How Indeed uses AI to help evolve the job search

Indeed is a platform that helps people find jobs and helps employers find the right talent. Job seekers use Indeed to search for opportunities, upload resumes, and research companies, while employers use the platform to attract, screen, and hire candidates more efficiently.

We spoke with Maggie Hulce, Chief Revenue Officer at Indeed, about how AI is unlocking opportunities for employers and job seekers, driving internal AI adoption, and shaping the future of talent acquisition.

AI is core to our mission of helping people get jobs. For nearly 20 years, we’ve used AI to power billions of connections between job seekers and employers, all with the goal of making hiring simpler, faster, and more human.

Today, we have over a hundred AI-powered features across job search and hiring—from personalized job recommendations and salary insights for job seekers, to candidate matching and job description optimization for employers. We also work closely with OpenAI on more than a dozen of these products, and that’s been incredibly valuable for us.

We push ourselves to move fast—using the data we collect to continuously improve matching for job seekers and employers, and to test and iterate based on real feedback. At the same time, we’re deliberate about moving responsibly. Even as AI speeds up sourcing, matching, and evaluation, it’s essential to us that employers stay in the loop and remain the final decision-makers in hiring.

In just the last few months, we’ve launched a number of new AI features, including two AI agents—Career Scout, which acts like a personal career coach for job seekers, and Talent Scout for employers, helping automate the most time-consuming parts of recruiting. We also announced new AI-powered capabilities through Indeed Connect, like Advanced Screening and Sourcing. There’s a lot happening right now.

There’s a lot of excitement across our teams about AI—especially where it helps eliminate repetitive work and frees people up to focus on more creative and strategic tasks. In marketing, it’s helping us move faster on creative generation, testing, and brand research. In sales and client success, teams are using AI both through our core tools and by building their own agents—for things like account planning, personalized outreach, and proposal generation—alongside internal models that surface next-best actions and real-time signals.

On the R&D side, adoption of agentic coding tools has taken off, with over 80% of engineers using AI. Overall, about two-thirds of employees say AI is already saving them up to two hours a week, helping teams move faster and ultimately deliver more value to job seekers and employers.

“At Indeed, we definitely see AI as critical to our mission to help people gets jobs.”

When it comes to AI, we want our culture to be rooted in curiosity, open-mindedness, and continuous learning. We know there’s some natural apprehension—people wonder what AI means for them and how to use it well—so we’re being very intentional about how we approach this.

We have a VP of AI who focuses on adoption, enablement, and measurement, including company-wide training programs available to every function. At the same time, we expect each team to define the AI use cases that matter most for their own workflows and business goals.

What’s been especially powerful is bottom-up sharing. In sales, for example, there’s an active Slack channel where reps share prompts, agents, and wins and cheer each other on. In R&D, a junior engineer started making short weekly videos showing how he uses AI—and that’s inspired more adoption than any top-down email ever could.

We want to fuel that energy. To encourage it, we’ve launched an internal hackathon and a monthly contest through the end of the year, with incentives and company-wide recognition, to celebrate ideas, demos, and real business impact. We’re intentionally trying to make AI adoption both practical and fun.

Recruiters have always spent a huge amount of time on administrative work like sourcing, screening, and scheduling. Tools like Talent Scout and Smart Sourcing are designed to take on that repetitive work so recruiters can focus on what really matters—building relationships, understanding candidate motivations, and creating better experiences for everyone involved. We’re already hearing from customers that AI is helping them engage with candidates earlier and more deeply, move faster through the process, and ultimately make better hiring decisions.

“We have a lot of excitement about AI across our teams especially when it [...] helps people reduce time-consuming repetitive work and allows them to focus on higher value creative and strategic work.”

Responsible AI has been a focus for us for years—we published our principles early on—and at the core, it really comes down to keeping humans at the center of hiring. Employers remain the final decision-makers, while AI supports better, more objective decisions. We don’t view responsible AI as just about efficiency or risk mitigation; it’s foundational to our mission of helping all people get jobs.

In practice, this means designing AI experiences that prioritize fairness, transparency, and accountability. On the employer side, AI helps match candidates to roles using more objective, skills-based criteria, which can broaden talent pools and improve fairness. On the job seeker side, it enables more personalized and transparent recommendations, helping people better understand why certain roles are a good fit. When both sides use these AI capabilities, we consistently see better outcomes—which reinforces that responsible AI leads to better hiring for everyone.

Ultimately, we’re trying to solve long-standing hiring problems—finding quality candidates faster and with less friction—and AI is simply a powerful new tool to help do that. Our goal is for AI to feel like it gives employers superpowers, while they always stay in control. The process is transparent, the criteria are theirs, and the decisions remain human—it never feels like a black box.

What’s been most encouraging is how clearly this shows up in outcomes. For example, when we recommend a set of highly matched candidates for a role and an employer reaches out, those candidates are 15 times more likely to apply than if they discovered the job on their own. That’s a great example of human judgment and AI working together to dramatically improve results.

We’re also seeing strong validation from customers. We’ve had positive results from companies testing Talent Scout, including BrightSpring Health Services, which filled 45% more hard-to-fill healthcare roles in just four weeks while saving teams eight hours a week. When customers see results like that—getting days of work back each week—it builds real confidence and reinforces that AI is helping them hire better, faster, and easier.

AI is embedded across nearly all of our job seeker– and employer-facing products, and we’re already seeing meaningful impact at scale. In our flagship product, Sponsored Jobs, about 70% of sponsored applications now come from AI-powered recommendations. In another core product, Smart Sourcing, employers who use AI capabilities are hiring 40% faster.

We’re also seeing strong results from newer products. Premium Sponsored Jobs, which hundreds of thousands of employers are already using, helps move forward three times more applicants and nearly 60% faster time to hire (compared to non-sponsored jobs). Talent Scout is delivering similar gains, including significant improvements in hard-to-fill roles.

On the job seeker side, early testing of Career Scout showed that people are finding jobs they’re excited about seven times faster and are 38% more likely to get hired. Taken together, these results give us confidence that AI—across both long-standing and new products—is improving quality, speed, and outcomes for everyone on the platform.