Employer messaging has a sameness problem. Candidates researching potential employers find the same values, the same mission statements, and the same well-meaning phrases wherever they look, which makes choosing between companies harder than it should be. The upside is a genuine opportunity. Standing out is no longer about outspending the competition; it comes from understanding what your organization offers that others don’t, and the work of finding and proving that difference is now within reach of employers of any size. So how do you uncover what genuinely makes you different?
My guest this week is James Ellis, founder of Employer Brand Labs and author of several books on employer branding. James has spent his career arguing that every company, whatever its size, can compete for talent by leaning into what makes it different. In our conversation, he shares why difference matters more than ever, why real proof beats nice-sounding claims, and where employers should start.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Why so many employers sound identical
- What scraping every Fortune 500 career site reveals
- Why playing it safe has become the riskiest strategy
- The opportunity for employers outside the Fortune 500
- The chicken soup story and the power of proof
- How AI changes the economics of employer brand work
- Finding evidence in the material you already have
- Why differentiation takes courage as well as insight
- What does the future look like?
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Key takeaways
- Employer brand messaging has become so uniform that companies in completely unrelated industries are using identical taglines to attract talent.
- Being different only creates value when it can be proven; policies, real spending, and specific stories carry credibility that polished messaging cannot.
- Claims every company in a sector must make, such as caring about people or patients, are table stakes rather than differentiators; the differentiated value is what a company offers beyond them.
- The evidence needed to prove an employer’s difference usually already exists in engagement surveys, policies, and everyday internal communication.
- Owning a distinctive space no other employer credibly claims puts a company at the top of the list for every candidate who wants what it offers.
- Differentiation is a change of perspective more than a budget line; the hardest part is pushing against the standard way of recruiting.
Transcript
Matt Alder 0:00
Every company says it has great values, a compelling mission, and people who care. When everyone makes the same claims, no one stands out. So how do employers find a thing that genuinely makes them different and prove it to candidates? Keep listening to find out.
Matt Alder 0:20
Support for this podcast is provided by Proof, the identity platform built for hiring. You’ve probably heard that by 2028, one in four job applicants is predicted to be fake. In fact, you’ve probably already seen that in your recruiting pipeline. Today, scammers are sending one person to get the offer and a totally different person to start the job. But most identity tools either only screen an application or verify a candidate’s ID. Proof does both, integrated directly with applicant tracking systems like Lever, from the first interview through to onboarding. So you have proof that the person you interview is the same real person you hire. You can learn more by going to proof.com. That’s P-R-O-O-F dot com.
Matt Alder 1:30
Hi there. Welcome to episode 821 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Employer messaging has a sameness problem. Candidates researching potential companies to work for find the same values, the same mission statements, and the same well-meaning phrases wherever they look, which makes choosing between companies harder than it should be. The upside is a genuine opportunity. Standing out is no longer about outspending the competition on branding or marketing. It comes from understanding what your organisation offers that others don’t. And the work of finding and proving that difference is now within the reach of employers of any size. So how do you uncover what genuinely makes you different? My guest this week is James Ellis, founder of Employer Brand Labs and author of several books on employer branding. James has spent his career arguing that every company, whatever its size, can compete for talent by leaning into what makes it different. In our conversation, he shares why difference matters more than ever, why real proof beats nice-sounding claims, and where employers should start. Hi, James, and welcome back to the podcast.
James Ellis 2:51
Hey, Matt, it’s only been a few days since the last time I was on this podcast. Oh, wait, I mean like 10 years. I mean, my goodness. First off, who has a podcast for 10 years? I thought I had a lot of podcast episodes and I looked at yours. I’m like, oh, oh my goodness, this is a track record.
Matt Alder 3:06
Yeah, March 2017, episode 82. I looked it up. I don’t know why you have not been back on. It must be my fault, so I’m sorry. But anyway, it is brilliant to have you back on the show.
James Ellis 3:16
Oh, I’m thrilled.
Matt Alder 3:16
Just in case there’s anyone who wasn’t listening in March 2017, introduce yourself for us and tell us what you do.
