Your Job Isn’t To Make Your Company Look Good
"Making” companies look good is the root problem in this industry of recruiting content, talent marketing, employer branding, or whatever you want to call it.
1-minute 30 second read
I was recently asked if our job at Before You Apply is to make our customers look good.
My answer was simple and direct: No, our job is to help our customers tell the truth.
(In practice this means helping them talk openly, honestly, and publicly about topics that they would not normally share with an external audience.)
But “making” companies look good is the root problem in this industry of recruiting content, talent marketing, employer branding, or whatever you want to call it.
Here’s some more context to my answer:
(This will be helpful for internal content teams who are also thinking about this stuff.)
We (BYA) are here to set teams up for success when hiring. Success doesn’t just mean hiring people who meet qualifications. It means finding collaborators who are good humans with high buy-in that you want to spend time in the trenches with—solving really hard problems and making really cool things.
One way to achieve this type of outcome is by creating a scaleable filtering mechanism using content to package and distribute hard-to-find information to your talent market.
When people at companies are given the opportunity to talk candidly about the things that have been historically gated behind the secret walls of employment—and those things are shared with the outside world of talent that you’re looking to recruit—filters are created. Meaning, those things—that information—either attracts people closer to you or pushes them further away.
And the more you lean into the idea that content is a filter for your candidates and your recruiters, the more the productivity of the conversations between the two increases.
The approach that we’ve found to work the best for a) pulling the most interesting information out of people and b) creating strong filters at the top of the funnel is:
Asking teams the questions that others aren’t willing to ask them.
Asking teams questions that others don’t know how to ask them.
Asking teams the questions that conservative marketing departments won’t touch.
Asking teams the questions that talent actually wants the answers to before they have a conversation with a recruiter or hiring manager.
BTW, you don’t need us to pull this off. You can do it in-house.
Regardless of who does it, embrace the mindset that you’re job isn’t to “make” the company look good. Your job is to help the company tell the right story, truthfully.
In the most literal sense, your job is to ask really good questions.
Here’s the irony: The information that companies aren't willing to share out of fear of looking unappealing to candidates are the things that actually make them more attractive.
Why? Because when companies share that information:
Candidates know that they’re not full of shit. Trust increases.
2. Candidates can make an informed decision on whether a conversation is worth their time or not. Affinity increases.
And trust and affinity are really good for your brand.
P.S. If you have questions, DM’s are open. Feel free to reach out.