On this week’s episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, co-hosts Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt talk with Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, about the reasons it's harder than ever for businesses in some sectors to find new employees.

Job seekers are looking for companies that share their values—"Places," Hyams says, "where an employer is going to look out for them as a whole human being, that is going to care about their physical health [and] their mental health." Hyams, Murray, and McGirt also discuss breaking down systemic biases and barriers in hiring, and how to help job seekers expand their understanding of their skillsets.

Listen to the episode or read the full transcript below.

Transcript

Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are super focused on how CEOs can lead in the context of disruption and evolving societal expectations. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership.

I'm Alan Murray and I'm here with my perspicacious co-host, Ellen McGirt.

Ellen McGirt: Did you have to practice that?

Murray: Yeah. I'm trying to find some new adjectives.

McGirt: Well, I love that. I love your dedication to the craft too. And you know, I love you as well. But I want to start off today and hello, everyone who's listening, with asking you a philosophical question, Alan Murray. Are you ready?

Murray: Go for it. Go for it.

McGirt: Are you happy in your job?

Murray: Wow. You know, Ellen, actually, that one's easy. I love my job. I think Fortune has a great purpose in the world. It's been around for almost 100 years, and my job is to make sure that it's around for another 100 years. I couldn't ask for anything better.

McGirt: And we couldn't ask for anyone better, so... but we are the lucky ones, right? We are really in the right job at the right time for us, but so many people just aren't as sure for all kinds of reasons that we talk about a lot, like their stage of life, the company that they work for, their employers are looking for certain types of people, if you get my drift, and of course, pandemic stress, whether they're looking for meaning or impact and safety and security. They're looking.

Murray: Yeah, I think that's become so central to business today. And so much of what we've been talking about on this podcast for the last two years. What's loosely referred to as the war for talent has much bigger implications about how people find meaning in their life and how companies attract the best people to create the most value. That's why I was really excited about this episode, Ellen, that you're responsible for, an opportunity to talk to Chris Hyams, who's the CEO of indeed, and is in a fascinating position to help us really understand the labor market, where work is headed. They're the largest job site in the world—250 million unique visitors every month, more than 12,000 employees around the world. And they're sitting on a mountain of data that we're going to explore today to find out what workers are really looking for and why.

McGirt: My favorite part of the story too is that they're in a position to nudge employers at scale, to do things like remove human bias from their hiring process and to think more broadly about the social impact of what it means to have an inclusive workforce in the world. And he's doing all that work at the company too. I met Chris this spring at a conference in Austin called Culturati, which was a wonderful experience and I was really taken with his vision and his ideas and his life story. Alan, unlike you who started your journalism career as a kid with a homemade broadsheet for your neighborhood, Chris had a very different idea of what he wanted to do when he first started out in life, which is a wonderful journey indeed. So Chris, thank you for being here. And welcome to Leadership Next.

Chris Hyams: Ellen and Alan, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Murray: Chris, your real roots are in rock and roll. Tell us about that.

Hyams: Well, I came to tech, not on a straight path. And I actually did my first job right out of college, I worked in an adolescent psychiatric hospital on the chemical dependency unit with young addicts and alcoholics. I taught special education [at] public high school in rural Vermont for two years. I then played music professionally for three years. I tried to become a rock star and failed, and then found myself in a in a graduate program in computer science. But for me, the experience of doing all of this human and creative work before, I think, helped me to approach technology from a more human perspective.

Murray: I want to start with the big picture because Ellen's already made a subtle nod to my length of time in this business. I have never in my 40 years looking at business, in covering business and the economy seen anything quite like what we have right now. Where we've had in the U.S. two negative quarters, people are talking about a recession, and yet, the business fight for talent has never been greater. People are desperate to find good people to staff their company. So I'm curious from where you sit with all the data you have access to, what's going on?

Hyams: Yeah, that's a that's a great question. Technical recession and 3.5% unemployment tend to not go together historically. But it's almost become boring saying we're in uncharted territory. The last two-and-a-half-years, everything that's gone on has been very, very new. So if you look at the at the top line stats in the U.S. right now, there are two open positions for every worker out there that is potentially looking for a job. And that's just sort of people who are out of work and open positions. There's actually more open positions plus filled positions than there are workers in the workforce. And that's that's relatively new territory. You often have the imbalance in terms of people out of work and open positions.

