Every business has a story – but what story are today’s most ambitious companies really living? The Dreamers is an interview series exploring how senior leaders understand the deeper narrative behind their work and how it shapes the way they lead – through the lens of the Human Story of Business framework and its four archetypes.

Traditional Irish pubs do not centre the television or the music. They are built around conversation. Enclaves and snugs hold clusters of people mid-story, mid-laughter and mid-argument. The musicality comes from the telling. 

For Aidan McLaughlin, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Indeed, that early immersion in storytelling was formative. Irish-born and psychology-trained, he now works at the intersection of the global job market and lived experience, shaping the narratives that help leaders, job seekers and organisations understand what work means now. 

We spoke to him about becoming a storyteller, and about the story of work itself. 

When did you start identifying with the term ‘storyteller’? 

I’m Irish, and storytelling is deeply rooted in Irish culture. The Irish word for storyteller is Seanchaí. Traditionally, the Seanchaí was second only to the king of a clan. They were the ones who kept history and tradition alive and held the community together.
 
You still feel that tradition. In a lot of Irish pubs, conversation is the main event. There isn’t music or television pulling your attention away. The energy in the room comes from people mid-story – the rhythm of someone remembering, exaggerating, laughing. That’s the music. 

When I first got into public relations, I realised it’s all about storytelling. Picking up a phone and pitching a story to a journalist in 30 seconds. If you want people to move or act in a certain way, you have to tell them a great story. It’s a powerful tool for persuasion, for motivation, for getting things done. And it’s also just great fun. You’re never done reading and telling stories. 

You’ve studied psychology – can you talk about why stories move and change us?   

So much of the work is thinking about what people are not thinking about. We live our lives with heuristics, shortcuts that help us get through the day. That’s fine. But if we’re trying to help people think differently about an organisation, we have to surface the invisible assumptions through storytelling. 

That’s a practice. It doesn’t come naturally. 

Take the invisible equation between job title and self-worth. We assume work is something we do, but for most people, it’s something they are. That shapes how people search, how they respond to rejection, how long they stay somewhere that isn’t right for them. Surfacing that assumption is what lets us tell stories that actually connect. 

What stories are being told in organisations? 

People tell themselves a story about the role they play, the office they work in, and then the organisation itself. 

The job of a storyteller in an organisation is to understand what’s real, what’s fiction, what’s malleable, what’s static, what works and what doesn’t. Then you can build narratives that people can get behind. 

Often that means finding points of connection, what remains true as everything changes around us. Change is metabolically draining. We’re afraid of it. As storytellers, we need to show that yes, it’s chaotic and it might feel awful, but we’ve been through this before and we can come out stronger. 

What story compelled you to join Indeed?  

Something I understood very early on is how important a job is to a person. After family, health and home, work provides dignity and meaning. Finding the right job can fundamentally change your life and the lives of those around you. 

Indeed’s mission, to help all people get jobs, felt deeply human to me. 

How do you bring storytelling to Indeed?  

I’ve been at Indeed for 13 years. I sometimes think of myself as a cultural historian. I’ve seen the organisation grow from a startup of fewer than 500 people to more than 11,000. 

Indeed sits in a remarkable storytelling position. On a micro level, we see individual lives change every day. On a macro level, we see global patterns of supply and demand that almost nobody else can see. That combination is powerful. 

We think every business is living in one of four stories. Which story is Indeed living in?  

I go back to our mission. We’re still on the quest to help people get jobs. But the terrain is shifting. 

We’re moving from a world of search engines to a world of AI. Instead of simply collecting all the jobs and asking people to find them, we’re now helping connect the job to the person. Moving from ‘search’ to ‘match’ is a new chapter in the quest. The meta quest remains the same. 

What stories are you seeing in Indeed right now?  

Great stories are rooted in change, and often tension. AI is a good example: one side of the story is job elimination. The other says it’s all hype. The reality is more complex. 

AI will fundamentally change how jobs operate. But it won’t eliminate the need for people. 

We’re interested in stories of how AI enhances people’s work. I saw that John Ganz, a US political philosopher, has built an AI agent to measure the degree of authoritarian consolidation in the US. Philosophers are vibecoding. That’s just one use-case.
 
We also want our stories to carry hope. There’s little point telling stories if we can’t give people encouragement to move forward. 

How do you balance emotional honesty with that notion of hope?  

That’s a misconception about the word hope – that it’s untethered from reality. Hope has to be based in reality; it emerges from facing the world as it is with courage.  

I subscribe to Nick Cave’s view that hope is the ‘warrior emotion’.  

Find out more about the Four Archetypes of the Human Story of Business here.