need to lead by example. So that was one thing that we did to grow our commitment to equitable hiring as a large global employer.

John: Fascinating. So you’re basically just saying leading by example is part of the greater core values of Indeed – leading by example.

Abbey: Absolutely.

John: Talk a little bit about your Skill Connect Program. What does the Skill Connect Program mean, do, and help you reach your commitments and goals that you laid out at Indeed?

Abbey: Yeah. Skill Connect is a relatively new product that we’ve launched in the last couple of months again under this banner of skills-based hiring and helping people connect to jobs on the things that really matter. So, if you think about how Indeed and many job-matching platforms were built, it’s often the case that that experience may have been built more with a job seeker with a college degree in mind.

So if you go on to Indeed or if you went on to Indeed a couple of years back and you go to create your profile as a job seeker, it is really easy for you to say the highest level of education that you’ve attained. But until more recently, it wasn’t as easy to say, “I don’t have a college degree but I attended this workforce development program at Per Scholas and I got a certification in cybersecurity, and here are the core skills that I developed as part of that program.” One of the things that I value so much in the way that we do our social impact work at Indeed is that we work really closely with partners in the field who are working day in, day out, on the ground with job seekers who face some of these barriers.

So when we went to the Per Scholases and other partners out there, this is something that they lifted up for us. They said we need to find a way to reimagine the onboarding experience onto Indeed in a way that centers skills. And so, that’s what Skill Connect is about. If you’ve gone to this Per Scholas program to continue with that example, you can now go in, select the program, and it will auto-populate the skills that we know because of our relationship with Per Scholas and programs like it, that you are likely to have developed in that program.

And the important thing about the way that those skills are demonstrated is that those connect to our back-end skills taxonomy at Indeed. So we can then use those skills to match you with the skills that our employers have told us that they need. We are trying to make our entire engine, starting with things like Skill Connect but there are other examples across our suite of products, work on a more Skills First way to match on skills, instead of some of these other pieces that might have been used in more traditional hiring practices.

John: I love it. For our listeners and viewers who have just joined us, we’ve got Abbey Carlton with us today. She’s the Vice President of Social Impact for Indeed. To find Abbey and all her colleagues and all the great work they’re doing at Indeed, please go to indeed.com. If you want also read their ESG report, go to indeed.com/esg.

Abbey, you mentioned what Skill Connect does and how it does it, one of the great trends that we see and read about more than ever before, especially in the last 12 or 18 months is AI. Because Indeed is a technology platform, does it get to benefit from the explosion of AI technology that’s out there now and leverage it to continue to make Indeed the world’s largest and keep it the world’s largest hiring platform?

Abbey: Yeah. It’s such a big topic everywhere you turn right now and that certainly is the case at Indeed. We actually just had an all-company meeting earlier today, where this was a key topic. AI has been a part of Indeed for some time now but I think it’s also exciting to think about this moment and even think about the conversation we’re having right now – how can we use some of this technology to point it at some of the problems that affect the most vulnerable? So, our CEO shared recently, said, “I was on a panel and I was asked whether I am excited or worried about AI,” and he said, his answer was yes. That’s how we think about it at Indeed.

We see a ton of opportunity for AI to continue to transform the way that hiring happens and we also see a lot of risk and potential vulnerability that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We actually have within our ESG organization, one of the teams that is in our ESG org is Indeed’s AI ethics team and that team thinks exactly about this topic – about fairness, about what are the potential vulnerabilities of using AI in all of the exciting ways that we are and want to use it and just really keeps an eye on those fundamental principles that have to underpin anything that we do around AI.

I was looking at them just the other day and one of the first principles – this is actually a principle for all of Indeed but it is Job Seeker First. How do we make sure that anything we are doing in the space of AI and really any decisions that we’re making as a company put the job seeker first? Another one on AI specifically that feels really relevant is Hiring Is Human. So we can use AI to augment some of the things that humans need to do in the hiring process but going back to everything that you mentioned just a few minutes ago about why jobs are so important, this is one of the most important decisions that you can make as a person and that a hiring manager can make to bring you on to a company that human element, human decision and judgement will we think always be a really critical counterbalance to what’s possible with AI.