You know, a huge part of this has been the fact that during the pandemic, we had an extraordinarily unequal impact on the labor market, different sectors shut down entirely. And then you had health care and obviously everything supporting the stay-at-home economy. So ecommerce and logistics and warehousing and delivery go through the roof. What we're seeing right now is this kind of strange things all happening at the same time. We're seeing a bit of the boom starting to slow down for some of the sectors that were running hot during the pandemic. But then, if anyone has tried to get on a plane recently or go to a restaurant, it's impossible to find staff right now in those sectors. So we are still at this place where psychologically everyone in the business world seems to think that we're already there, or we're about to hit a recession, but the labor market is as tight as it's ever been.

Murray: And so Ellen, if you'll allow me a follow-up on that, there are two points of view about what happens next. There is one group of people that says, well, when the recession really hits, all this craziness in the labor market is going to go away. And there is another group of people that says, you know what, something has fundamentally changed in the way business operates and generates value and and talent is so much at the core of that, that it may ease up a little bit, but it's not going away. The war for talent is a structural permanent change. Where are you in that debate?

Hyams: Well, we've been using the phrase war for talent for at least the last two decades. So as long as I've been at Indeed, which is 12 years, and then as long as I've been in tech trying to hire people, you know, that's a phrase that's been around. The things that we're looking at right now, I think there's a few long-term trends that we believe will continue to result in a shortage of labor supply. Two of those are not pandemic related. So you have an aging workforce population that obviously impacts certain markets like Japan more profoundly than others, but that's happening everywhere. You have a lack of immigration, and especially things like Brexit, where there are policies that are driving that. And then you have these changing attitudes towards work-life balance and what people expect to get out of their career. That's a trend that had been there but that was massively accelerated during the pandemic. And so if you look at certain sectors,why it's so hard to get staff in a restaurant right now is that people who've been working in the food industry for years saw overnight that there was zero safety net for them. There was absolutely nothing that their employers could do for them. They had nowhere to turn. The number of people who left and are never coming back to that industry is pretty meaningful. And then, clearly, you had a lot of other people in different sectors who just saw how much they were valued when things got tough. You learn a whole lot about, you know, any relationship when things are tough. That's very different than when when things are good.

Murray: I'm going to add one more structural change to your list and Ellen, allow me to do this and then I will shut up and let you present any questions I know you have on this. But there is a fundamental change in the nature of business. And there's a reason this started in the technology industry. If you go back 50 years ago, and look at the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies, what you'll see is that more than 80% of the value of those companies was rooted in physical stuff. It was plant. It was equipment. It was oil in the ground. It was inventory on the shelves. Things that were tied to financial capital. If you do the same exercise today, more than 85% of the value on the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies is intangibles. It's like intellectual property, it's brand value. It's all things that are much more closely tied to talent. So I do think there's been a real structural change in business that makes talent just so much more important than it was 20 30 40 years ago.

Hyams: And there's no question about that. People spent a whole lot of time while stuck at home thinking about what was most important to them, and being a part of an organization that is going to be there and care for them when things are difficult, I think, progressed. This was a trend that was happening. But I think we got about 10 years of contemplation crammed into two years, and people are looking for something very different on all sides of the economy.

McGirt: And I would argue that you think, Chris, it's your job to be part of that fundamental change in business. You're sitting in the middle of what we called, when we talked last time, a sacred transaction between someone who's seeking work and a meaningful life and an organization that is seeking the kinds of people and the intellectual talent to transform their business and their communities and their world in a positive way. But maybe we should take just a quick step back and figure out exactly what Indeed is because it has changed over the years. It's not just a search engine for jobs anymore.

Hyams: Right. So Indeed's mission is to help people get jobs. And as I like to say every time I talked to the company, that's what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us going all day. It is a platform for matching jobseekers and employers and there's a few things that are unique about Indeed. I'd say number one, it's that we are for everyone. So we're not a site for white collar workers. We're not a site for flex workers or part-time workers. It's absolutely everyone in the economy.