James Ellis 3:23
Absolutely. I am James Ellis. I do employer brand type stuff. I’ve been doing it for about 13 years. I’ve done agency work. I’ve done consulting work. I’ve done in-house work. I’ve kind of done all sorts of employer branding. I’ve written five books. I’ve had multiple podcasts. I’ve got newsletters. I’ve got articles. I’ve got speaking gigs. I mean, I am all about employer brand. And I think the thing that I am committed to and dedicated to is this idea that every company, it’s not that they need to pay me for their employer brand, though I wouldn’t mind that. It’s that they have to invest and think about their own employer brand. And it’s not something that is just for the massive companies, the Fortune 10s, the Fortune 100s. It is not just for Boeings and AT&Ts. It is for every single company hiring, because the more you understand what your brand is and how it works, the more it makes all your tools, your teammates, your tactics just more effective.
Matt Alder 4:10
I absolutely endorse this message 100%. Maybe just start off there, because there’s lots of things that we want to kind of get into. How are things changing in employer branding? How have things changed over the last 10 years or even in the last two years?
James Ellis 4:23
Yeah, and I love doing the historical analysis from 1991 when Simon started this whole, Simon Barrow started employer brand by saying, let’s just take what we do for selling fish fingers and apply it to jobs. And at the time, radical stuff, smart, genius stuff, and huge leaps forward. And in the last 10 years, I have seen this idea of all you’ve got to do to win the recruiting game is be attractive, right? You have to have a pretty website. You have to have some pretty content. You have to make some pretty videos. You have to go generate some pretty pictures. You’ve got to put some pretty words on pretty platforms and go ahead and buy the platform so no one can put the ugly words on there and only put the pretty words on there. And so you’re very, very specific about the pretty words that you put out there. And to be fair, I am guilty of encouraging companies to do that, because 10 years ago, it was a completely valid strategy. Because those of you who are not as young and spry as Matt and I, who might not remember that 10 years ago, applying for a job online was hilariously bad, was a hilarious, like mobile optimised, that’s the future. Like that was just, it was just so bad. It was just, for all the complaining you might do about Workday, 10 times worse. I’m just going to put it out there. Sorry, Workday. You’re not going to give me any money anyway. It was horrible. It was atrocious. And honestly, being attractive, looking like you put the least amount of thought or money or attention to your career site was a huge winning strategy, especially because no one else was. And so we would, you know, when I was at the big agency, we would encourage all our clients to invest in looking good, sounding good, sounding nice, because the landscape was so bad. That’s all you had to do. Well, fast forward to today and you can’t, it’s really hard to find a bad career site. It’s really hard to find bad career content, right? Katrina Kibben does a really good job kind of keeping an eye on really bad language. And they’re almost all mistakes, you’ll hope, because they’re really bad. It’s really hard to find. You buy an ATS platform with a web function to it, you, out of the box, it looks fine. It looks perfectly plausibly fine. And so there’s no kind of like race to, I have to look good because everybody else looks bad, because everybody kind of looks good now. And if everybody looks good, the value of you investing your time and energy in looking good suddenly is less useful. It’s suddenly less impactful. It doesn’t create as much value. So we’re entering the stage where being good looking, being attractive, looking nice, doesn’t do it, right? It’s a, you know, I always joke that if we all looked like Kardashians and Taye Diggs and Hemsworths, what would be the value of looking like a Kardashian or Taye Diggs? None. We’d all look the same. And that’s kind of what we’ve done. Every career site looks the same. Every job posting sounds the same. We all have kind of landed in this mushy middle where we’re all the same. So the companies that are really starting to get traction on a message that matters and that works, that it’s about effectiveness, not efficiency, are the ones who learn what’s different about them, what they offer that’s different, right? We all remember three or four years ago when Goldman Sachs had that article come out that it was a horrible place to work and all these junior analysts were working 100-hour work weeks and bathing themselves in the washroom on the weekends because they could never go home and, wow, woe is me. And we all thought, oh, no, this is going to really impact their ability to recruit great people, when, in fact, their numbers went up. People went, oh, I get it. I knew it would be hard. Now I understand exactly how it’s hard. But I also understand exactly how much money is on the other end of that. That is a trade-off I want. I’m there. And so by proving how they were specifically different, more people said, I want that. It was no longer a maybe, everybody says they’re kind of like that, I don’t know what that means, maybe I’ll try that, maybe. And that’s where recruiting kind of falls down. Recruiting is all about getting people to put trust in you about their future, because, let’s be fair, changing a job is changing your future. And recruiters, for the most part, are focused, and I’m not blaming them, they’re pushed to be efficiency machines. How do I scale? How do I put this message everywhere? How do I get as many people to apply? How do I get bigger? Well, efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness. And so what you’re trying to do to get the best hires to choose you is to say, let me help you understand exactly what you’re getting here, what we’re offering. Let me show you the proof. Let me show you with credibility what that looks like, not just some pleasant words, but instead here, let me show you the proof of the policy we put in place to make that happen, the amount of money we spend to make that happen, the stories that prove that these things are true. Let me prove these ideas to you. And when you do that, the people who want that thing show up, they lean in, they can apply, they show up to the interviews and they’re excited for what that thing is. So to me, the big sea change for employer brand in the last couple of years is going from attractiveness to being different and leaning in to understand how your difference is actually your inherent value when it comes to recruiting.