John: In other words, let’s not get too carried away with all the fun benefits that technology brings us all, let’s not lose the humanness of what we do at Indeed and the importance of how you treat your client base.

Abbey: And let’s be really intentional about how to move forward in this moment.

John: That makes so much sense. A little while ago, Abbey, you mentioned the fair chance hiring filter. I wasn’t clear and I don’t fully understand what that means although it sounds fascinating and very important, by the way. Can you explain to our listeners and viewers a little bit about how a fair chance hiring filter that you developed at Indeed works?

Abbey: Sure. To give a little bit of background on fair chance at Indeed, it actually is the case that the very first Indeed employee – Employee Number 1 – was someone who had a criminal record and had spent several years in prison. I think it’s such an important anchor for this conversation because we, as a company, would not be where we are today without so much of the infrastructure that this first employee helped to build. So, fair chance hiring has been part of Indeed’s story since the beginning. Fast forward to a year or two ago when we started to think a lot about what we could do in this space when we looked at our talent platform, we realized that a lot of employers were telling us in some way that there was a fair chance job but we weren’t doing enough on the back end to be able to categorize those jobs so that we knew that they were fair chance jobs and make it easier for job seekers to find them.

You go over on the flip side, on the job seeker side, there were a lot of ways in which our job seekers were telling us that they were looking for a fair chance employer searching for things like the two boxes on the Indeed homepage putting no background check or felony-friendly in the search box. But again, it wasn’t easy to translate that search into a ready set of jobs that were, in fact, fair chance jobs. We thought we were all about better matching for job seekers and employers, we can enable better matching for job seekers with a criminal record and employers who have already raised their hand in some way to say that they are open to hiring those job seekers. So, it was two sides of the equation. On the employer side, we both got a lot better through our back-end taxonomy of understanding the ways in which a fair chance commitment showed up in a job description.

We added a question to the job posting experience so if you are a small business and you’re posting your job on Indeed, there’s an opportunity for you to say that job seekers with a criminal record are encouraged to apply. And then on the other end, we built the filter so that instead of doing these different searches and hoping that they would find their way to those jobs, our job seekers could simply say show me fair chance jobs where I live or remotely or whatever the criteria would be, and those jobs would be the ones that would show up for them. We now find that it’s been about, I think, about a year since we launched the fair chance filter and it is used over 500,000 times every month.

John: Really, it’s just a wonderful piece of technology that you’ve created that creates better matches between potential employers and potential employees.

Abbey: Yeah. Really, it’s just about expanding what is core to who we are as a company. Our whole company is based on understanding what employers need and what job seekers need and matching them on those things. We are really trying to do the work to get smarter about things that we might have left off that list that really matters for people who are struggling to connect to work, whether that’s because you have skills and you don’t have a degree, whether that’s because you have a criminal record, whether that’s if you have a disability, if you’ve been out of work for a long time, some of these different things that show up in the hiring process where folks can get screened out, but have nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

John: And do it well.

Abbey: Yeah. They’re missing out. That’s the business case here. For us as a company, this is, of course, about doing good in the world and really fully living our mission. But our clients tell us that the number one thing they want is to make quality hires faster and some of these behaviors, these more traditional hiring practices are screening out a bunch of really qualified candidates on things that are not going to have an impact on their job performance. So if we can take some of that noise out and match on the more important things, it’s a win for job seekers, obviously, but it’s also a big win for employers who are using Indeed and want to connect to the broadest pool of qualified talent that they can.

John: Understood. Abbey, talk a little bit about, to our audience of business owners, business managers, and HR directors, how can a company or organization who’s listening to this create more equitable hiring practices and make the case of why that would benefit their business.