Hyams: The other one is that our business model from the very start, pay for performance, that was pretty radical in 2004 when everything else was essentially classified ads. But what it means is we have no long-term contracts we have no minimum spend for our customers. We want to get paid when we're delivering value. When the pandemic hit we spent a huge amount of time, our client success teams were calling into our customer saying we see no open jobs right now for you but you're still paying for a subscription to our Indeed resume product. You should pause that subscription and come back and start spending when you're ready to hire again. We had a really rough Q3 of 2020 because of that. And then as soon as people started hiring, they came back to us and have continued over the last multiple quarters. And so I think that trust in that relationship, that's that's really the principles that the business was founded on. And especially in the last few years that's become incredibly important where how can we be there and help people when they need us the most? And there's been a lot of opportunity for the last couple of years for that.

But there's a couple things that from the very start had been really unique. And I think that that's really what we've been leaning into for the last 17 years that we've been around. The first one is that we're a marketplace but we put job seekers first. That shows up in a million different ways. Probably the most important one is that the only connections that we allow on the site and we police very aggressively is someone who is looking to hire someone for an open position right now. There's a whole lot of ways that we could make money by targeting job seekers for ads because we know a lot about them or by allowing employers to reach out to them for business development opportunities or selling them educational opportunities. We are focused solely and entirely on helping people get jobs and that has been that has been really important from the start.

McGirt: So how has hiring changed over the past couple of years and I think the implied follow up, how does it need to change?

Hyams: So the way that we describe it from the start really is that we want to make hiring simple and fast. What we've added is this dimension in the last few years and the recognition is making hiring more human. So Indeed very successfully, in the early days, was able to take all the jobs from everywhere in the world, bring them into one place and make it simple and fast for people to find jobs that were interesting to them. But in making it so easy for people to find and apply to jobs, then suddenly the problem became people applying to more and more jobs, which then started overwhelming employers with too many applications, which then made them less responsive which made jobseekers more frustrated.

And so, what we've really been focused on for the last several years is bringing that human element back in. We want to remove all of the complexity, make it incredibly we're really focused on just understanding everything we can about job seekers and employers and and really what job seekers are capable of, what their skills are, not what their resume says, trying to match them as quickly as possible to the right jobs, but then to bring the communication and connection on to Indeed so one of the things that we did during the pandemic was we saw in April of 2020, in one month, the request for video interviews went up by 1600%. And so we pivoted a huge portion of the company we built our own video interview platform. And what we can do now because the interview is happening on Indeed, we can take a job from an employer, get a few specific criteria, and then we can go and find the right job seekers, assess them in an objective way, schedule an interview and take them directly to talking to a human being in a matter of hours instead of a matter of weeks.

Murray: Sounds like a dating site.

Hyams: It's funny when we talk about the analogies that is really the closest thing especially because of the one-to-one nature. It's one thing in e-commerce to try to find a product or a movie or a book that you might be interested in. But there's there's no limit on the supply of the number of books on Amazon. For us it really is this one-to-one connection, and so we've just spent the last 17 years trying to understand everything we can about that.

[Music]

Murray: I'm here with Joe Ucuzoglu, the CEO of Deloitte US and the sponsor of this podcast for all three of its seasons. Thank you for that, Joe.

Joe Ucuzoglu: Pleasure to be here, Alan.

Murray: The biggest issue that I hear companies talk about these days and CEOs talk about is the battle for talent. People talk about the great resignation. How do you hire great people? How do you retain great people? It really seems to be the leading challenge most companies are facing. You agree?

Ucuzoglu: I do. The intensity level in the talent market is high and we certainly see the challenging aspects of worker shortages, of turnover levels. But Alan we're also seeing the leading companies realize that there's some opportunity in all of this. Market forces are at work here that's driving differentiation in the talent experience. And the companies that do this well are going to be big net winners, attracting and retaining more great talent. There's a lot of good in that, competition driving better outcomes for employees.

Murray: And so what's your advice for the companies trying to win the battle for talent?

