What Will I Be?

Email lists and quality content are the cornerstones of an effective marketing program.

Social media and branding are great, but you aren’t in control of who sees your message and when. It’s the brand equivalent of spray and pray, which may be why employer branding is more prevalent than recruitment marketing. It translates more closely to the way recruiters have been acting all of these years.

Sure, you can try to put your message in a place where your audience spends time, but it’s predicated on hope more than skill.

It’s mostly pay-to-play and algorithms that no one fully understands other than the people creating them. It’s all assumption.

Too often, it’s assumed if you just keep showing up in someone’s social feed with pictures of your 3pm Friday keggers and cool Halloween parties, people will jump the next time you post a job.

I see that and want no part of University 2.0.

What I want to see is the work that is being done. How the people at the company – from leadership to potential peers – think about problems and the industry.

Most of all, I want to know what I’ll be when I get there.

Chances are you’ll hire me to do almost exactly what I’m doing now. That’s how hiring works (and is part of why it’s broken).

Will I be successful?

Will I be challenged?

Will I be heard

Will I be valuable?

Will I be appropriately compensated for the value I provide?

Will I be respected?

Will I be included?

Don’t get me wrong, people are interested in what they’ll do, but they want to know more. It’s the intangibles that make working at your company different than another, especially if I can do the same thing at both places. But for some reason, the messaging you hear coming from hiring teams and companies are all about the doing.

That’s why your content and engagement strategy have to be good. You can’t continue with the status quo. You need to understand why someone would be interested in your company. Sometimes it’s irrational and based on emotion, but marketing is deeply involved in emotion and the way people feel.

Someone’s reason for wanting to work at a company may be different than why we would work there.

Stop focusing so much on telling your story and try to connect with the story they want to write but haven’t written yet.

Photo by K8 on Unsplash