Matt Alder 8:52
Now, when it comes to difference, you’ve just done some interesting research that really kind of looks into that. Tell us what you did and what you found.
James Ellis 8:59
I don’t want to like scare away from the AI conversation, but AI tools were used in this. And I’m going to tell you why, because I think it’s important that I kind of underline the process here. AI allows us to do so much more than we could five years ago. I’m not the first person to say that, but it’s not about, hey, write my job posting for me. To me, it’s about having little minions who can do all this scraping of data and putting it in a central spot in a clean repository so that I can do analysis for it. So what I did is I spent, a couple of months ago, I scraped every career site in the Fortune 500. I just went and found a list, found every career site and said, go scrape them. And they did, and I had to do a little handwork and kind of tweak it and do the things. And then I had them scrape all the, you know, 40, last 40 LinkedIn posts for each one of those companies. And I dumped it into a massive spreadsheet. And then I said, let’s use the AI tools to help you analyse this stuff. Because pattern recognition is really where AI lives and breathes. That’s where the power really is. And so it started to look for. So the first thing I said is go read their entire content and say, give me in 10 words or less, what is this company offering? Just treat each company individually. Just distil it into what they offer. And it turns out they’re all distilling the same stuff. They all have got values and their values are all the same, and they all are committed to a mission and they all care about innovation and caring about you when they decide to care about it. They use the same stuff over and over again. And then you dive deeper and you say, okay, find me outliers or find me interesting examples. Or then, I think that’s really crazy, because I was feeling really salty. Anybody who knows me will go, yeah, that was bound to happen. I was feeling really salty. And I said, find me companies who sound functionally the same. And it came up with 10 companies who were matched. Like these are companies like IBM, who is IBM, and we all know who IBM is, and DaVita, who does dialysis. They clean your kidneys, for goodness sake. They clean your blood so your kidneys can keep working. These companies have nothing to do with each other. They have the exact same tagline. Wow. The exact same. And they’re not the only ones. And to me, that’s just so, it’s so kind of clearly, okay, every company was so sure that if they said anything that might be seen as negative, people will ding them and people won’t show up. So let’s say the most bland, positive thing we can, and, well, frankly, there’s only so many words in the English language. There’s only so many kind of permutations of those pleasantly bland platitude words we can stick together. And guess what? Everybody’s copying from each other’s paper. And it turns out you start to realise everybody sounds exactly the same. And that’s the fun stuff that you get to do with this kind of research. And it allows me to do some other kind of stuff. But to me, the top line is everybody sounds the same, which means to every other non-Fortune 500 company, instead of looking at a Fortune 500, instead of looking at IBM and going, how the heck do you beat IBM? They’re so big and they’re so well-funded and they’re so well-known. Yeah, they sound exactly like that dialysis company down the street. So maybe there’s an opportunity for you to win, provided you lean into how you’re different rather than trying to be IBM, but smaller, IBM, but less, right? And that’s no way to win.
Matt Alder 11:56
That’s really interesting. And it’s been like this for a long time, because I did a similar, much more manual exercise before AI, where I think I just looked at sort of 10 technology companies and looked at their homepage for a project I was doing. And they had variations on exactly the same tagline, which was…
James Ellis 12:11
I found two companies once where they used the exact same stock photo. These are two competing companies, same industry. They used the exact same. You’re going, how? How does this happen? And the answer is everybody is looking to look nice. Everybody is looking for the platitude. Everybody is looking to stay safe. And we are, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve entered a world where trying to stay safe is the most dangerous plan of all.