Ucuzoglu: Well, first it's not going away. So prepare for the long haul. The demographics would suggest that there will be some level of continued tightness. I also think that it's important to realize that employees are now in the mindset of expecting a lot from employers, including a baseline expectation that they can relate their work to a broader purpose, that they're doing work that they're passionate about. They want to work for an organization that aligns with their values.

Murray: Joe, thank you.

Ucuzoglu: Alan, it's a real pleasure.

[End music]

McGirt: So let's stick with the philosophical piece that we started out with. What are people looking for today? Maybe we could break it down by sector and how do you get that pulse? And how do you translate that into insights for employers?

Hyams: We do a number of things. We look at clearly all of the activity that's happening on on Indeed. We have a team of economists, who are PhD economists who take all of the data that's available on the labor sector on the outside, and they combine it with our unique perspective. So what you typically see on the outside is supply, we have this view of demand and you can put those two together, but more interestingly, look at the mismatch between supply and demand. So what we're seeing right now is, for example, a significantly higher rate of people looking outside of the industry that they're in than we've seen before, and especially in some of these sectors that have seen the most disruption during the pandemic.

We also talk to job seekers and employers constantly. We run surveys. Our team of economists for anyone that's interested, I'll just give a quick plug—hiringlab.org—we publish in the U.S. and in multiple countries around the world, real time insights every single week. There's a huge amount of data that comes out of that. But really what we're seeing is that trend that more and more job seekers are looking for companies that share their values. And they're looking for places where an employer is going to look out for them as a whole human being that is going to care about their physical health, about their mental health. One of the biggest things that's happened during the pandemic is that, especially for folks who are connecting and working remotely from home, is we have these windows into each other's physical lives, like we're looking at these little rectangles, and we're seeing not just someone at a desk, we're seeing piles of dirty laundry and dogs running in and out of rooms and kids crying and and I think that you know, one of the things that that we've talked about quite a bit is that if you ask the question, especially in the U.S. three years ago, how are you doing? The answer always was one of two things was great or fine. And starting in March of 2020, if you asked how you're doing, you get a big sigh and then a real answer of what's going on in your neighborhood with your family. And I think that that has fundamentally changed every sector, every part of work in that we're beginning to see human beings as complete complex creatures that have a life outside and what's going on outside does affect us. I mean, we've always walked into work with a bag of weight on our shoulders. But almost everyone showed up with a game face and just said, Well, while I'm here, I'm just going to do my job and that's it and then might quietly break down in the bathroom stall. And it's not just one type of job or another type of job. People are bringing their whole selves and and we see that coming out in all kinds of different ways that people really want to be able to connect as humans with each other.

McGirt: So what does that mean for employers? You know, when we talk about things like inclusive leadership, and we talk about empathy, which we do all the time, and particularly on the podcast, we are hearing people particularly in the middle of their careers, really struggling with the new mandate to be human people who lead human people. What does that really look like and where should executives be focusing their learning?

Hyams: So certainly for us, you know, we started with just the the impact of this fear about this this virus and what it means for me and and my family, what it means for work. But then, on the heels of that we saw the waves of anti-Asian American xenophobia and then the murder of George Floyd in the aftermath of that and because of the lack, I think, of answers that were coming from the outside. Normally people would expect to maybe hear from the leaders of their of their country or if people were still going outside from their places of worship or whatever. People started turning to the workplace to get these answers and all of us who were not necessarily trained in any of these areas were thrust into a position of having to either try to provide some answers, or just ignore it. And I think that the one thing that was very clear is that leaders at this point whether or not this is something natural, ignore that at their own peril and so for us, it was really an opportunity to to open up and to listen to to create safe spaces for employees to come together. We were extremely fortunate, I think, at Indeed, that we had been doing with sincerity work around inclusion and equity for a number of years. And so we had this infrastructure of our, we call inclusion resource groups, some other companies might would call them ERGs or employee resource groups and for us, without even recognizing it or planning it, that actually became the glue that held the company together because we didn't have physical locations where people could get together and talk.

