How Indeed Got $80,000 Worth of Research for $4,000 with Outset

Indeed's biggest product launch in two decades needed a messaging framework that would resonate with job seekers, explain the product clearly, and anchor an entire go-to-market strategy. The magnitude of the Career Scout launch, an AI-powered career coaching tool designed to help job seekers find jobs, land offers, and everything in between, demanded rigorous consumer research. The question was whether it also required an $80,000 focus group study to get there.

The Challenge: High Stakes, High Costs

When Angela Kesselman, Brand Research and Insights Lead at Indeed, began planning research for the Career Scout launch, traditional video focus groups were already scoped and underway. Four 90-minute Zoom sessions with 20 job seekers across general, high-salary healthcare, and high-salary tech audiences. She was looking at five weeks from kickoff to report and eighty thousand dollars out of her budget.

The study would inform the messaging framework that would anchor the entire go-to-market strategy. It was critical work, but Kesselman saw an opportunity to pressure-test whether it had to cost that much, or take that long.

The Solution: A Parallel Test

Indeed ran the same study twice. The focus groups proceeded as planned, while Kesselman built a mirror study in Outset using the same stimulus, the same recruit criteria, and as close to the same discussion guide as possible. She ended up running three 45-minute AI-moderated studies across the same audience segments for a total of seventy-five completed interviews in two weeks from kickoff to report. All for four thousand dollars.

Translating the focus group guide into Outset turned out to be simpler than expected. "I was like, are we going to have to cut out a lot of this in order to fit 90 minutes' worth of conversation into a 40-minute session," Kesselman said. "We actually didn't have to cut much at all." The dead air that fills group settings, like waiting for participants to respond, managing dynamics, moderator small talk, simply wasn't there.

The Results: Same Insights, a Fraction of the Investment

The two studies arrived at the same core findings. The messaging that resonated most positioned Career Scout as "your personal career coach,” language that job seekers responded to because it implied support and guidance without removing their agency. The core message that emerged, making it easier to find jobs, land an offer, and everything in between, tested strongly across all segments.

Outset's synthesis tools helped surface what was driving those findings at a granular level, including the discovery that mock interview feedback and personalized career guidance were the features drawing the most organic enthusiasm from participants. That drumbeat of personalization shaped how heavily the final messaging framework leaned into it.

The Outset study also produced something the focus group couldn't: AI-generated highlight reels that let Kesselman bring the consumer voice directly into stakeholder presentations. "Putting together that highlight reel compilation, that's automatic," she said. "It's making the theater of your insights so much easier to put together, which, as fellow insights people, you all know is incredibly important for stakeholder buy-in.

"Not only was Outset able to deliver the same rigor at 1/20 of the cost in the parallel test, we were able to identify new ways to use Outset across our studies more broadly."

That last part turned out to matter most. The Career Scout study opened the door to a broader shift in how Indeed's insights team approaches evaluative research; one where consumer input is no longer reserved for the highest-budget projects, but available to any question worth asking.