Abbey: Yeah. It’s such a great question. I would say a couple of things. The first thing is to take a look at what some of your, I’ll say, burning business challenges are. And look maybe a little deeper than you have in maybe conversations past. So, is it – we’re not finding the right talent or we have a retention problem, or whatever it might be? I think often on the face of it, these might not seem like equitable hiring problems, but actually, a lot of the things that we’re talking about today can help to solve some of those business problems. They are not different. I think too often these conversations can be about niche side programs but if you’re experiencing retention issues, it is proven that job seekers with a criminal record are more likely to stay on for a longer period of time than the average employee. It is proven that a college degree is for most jobs, not a good metric, not a good proxy of who’s going to be a good fit, and using that to screen, you’re missing out on a much broader talent pool. And then, the question is, well, why aren’t we connecting with the right folks?

Well, you might be screening them out. So, I think there is this just kind of second look at what are the business challenges we’re experiencing right now and where might there be some different levers to pull that we haven’t thought about. That’s definitely one thing that I would recommend. A second thing is – and this is a little bit more specific to our conversation about skills-based hiring, although it really is relevant to a lot of these different challenges. Take a look at your job descriptions, what are you asking for? And over the years, I think all of us are probably guilty of – you just keep adding more and more requirements to the job description, and then you’re hiring for another role and you just used the description that you used for the last one and that can really lead to a situation where some of the best people for that job are going to look at that list and they’re not going to see themselves in it.

So that’s another concrete thing. Look at what you’re asking for and really think about if I had to cut this list to a quarter of what it is right now, what are the absolutely most critical things to be successful in this job. And then maybe the last thing that I would say because this can feel sort of daunting or overwhelming or where to start and a lot of small businesses, in particular, people are just their heads down, they’re doing a bunch of different jobs at the same time, it can be really difficult to say, oh, let’s rethink our practices in a fundamental way. I would say find a partner. You do not have to do this by yourself. I mentioned this group of partner organizations that we have the privilege of working with at Indeed, some of these are community organizations that specifically serve job seekers with a criminal record.

Others like Goodwill are organizations that are in communities across North America who are helping to support and train people who have any number of barriers to employment. Find some of these local organizations in your community and work with them. They know the playbook. They have job seekers. They can help you to take that first or second step toward thinking about more equitable hiring in a way that’s not going to require you and your team to totally pivot away from some other things that are taking up all of your days as you’re trying to run your business. So, those are a couple of starting points that I would recommend for folks.

John: At Indeed as we discussed earlier and as you shared earlier, walking the walk before talking the talk is very important. You said in recent times, you took off a lot of the requirements for college education in your own hiring there at Indeed. What other strategies and approaches have you taken at Indeed with regard to your own internal practices that have succeeded and that you are excited about sharing with the world and having others follow suit?

Abbey: We are so lucky, also within our ESG organization, another pillar of that work is our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging team, and they are really in a pretty holistic way thinking about these questions that you and I have talked about. My role is largely to think about how we help our clients and our jobseekers achieve more equitable hiring on our platform, all of that, then through our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging team is also pointed inward to think about how we can live those values and be a more equitable employer.

There’s a lot of really exciting work going on. I will highlight one piece that feels really relevant to what we’ve been talking about. I mentioned fair chance hiring has been a big part of Indeed’s DNA since the beginning. One of the things when we made a public commitment around fair chance that we started to better understand and this might be true for others who are listening. We had pretty progressive background check policies and adjudication policies already but what we realized we hadn’t done well was make our fair chance commitment public.

So here I’m talking to you about how we have employers coming on the site and telling us in myriad different ways that they have a fair chance or second chance programs. We realize that we weren’t highlighting that enough as a global employer. So we went back in and we made our commitment much more public. It is now in all of our job descriptions. That was one thing. It’s always peeling back the onion, right? As you do this work, you will take a step forward and it will make clear to you a bunch of next things that you can do to continue moving in that direction. So, we made our commitment public, and then importantly, coupled with that, we realized that we needed to make sure that our recruiting team and hiring managers understood in practice what that commitment meant to us as a business.

We made some investments over the last couple of years in making sure that it wasn’t just a behind-the-scenes commitment or a public on-paper commitment but folks felt like they were empowered and had the resources where they sit to really live the commitment. Again, all of this, I mean, I think a headline for this work is that is always a work in progress. We are on our own learning journey as a large employer. We are on a learning journey as a talent marketplace that wants to do better in this space and we get a lot of that really from listening to our job seekers and our partners so we’re really grateful for them.