Hyams: We had very transactional meetings going on, people were showing up on on Zoom. But then suddenly, we had a place where when George Floyd was murdered, where our Black inclusion group could get people together, not just in a single office, but across the U.S. and EMEA together, across AIPAC and have employees who were deeply impacted, have a safe space to talk about that and for other people, to actually be witness to that and to start to listen, and that's, you know, one of the things and Ellen you and I spoke about this before that's really remarkable that I honestly I hadn't thought about too much, is that for many people, their place of work is the most diverse environment they find themselves in. Most people's neighborhoods are not terribly diverse. Most people's schools, their place of worship might not be. But if you work at a big enough company, you're going to work with a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds and experiences and what changes people's perspectives and ideas is getting to know someone who can share their own personal experience. That's so much more impact. I mean, you can you can read books, you can watch TED Talks and do all those things. But if there's someone who you know who you've worked with, who's telling you that they're, you know, an Asian-American is terrified for their parents going out to the grocery store. And they spent two hours on the phone with their mom last night begging them not to go to the grocery store because they were afraid for their safety. That's something that I've never had to beg my mother for and it's very different when I'm hearing it from someone that I know, than the abstraction of of seeing it somewhere else.

Murray: Yeah. You know, Chris, the other thing is that it's not only that the workplace is the most diverse interaction they have with society, in many cases for the younger generation. It's the only formal connection they have with society. They're much slower to get married and form families. They're much less likely to belong to an organized religion. They're not big joiners, you know, Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club, Moose club, whatever. And so oftentimes the employer is it that which seems to me as part of what's going on here.

Hyams: Absolutely. So we have found ourselves in in a new position I think, you know, one of the things that we look at is what is the role of an employer to care for people? And you know, if you if you look at the at the history of technology and technology innovation and then disruption, so there have been and there's this debate that we could spend hours on, which is, are people going to be permanently displaced by technology? So this is an argument it's been going on since the Luddites and for smashing looms. What has happened historically, is that every time there are technological innovations, it frees up people to do higher level work. It gives them more flexibility. By and large, they're doing work that is less dangerous, but a couple things happen at the same time. So it's very easy to focus on that and say, well, in the long run technology is great. It also does lead to more lower-paying jobs. And so right now there's a huge growth in warehousing and driving and all these other things to support these technology jobs. And those don't have the same type of future as these higher-level jobs that are being created.

Hyams: But the other thing that we ignore is that if you if you look at the long version of history, things do get better and more and more people have opportunity. But every time there's a new technology that comes up disrupts things, there's a massive set of people who are disrupted. So for me as someone who works in technology, I'm kind of sickened by the use of the word disruption as a good thing. Everyone's like, what we're disrupting this industry. We're disrupting that. Disruption means a whole bunch of people are losing work, and it's it's inequitable, how it goes down. You look at the industries and the type of work that is disrupted, it is typically people of color. It is people who are much more vulnerable from an economic perspective. And then we've also seen this very long thing over the last 40 50 years in this country of less and less power for workers. So you see huge productivity gains, and the the values go into smaller and smaller groups. So for us, automation means faster and faster disruption.

Murray: So Chris, what can Indeed do to help with that? No question, in advanced societies inequality is getting worse. No question, we have to massively speed up the ability to upskill train people to take on higher level jobs. How are you taking that on as a company?

Hyams: So we're deeply focused on that. And there's a couple things. Number one is that all of this data we have allows us to see these trends. So the first thing that we do is we try to recognize where things are going and see where disruption is starting to happen. Where are the number of jobs starting to shrink? When something happens like that, we will be able to see it, you know, minute to minute day to day. So the second thing that's really, really important is that if disruption is going to keep happening and happening more and more, we're focused on reducing the amount of time it takes to get a new job. And a big part of that, wo we believe in rescaling and upskilling, but that's too slow in many cases. So what we're really focused on is transferable skills. What can someone do that they're not and that's the thing that we hear so much for job seekers, they have no idea what they're capable of doing. So understanding from the work that you've done before, what are the set of skills that you have and what else could you go and do? So we have hundreds of millions of job seekers who we've seen move from one job to another to another, and understanding those and being able to help someone who is being displaced, and point them to something else where they can get hired right away.