Matt Alder 12:32
Absolutely. So let’s talk about the opportunity. So, you know, you’ve identified that there is a huge opportunity for challengers, for people who aren’t sitting in that kind of, you know, that Fortune 100. What do they need to do? What do they need to think about? How can people take this opportunity?
James Ellis 12:45
Yeah. So if everybody sounds the same, the goal is not to say, I want to sound just like them, but since I don’t have as much money or as much brand recognition, I can only be them, but smaller. And I always joke, if I ever wanted to learn how to play basketball really well, I would never go, what does LeBron James do? I’ll just do what he’s doing, because I’m nowhere near as tall and I’m nowhere near as strong and I’m nowhere near as coordinated as him. And all I’m going to do is be a pale shadow of what greatness might look like. And that’s really what recruiting does. I mean, I’ve been in so many rooms where the team gets stuck and some bright penny says, well, what does Google do? And you’re like, that’s why? Who cares? You’re not Google. You’ll never be anything like Google. Why are you looking at Google and saying, what do they do? Because, you know, the other understated part of that question is, let’s just do what Google does since they’re the number one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or OpenAI or whatever that company is. The opportunity is simple. You are not them. And that is not a ding on you. That is not a diss. That is not, you know, a bad thing. You are your own thing as a company, whether you’re 20 people or 20,000 people, you are your own thing. And you are not like other companies, because if you were like every other company, you would not exist, right? There doesn’t need to be Google 2.0. There doesn’t need to be another Target. There doesn’t need to be Sainsbury’s, but more Sainsbury’s. Like there doesn’t need to be those things, because those things already exist. You have to lean into what makes you different. And I think this is a level of like corporate therapy that is so terrifying. Like, oh, we’re different somehow? Because upstairs, if you go all the way to the top, they’re going to tell you how great the company is, but they’re never going to tell you specifically how they’re great, because anything that might be specific puts them into hot water. They just go, we’re a great company, which is why it’s so much fun and so popular and so exciting to go buy a little award that makes you say, we’re a great company. You get to slap it on your career site and check the box and we’re all good. But you sound exactly like the 10,000 other companies who have the exact same award. The opportunity is, if you are willing to do a little bit of work and look around and look honestly at what your competitors are saying and look honestly at what you offer, you can find the thing that makes you interesting and different. You can find the thing that other companies aren’t talking about, other companies don’t offer. And it’s not that, okay, you’re going to be a small fish in a big pond. I’m sorry. This is business. There are no big fish anymore. The biggest fish are Google and they are dwarfed by the other small fish in total size. So there’s no winning the game. The goal is, how do you find a little niche that you can own and drive and really, you know, oh, and that’s the thing. So if you find what makes you different and you lean into that and you prove it and you’re super clear on that, you get to own it. I’ll give you a good example. There was a, it’s not a tiny company by any stretch, but it was a good size company. I can’t say who. I was talking to them and interviewing them, head of TA, head of people officer, and we’re doing the normal kind of like, okay, well, what’s different about your company? What’s interesting? And I was 45 minutes into this conversation. I was having this, the moment, my existential dread moment where I was like, oh no, there’s nothing different about this company. Oh no, everything I believed about my own work is wrong. Oh my God, I found the example that disproves the rule, because they kept saying, well, we really like each other. And I’m like, that is not a reason to join the company, because how do I know I’m going to like you? How do I know you’re going to like me? Like how does that work, right? We’re nice people and I like the people around me is what you say when you’re in a foxhole getting shot at, right? That’s not exactly the marketing claim you really think it is. And I’m 45 minutes into this conversation and I’m just, I’m stuck. I’m terrified. I think I’ve done it. I’ve reached the end of my career. And someone says, yeah, you know, it’s kind of like a couple, last month I got sick and they DoorDashed me chicken noodle soup to my house. And I felt like I had a stroke. I was like, what? But first off, one, how did it take 45 minutes for you to get to that story? Because that’s an amazing story. That’s a tremendous story, because I’ve never heard it before, right? The reason Nordstrom is Nordstrom is because they told one story about how they received a return for a product they don’t actually sell. And that’s how much they care about their customer service. They grew for 20 years on that one story. Here’s your one story about how much you care about your own people. And you didn’t even realise it was a thing. Oh my goodness. You know, and I get the whole, it’s really hard to read the label from the inside of the pickle jar. But what they didn’t realise is by telling this story, they’re checking all these boxes. It’s not about, okay, you’re so different because you care about your people. You’re different because you can prove exactly how much you care about your people. Okay, take