John: Abbey, speaking about the learning journey, what have you and your colleagues at Indeed learned post-pandemic with regards to potential employee hiring practices and what employees want now prior to pre-pandemic and the same goes on the duality, our concurrent basis, the same thing goes for potential employers, how their hiring practices needed to be adjusted in a post-pandemic world?

Abbey: It has been such a journey, hasn’t it? I feel like we’re still on it too, right? This fall or I guess we’re not quite in the fall yet but this summer, more return-to-work announcements. I feel like the landscape is ever-changing but we definitely learned a lot over the last couple of years. On the employee side, I think all of us, I can certainly speak for myself, we found ourselves juggling things in ways that we never were before. I mentioned at the start of our conversation that I have four sons and during the pandemic, they were all home as I was working from this desk right here. And I am so lucky to have an amazing partner, and actually, we have an au pair who lives with us. So, we were really lucky to have childcare during that time but I would say flexibility is something that is not new, we all needed flexibility before.

Sometimes I’ll have these conversations and we’re talking about working mothers, this is true for everybody but the dimensions are different depending on who you are but I think the need for flexibility could not be ignored during the pandemic in a way, where maybe before we all just said, we’re going to make it work and I’ll find some way. It really came into the spotlight and I think that again, I’ll speak for myself but I think I speak for a lot of other folks. In the New York City suburbs, I was doing the hour-and-a-half commute on most days a week so that’s three hours a day that I wasn’t spending home with my family. And then to have that time back, it certainly had me thinking about, well, what is the right balance between my work and the rest of my life?

So, I just think that, for so many people, they took a step back during the pandemic and said – what do I really want in a job? What do I really want in my life and how can I make those things more compatible? Now, on the employer side, it was such a roller coaster. Companies that had never had to think about virtual work before had to flip that switch overnight. Now, we’re in interesting hybrid situations where people are back in the office some days and not another day. So, it really just upended on both sides a lot of things that maybe we all thought weren’t up for debate, up for negotiation. And so, I think it’s going to be really interesting to see. I don’t believe that the dust has fully settled on either side of the equation but it has certainly changed what I think both job seekers and employers are looking for now.

John: Abbey, what are you and your leadership team at Indeed looking for as top priorities in your ESG program in the years ahead?

Abbey: As I mentioned our goals are looking ahead to 2030 and that’s really exciting. Being in a big global company, often, you have to be thinking about the next day or the next quarter for Indeed and for Recruit to set these goals looking ahead now seven years. It feels really important because you know and we all know that when you set a goal like helping 30 million job seekers facing barriers get hired, there are some really entrenched systemic challenges that lay beneath the surface of that goal that incredible organizations have been trying to solve for many, many, many years.

So the fact that we have this time horizon across which to really think about what is our role as a talent marketplace, what are the levers that we have to pull? What works, and what doesn’t? Trying different things. A lot of this is going to be about trial and error. A lot of it is going to be about having the humility to know when we lead, when we partner, when we need to listen, and more deeply understand a facet of the job seeker experience that maybe we haven’t understood as fully before. These are all things over this arc from now to 2030 that we are excited to dig into so that Indeed will be the leading talent marketplace globally as it is now. It will also be the go-to place for equitable hiring for employers to connect with the right talent to connect with the most diverse slate of candidates and to be able to make those better matches and for job seekers to know what kind of experience they can have and expect when they come to Indeed.

John: I love it. Abbey, thank you so much for your time, wisdom, and your vision today. This is such important work that you’re doing. And for our listeners and viewers to find Abbey and her colleagues and all the important relevant work they’re doing with regard to social impact, equitable hiring, and diversity, please go to indeed.com to learn more about also, all the accomplishments to date and all their vision for the next year’s ahead, for the 2030 goals with regards to ESG, please go to indeed.com/esg. Abbey Carlton, thank you for not only joining us today on the Impact Podcast but thank you for making the world a more equitable and better place. Thank you again for all your time today and you’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast.

Abbey: Thanks so much for having me.

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