Hacking the Comms Bureaucracy: How Smart Talent Leaders Will Save Themselves by Avoiding the PR and Marketing Gatekeepers
Companies are spending countless hours and dollars trying to discover and articulate who they are so they can position themselves with ambiguous words that fit into a safe little box. Not only is this unnecessary, but it’s useless.
1-minute read (+0:53 video)
The obsession with "brand alignment" and an unwillingness to be pragmatic doesn’t just plague marketing.
This is employer branding's biggest Achilles heel. It’s why this work typically has little impact on recruiting outcomes.
Companies are spending countless hours and dollars trying to discover and articulate who they are so they can position themselves with ambiguous words that fit into a safe little box.
The thinking is, “We must get ourselves ‘aligned’ before anything sees the light of day. If we don’t, people will be confused, dismayed, unimpressed, left scratching their heads. We’ll look like a circus!”
Why? Because they’ve been told they have to. All in service of the “higher up’s”—the fearful, the risk-averse—so they can feel safe.
As a result, by the time anything does reach the public, it's so PR'd and diluted that whoever is actually communicating this stuff has lost all personality, humanness, and trust.
Well, guess what? Not only is this unnecessary, but it’s useless.
Talent leaders at companies without strong brands think the only viable solution is (drumroll) a strong brand—but they’re wrong. There’s a shortcut: give candidates the precise information they want—ungated and unfiltered—at the top of the funnel.
In the future, great companies will not “acquire” talent, but will instead approach recruiting like they approach customer development.
The mantra of these companies will be “give job seekers what they want.”
Here’s the rub: Job seekers want information before they apply, but companies don’t know what to say, where to say it, nor how to scale it.
The vast majority of companies are set to fail. At these failing companies, the smartest talent leaders are already circulating their resumes.
The winners will take a dramatically different approach to recruiting.
They’ll hack the comms bureaucracy by using content to freely share what was historically regarded as 'privileged' information.
And what was gated behind interviews and employment will now be used to facilitate engagement, connection, and most importantly, trust.