that story. That’s great. But that’s just the beginning. Go back and ask your CFO to go tally up the DoorDash bill from the last 12 months and stick that on your career site. You know how much we care about our people? Last year, we spent $147,000 on DoorDash because when they were sick, we sent them chicken soup. That is a story. Look, no one’s going to go, that doesn’t sound real. There’s a number attached to it. The CFO signed off on that number, right? They just aggregated the credit card bills and there it is. There might even be a policy inside that company that says, hey, when our people get sick, we feel free to spend some money to make them feel better. That is a corporate policy. That is such credibility. And suddenly this tiny thing that is, you know, we’re like everybody else, we like our people, which doesn’t sound differentiated at all, they suddenly have an angle from which they can talk about this idea that no one else has. And it’s an incredible way for them to stand out. Because anybody who wants to feel like I’m on the same team and I’m not, you know, this is not cutthroat and I want to be part of a larger team that cares about me on my good days, my bad days. I tell you that story and that company is suddenly the top of your consideration list. No recruiter needed, no job posting, no job ads, no bells and whistles, no tech tools. You go, that’s on the top of my list. And that’s how the game gets played. If you understand how you’re different and you can make it credible and provable, everything else gets so much easier.
Matt Alder 18:24
And let’s talk about how this work gets done for a little bit, because, you know, traditionally, employer brand projects have been expensive, in-depth, focus groups. I mean, I used to work for a couple of agencies that did them, and they were quite epic and tended to be reserved for those bigger companies because of that. Now, AI is shifting lots of things. There’s lots of negative things I’m sure AI is doing in terms of content for employer brand. But what’s kind of going on here? How is the way the work gets done actually changing and what are the advantages for smaller organisations?
James Ellis 18:57
So if you take away employer branding from how do we look good, which, by the way, is the reason why the bill on old EB projects is so big, because what they have to do is find that platitude that is vaguely pleasant enough, but vaguely specific to that company enough that everybody goes, yeah, okay, it’s not a flag I’m going to salute. But I’ll be like, yeah, sure, fine. That sounds enough like us. And you’re really socialising. You think about how long these projects take. Most of that time is spent on 100 focus groups around the company at different offices, just socialising this idea so that when they do deliver it, everybody goes, yeah, sure, I guess. Which might explain why EVP projects, employer brand projects tend to land with a thud once it gets out of the corporate room, because every company goes, what else is there to do with this? This is just a platitude. I can make up my own platitudes. What do I need this for? If we say it’s really about how you’re different and what the process of EVP and the process of employer branding is, is understanding how you’re different and bringing it to market, well, suddenly the game changes. That means it’s a lot more about what your competitors are doing, because being different is a function of what others are doing. If you say you’re the only spotted dog and you don’t look around to see what other dogs look like, well, then how do you know you’re the only spotted dog? You could be in a sea of Dalmatians, you don’t know. So you’ve got to start by looking at the landscape. And this is where AI really sings, because the same tools that I used to scrape all those career sites for Fortune 100s, I can say, give me 10 competitors, I’m going to scrape all their content. And I’m going to use analysis tools to say, what is each company talking about? And I think of it not as this is what corporate says they’re talking about. This is what a candidate sees when they go looking, right? A candidate doesn’t know your company, a candidate doesn’t know that company. They’re going to base a lot of their impression of what the company’s all about based on the corporate language, based on what is being talked about on the career site, on LinkedIn, on Glassdoor, on the corporate site, the About Us page, the culture page, the Life At page, all that stuff. They’re going to do the research. Well, let’s just grab all that research and put it in one spot. Build a spreadsheet of all those companies and all their content and analyse it. What does this company care about? What does that company care about? What does that company care about? Based purely on what they talk about most, because companies only spend time talking about the stuff they care about. They don’t talk about stuff they don’t care about. And then you ask, well, how well is that proven? Yeah, that company says they’re innovative. What does that mean? I don’t know. They just said they’re innovative. That company says they’re supportive. What does that mean? I don’t know. They just said they’re supportive three times. What does that mean? Until you have like a shape to it, right? Because let’s be fair. We’ve all been around the block. We’ve all had those jobs where they promised us the sun and the moon and a purple skyscraper. And we showed up and we went, what the hell is this? This is not what I was promised. And you say, hey, when I joined, because this place was innovative, you said this place was innovative. And you talked about how much it’s innovative. And I show up and you give me a three-year-old laptop. Explain to me how you’re