You Can’t Employer Brand Your Way to the Promised Land
45-second read
Offering a candidate the ability to properly evaluate a job opportunity before talking to a human isn’t a widely adopted practice in recruiting.
The creation of well-informed assets and the distribution of information from company to candidate is a total mess.
Candidates can't do their due diligence at the earliest stage of the hiring process because companies gate the most relevant and practical information about a) the job and b) working at their company behind interviews and employment. Aka, they require human interaction.
And instead of publicizing useful information to the sectors of the workforce that they're trying to recruit, companies instead opt for posturing—investing in meaningless employer branding fluff that is of little to no value to a job seeker at the top of the funnel.
The result: pools of uninformed, unqualified candidates opting into conversations that completely waste everyone’s time.
Furthermore, if you’re a curious candidate, attempting to do self-guided research on what it’s like to work at a company is akin to an easter egg hunt—with articles, blog posts, PR pieces, candidate assets, and reviews spread across multiple platforms, online searches, and random backchannel chats.
No high-demand candidate needs to put in this kind of effort. They have too many opportunities being given to them. They’ll just opt out at the first signal of “too much time”.
There are two main paths for companies:
- Build a one-stop-shop content hub and start filling it with tactical recruiting assets for your candidates. (Notion works great for this kinda thing.)
- Accept that without this approach you’re increasing sourcing friction, decreasing recruiter efficiency, and degrading the experience you’re offering candidates.
The latter translates into losing money by spending way more of it trying to get the same result.
Bottom line: You can’t employer brand your way to the promised land. The people with jobs whom you’re trying to convince to come over to your company need hard facts delivered in a self-guided way in order to know if the thing you’re pitching is worth a conversation or not.
Stop trying to make this into more than it is.