Then the big thing is working on breaking down the systemic bias and barriers and hiring. And so those those show up in every area of society, in health care and housing, education, the criminal justice system. But employment we believe is the foundation of all of that and so, we have a huge effort around partnerships and social impact and working on helping people get ready for work and helping people with reentry from the criminal justice system. But also, we have this huge obligation given where we sit with all the data that we're collecting to look at that data with extreme skepticism. So the data that we have on employers selecting job seekers for jobs is colored by their bias. And so we have an AI ethics team that is looking at measuring very specifically what is the difference in overall impact and outcomes? And how do we measure and counteract that bias to make sure that not only are we not replicating the bias that exists in the world, but how are we counteracting that and creating a more equitable platform for hiring?

McGirt: So we should also talk about the work that you're doing within the company. You had mentioned when we talked last time that your focus and understanding of equity was still relatively new for you. You didn't come in to Indeed or even in the tech industry with that orientation. So how are you retooling the company to embed this kind of thinking in all parts of the business?

Hyams: Yeah, that's a great question. We could we could spend a lot of time on that. So I mean, like a lot of other people I was hired at Indeed in 2010. I came in as the VP of our product organization. I was the ninth member of the senior leadership team and the ninth middle-aged white guy. Eight of us were married with kids. So not a whole lot of diversity on that team. So we've had to be extremely thoughtful and intentional about those changes.

I'll tell you just one example, most recently, you know, like a lot of other companies were trying to increase the diversity of our hires. We put in place in June of last year, a new rule called the we called the "inclusive interview rule." So it's based on the Rooney rule—if you're familiar with the Rooney rule in the National Football League—but we adapted it and so for every single director level higher and above in the company starting last June, we have to have in our final slate of candidates before deliberation for an offer, we have at least one non-male identifying candidate and at least one what we count in our business as underrepresented minority in technology. So basically BIPOC, Black, Latinx, Indigenous Pacific Islanders. We don't we don't count Asians because they're not terribly underrepresented in technology.

That was hugely disruptive. I put this in place and I have personally approved every single offer for director level and above higher since last June. For the first three months. It was chaos, because basically everyone was saying, look, we've had this roll up. And for nine months, we have this amazing candidate for Google. We did get to talk to a woman but we couldn't find a person of color. Can we just make this offer? And I said no. And the answer was it forced us to completely change how we recruit. You can't just put a filter in place and say that that's going to change anything. So we had to, we had that we hired a whole inclusive recruiting and sourcing team. We started changing to spend the first couple of weeks of every search just looking for underrepresented minority and non-male identifying candidates.

What it ended up doing is opening up a whole new pipeline, we're now hiring more people faster and better. But we had to make all of these deep changes and we had to be willing to do painful things like slow down for the first few months. The outcomes are tremendously different. We've now expanded that to all of our HR team because they're so foundational to everything that we're doing. So the the inclusive interview rule is in place for that. We're going to expand it slowly to the entire company. And we've had to do so many different things. And what we've realized from this and is that in order to really make the kind of change that we make, if these are systemic issues that exist in the world around us, the only solutions are systemic. So where we are at now we just hired a new chief people officer and Priscilla's primary focus is on the way that we've described it is we need to break down the entire HR system, tear it down to the studs and rebuild it with equity as the primary lens. So how we do job architecture, how we do promotions, how we do compensation and benefits, how we do leadership development. Every aspect of that has to get rebuilt. It can't be done as a let's look at the numbers and say let's do better.

Murray: Yeah, Chris, it's so inspiring listening to what you are doing to make both your own hiring and your platform more inclusive, and more human. Really impressive. Also daunting though, to recognize the challenges that this disruptive sorry to use the word economy is is presenting us. Thank you so much for spending the time with us on this really fascinating and we appreciate it.

Hyams: Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure.

Murray: Leadership Next is edited by Nicole Vergalla, written by me, Alan Murray, along with my amazing colleagues, Ellen McGirt and Megan Arnold. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Executive producers are Mason Cohn and Megan Arnold. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune's editorial team.

The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com