innovative. And the answer is the same. Every company, every country, every world, anywhere you go, the answer is always the same. Well, you see, and then you get the equivocation, you get the spin job, and you get the bullshit. And you get all this other stuff that’s like, okay, but that’s not real. And then you realise you were sold something. You were sold a pig in a poke. You were sold an idea that was not true. And that’s why so many recruiters get the shaft on Reddit and places like that, when they say recruiters are liars? Well, it’s because they’re told to sell it. They’re told to spin it. But if you say, I understand what those companies are saying, what those other companies are saying, and I understand how credible each of their claims are, suddenly you can be that company that says we do DoorDash for soup. You can say, hey, everybody else cares about their people, but so do we, but we can prove it better. That’s a winning strategy. Or you can say, if everybody talks, like biotech is my favourite for this one. Everybody talks about how much they’re innovative and how much they have positive patient, how much they care about positive patient outcomes. To which I want to say things like, that’s what a biotech is, right? That’s like saying, look at this amazing Ferrari. It’s got four wheels.
Matt Alder 22:40
Imagine if they didn’t care about patient outcomes. Yeah.
James Ellis 22:43
When I joke, I was talking to healthcare recruiters. I said, I’m more interested in the company that does not care about that stuff. That’s more interesting information to me on a very different level. But all hospitals have to tell you how much they care about their patients. I believe that’s the job. So you have to kind of get past that and say, okay, if everybody’s talking about that, it’s not that you don’t, it’s that you can just treat that as table stakes. Hey, all cars have four wheels. All hospitals care about their people. So we are that plus this other thing. And that’s your differentiated value. That’s the thing you care about. It’s status, it’s support, it’s learning, it’s professional development, it’s whatever that is. And then you’ve got to prove it and you’ve got to figure out how do you prove it. Now, the challenge is, if you don’t involve the actual voice of your own people, it’s very easy to come up with something fun that’s cool and say, oh, yeah, we’re all about this thing, because that’s what’s hot on Reddit this week. Or that’s what I read in a magazine with everybody. That’s what my favourite. That’s what Gen Z cares about. Whatever. It’s all BS. You’ve got to understand what you actually offer. And that means looking at your own policies and looking at your own onboarding and looking at your own engagement survey data and looking at what your candidates say and looking at what your employees say and looking at what Glassdoor is and understanding, what does this company offer that other companies don’t? So if you understand what the competitive set is and how you’re different, you are like 90% of the way to say, okay, let’s talk about these things. Let’s support it with this evidence. Let’s support it with this level of credibility. Let’s communicate that out on every single channel. And suddenly, imagine having to compete with that company with the soup. What are you going to say? You care about your people? Now you have to out-DoorDash soup to people. That is a hard fight to win, because they just claimed a really interesting space. You don’t want to be that. So you’ve got to figure out, okay, well, if they’re going to own we care about our people, we’ve got to go own professional development or status or autonomy or collaboration or something, anything else, because that is now an owned piece of land. And I’ve got to go find my own piece of land that I can own. Because the ultimate goal here, and I say this and people freak out, but I’m going to say it again anyway, because what the heck? The ultimate goal is to own a monopoly on a space, on an offering. You are the only company that offers this, because if you are the only company who credibly offers this, whatever this is, everybody who wants this just puts you at the top of their list, because there’s no other place that offers that. That’s my favourite, is when candidates have that moment, when you communicate to them properly what you offer. And I see this, candidates go, oh, I didn’t even know I could want that in a job. And that’s when you know you’ve really landed on something, where you’re like, it’s not the standard, hey, here’s our five values. Here’s our standard competitive. We have competitive salaries and world-class benefits and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We offer this and no one else does. And they go, oh, I didn’t know I could want that. And that’s when you know you’ve really landed on something positive. That does not take six months. That does not take $120,000. And if you do it and you use AI tools, and let’s be fair, if you use a lot of the existing material you have on hand, like your engagement survey, your culture deck, your… Honestly, if you scrape your Slack and Teams channels for how you talk to each other and how you solve problems, gold, there’s gold in them there hills. I’m telling you, there’s amazing stuff. And proof, because you could say, this isn’t what comms said. This is what actual employees do on a regular basis to solve problems or how they interact or what they care about. This is proof. And we are living in a world where proof trumps everything else. And if you can find real good proof that isn’t just cherry-picked corporate language and written in Comic Sans on Canva, right, that really speaks to the actual experience of working there, that’s how you win.
