A Commitment to the Right Conversation and the Future of Marketing to Talent
My commitment is to the conversation that helps inspire thought and spark ideas—not to being right. Because what this community needs more than anything right now are the right conversations.
1:15 read (+2:52 video)
The concept of marketing your company to talent isn’t new. The ways in which to do this in a modern market are.
This doesn’t take a huge investment of time, money, or tools.
It can be accomplished with little more than the tools and platforms available to us for free.
To be honest, one influential person at a company who’s active in the right ways online can exceed what we see the majority of companies trying to do today. (That’s for another post. To be continued later…)
The market, and therefore the industry has shifted. Yet, few companies have adapted—let alone started.
Let’s simplify this whole thing.
Effectiveness comes down to:
Can you create content at scale?
2. Can you successfully distribute it wherever your target audience spends time online?
3. Whoever spends the least amount of money to get the most in return typically wins.
Whatever you call this activity doesn’t matter.
Employer branding. Recruitment marketing. Content marketing. Those terms only mean something to the industry folks who sit around in Facebook groups and LinkedIn comments arguing the differences.
A Head of Talent at a 200 person startup with no employer brand team who needs to recruit software engineers doesn't care about the nuances between employer branding and recruitment marketing. They just want to hire faster and easier.
Focusing on terminology doesn't help anyone. Talking about how to successfully execute on a shoestring budget with a scrappy team, does.
In the meantime, the EB traditionalists will continue having the wrong conversations about the terms and the value props and the fluffy culture stuff.
It's time for innovation, not a debate over words and whether EVPs are a waste of time and money.
(I’ve fueled some of these fires—and I have strong opinions about that stuff. But now I’m only focused on having conversations that advance the way we think about companies and candidates meeting. It’s a much better use of my time.)
Here’s my two cents about the current state of marketing to talent:
Mindset and the ability to create isn't about tools, it's about aptitude.
Generally, recruiting teams have struggled to adapt to market changes by evolving their processes to align with market behavior. Instead, their solution has been to purchase tools in hopes that they will close the gap.
Tools never will. And in most cases, more tech only exacerbates the problem.
The long-term solution: visionary recruiters who can identify trends and adapt to an ever-changing market.
I'd argue that what this currently means is recruiters operating as content marketers, not salespeople—as that is the direction that the industry, and the market, are headed.
There are arguments against this. That’s ok. My commitment is to the conversation that helps inspire thought and spark ideas—not to being right.
Because what this community needs more than anything right now are the right conversations.