Matt Alder 26:22
And what is the first step with this? So people are listening and they want to, you know, really kind of lean into this way of thinking. What’s the most sensible first step or first thing to think about?
James Ellis 26:34
The first step is a challenge of will and courage to say, I’m willing to push a boundary that we’re not used to pushing. Because, and this is where, you know, I get a rap for not liking recruiters, which is crazy, because I think recruiters are the central driver of all company growth. Okay. I just want to state that on the record. Matt, you heard me on the record.
Matt Alder 26:53
Absolutely.
James Ellis 26:54
Okay. This is real stuff. The thing is, is that if you’re a TA leader, the world is arrayed against you. You want to try anything different, you are facing a wall of why. No, don’t do that. Don’t change. Don’t be different. Like your hiring managers say things like, oh, that’s not how we did it at our last company, so I don’t want to do it that way. Your recruiters say, that’s not how I was taught, so I don’t want to do it that way. Your leadership goes, but ZipRecruiter ads say we should do it this way, so we don’t want to do it that way. Anything you want to do differently requires 10 times more pushing to make that change happen, whether it’s technology, whether it’s process, whether it’s language, anything. The world says there is a standard way to recruit. And of course, the more you are the standard, the more you sound like everybody else, which is kind of defeating the purpose. So trying to deviate from that standard is insanely hard, which is why most companies don’t do it. It’s just not, it’s just too hard. It’s too exhausting. It’s hard. And I don’t blame TA leaders for not doing it. But if you’re going to do it, you have to understand what you’re up against. You have to understand your job is going to be to fight, to argue, to push, to try and change people’s minds, because this is a change of perspective more than anything else. Saying we’re going to be different and showing how we’re different, instead of we’re just going to look good, is a radical, seemingly simple, but radical shift in perspective in what jobs are and what it means to be in the market, for what candidates should be looking for, what they should care about, the questions we should ask, how we evaluate them, how they evaluate us. It all has to start with that idea of being different is our superpower. But right now, I’m the only one in my company who knows it. And I have to evangelise that to the entire company. And that’s a job in and of itself. So you’ve got to have that moment where you kind of say, okay, I know what I’m in for. It’s like training for a marathon. No one goes, ah, that’ll be easy. No, you kind of have to go, it’s going to suck. It’s going to be hard. There are going to be days I’m not going to want to wake up and do the work. This is kind of the same thing. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to take eight months, but it requires you embracing the reality of the job, and that is getting the rest of the company to understand how you’re different. Now, I will say, once you crack the ice on this and you get your leadership to realise that you’re not just doing things different for the sake of doing things different, that you’re in fact doing something strategic, and that’s an interesting word, that you are in fact doing something proactive, another interesting word, that you are in fact trying to be more effective at bringing in the talent who grows the company. Oh, those are more interesting words you should be saying more often. That is what this is about, and not about how do I make my process a little more streamlined, a little more easy, because I’m so tired and I’m so burnt out, which, by the way, is how leadership hears that language. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about effectiveness, because ultimately your job is not to bring in more butts in seats. Your job is to put the person in the seat who brings in the most skills, the most experience, the best perspective to help the company grow. And the more you align what this is to company growth, the more it’s like having a bigger hammer when you’re trying to crack the ice. That’s really all that is.
Matt Alder 29:53
Absolutely. I think that’s just so important as well, just like mapping it to value for the company. And ultimately, that should be what talent acquisition, employer branding, recruitment marketing is there for. A final question for you. How do you think things are going to pan out over the next couple of years? What does the future look like for you? Or what you hope the future looks like? I wasn’t going to say 10 years, but just the next couple of years.
James Ellis 30:14
It’s going to be funny. I think I’ve already started to see this wave of AI creeping into language. I’ll go ahead and say it. So I’ve seen in EB circles, this idea of gravity is everywhere, because I think AI has decided this is a way, when you ask it, hey, how should I describe this idea? It likes to think in terms of gravity for whatever reason. And I’m seeing the word gravity pop up like everywhere. In very different circumstances, in very different locations, in very different audiences, it’s like it just suddenly happened. It’s like a thing that metastasised everywhere. I’m like, a lot of that’s got to be from AI, unfortunately. Which means we’re going to see a couple of these. After gravity will come this other word, will come this other term, and we’re going to see that. And I think it’s going to take us at least a solid year of saying, how do we better prompt AI? How do we better use AI? How do we better feed AI our own individual context so that we are not getting the same stuff everybody else is getting, right? How do we not try and cheat this process by saying, oh, I want to be different and I’m going to do it by using the same AI everybody else does. Wait, hold on, hold on. There’s some problems with that maths. It’s going to take a little bumpy. It’s going to take a little kind of like fussing around and figuring out and getting messy with this before we go, oh, okay, this is how it is. So I think we’re in the middle of wanting to be different, wanting to show how we’re different, wanting to use these tools, wanting to be more effective, but realising, like much like going to the gym, that first time you go to the gym, you’re like, how hard is it to lift that weight? Okay. It’s not that hard to lift the weight. It’s hard to lift it 20 times in a row. And when you hit 19, you’re like, oh my God, that’s the moment. That’s kind of where we are. We go, okay, it’s not that hard, but to do it every day, that’s work. And you suddenly realise how out of shape we all are in this world. And so we’ve all been focused on, look, recruiting has spent the last 20, 30, 40 years being as efficient as humanly possible. Let’s make it faster. Let’s make it cheaper. Let’s make it smoother. Let’s make it one click. Let’s make it small. And then you wonder why your budget keeps getting smaller. It’s because you’ve told the rest of the world, our job is to become as small and efficient as possible. Well, that’s not what we are anymore. We’re about effective, not efficient. And I think that’s the other side of it. It’s the business side comes to terms with, wow, we want to grow. We all read the same BusinessWeek articles two years ago about how AI is going to let us fire everybody or stop hiring. And that’s great, because AI is cheap. Oh, wait, it turns out AI is not cheap. It turns out they’re not nearly as good in a lot of ways. Oh, shoot, we may have spoken too soon. You’re going to have this moment of companies realising, okay, if we’re going to hire, it can’t just be a butt in the seat. It can’t just be a slot to fill. It has to be someone who’s bringing real, meaningful value to the company. Well, let’s define what that value should be. Let’s define how that person is going to bring value. And maybe if we’re really smart, we don’t say, we’re going to tell you how to bring value in. Just like you don’t tell a salesperson, this is how you’re going to sell. You’re going to pick up Salesforce. You’re going to dial that phone. You’re going to do these things. You ask the salesperson who’s really good to say, how would you bring in more leads? How would you close more deals? Is it content? Is it storytelling? Is it better demos? Would you change the demo? Is it marketing? How would you do that? And letting the experts, because that’s the thing. AI allows that expertise to trickle farther and farther down to the boots-on-the-ground level. And instead of leadership telling us all what to do, the boots on the ground are telling leadership, this is how it gets done. And I think as those ideas merge, as the company goes, oh, employer branding is how we tell our story differently. And the skill sets say, this is how we bring our skills to the market to drive more value for the company. That’s something that talent acquisition and EB can be feeding. And that’s a ride we’re going to want to ride for a while, because that’s how we’re going to get to where we want to go.
Matt Alder 33:44
James, thank you very much for talking to me.
James Ellis 33:46
Thrilled to do it. Literally thrilled to do it. It’s only Monday morning. This is going to be the highlight of my week. I’m just going to say that.
Matt Alder 33:52
My thanks to James. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
