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Most talent acquisition leaders can give you a reasonably accurate list of what is going wrong.
Applicant quality is poor. Response rates are falling. Hiring managers are frustrated. The career site is not helping. The employer brand sounds rather too much like everybody else’s. Recruiters are overloaded and being asked to do more with less.
These appear to be six different problems, so companies naturally set about solving them separately. Applicant quality becomes a sourcing problem. Response rates become a recruiter productivity problem. Hiring manager frustration becomes a process problem. The career site is handed to HR, marketing or an agency. Employer brand becomes a communications project. Recruiter workload becomes a technology problem.
Before long, there are six owners, six meetings, six vendors and six budgets.
And, a year later, very often six familiar problems.
The reason is simple. They were never six problems in the first place. They were six symptoms of the same condition: the company has not given the right people a compelling reason to choose it.
That weakness travels through the entire hiring system. It affects who applies, who replies, what recruiters have to overcome, how hiring managers experience recruiting and, eventually, how much money the company must put on the table to get a candidate to say yes.
This matters because companies are remarkably good at improving the machinery of hiring without examining what the machinery is being asked to sell.
A generic job is not a neutral job
Consider applicant quality.
When the wrong people apply, the diagnosis is usually straightforward. We need better targeting. Better sourcing. A different job board. Better screening. Perhaps a better programmatic advertising platform.
All of those may help. But before buying anything, it is worth reading the job advertisement.
You will often discover that the company is looking for an unusually capable person while advertising an extraordinarily ordinary opportunity.
The successful candidate will join a collaborative team. The environment is fast-paced. There will be opportunities to grow, innovate, make an impact and work with talented colleagues. The company has a great culture and cares deeply about its people.
This sort of language is not merely dull. It sends a signal.
Candidates do not read vague language and conclude that some fascinating secret must be hiding behind it. They usually conclude that the company either cannot or will not explain what is interesting about the work.
That changes who responds.
Imagine you need an engineer who loves complicated legacy systems. Not someone who will tolerate them, but someone who genuinely enjoys opening a system everybody else considers hopeless and discovering why it behaves the way it does.
That is potentially a very attractive job, but only to a particular kind of engineer. If you advertise it as an opportunity to “join an innovative team and collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders,” you have removed the very thing that would make the right person pay attention.
The company then looks at the resulting applicant pool and complains that the applicants are not good enough.
This is backwards.
A generic job attracts people willing to consider a generic job. That is not the same thing as attracting people who specifically want the work you need done.
Most companies have more to say than they think. There may be an unusually good manager. The technical problem may be rare. The team may have more autonomy than competitors allow. The role may expose someone to work that would take them five years to reach somewhere else. The organization may be entering a difficult and important period that will make the next two years unusually valuable for the right person.
These are reasons to choose.
“Great culture” is not.
The job may be excellent. The candidate simply cannot see it.
Requirements do not create demand
Now consider the hiring manager problem.
Many organizations describe this as an alignment issue. Recruiters need better intake meetings. Hiring managers need to be educated. Expectations must be managed. Service-level agreements may need to be established.
Again, some of this may be true.
But sit in on a typical intake meeting and something more fundamental becomes obvious.
The hiring manager explains what the company wants. Seven years of experience. Knowledge of a certain system. Strong communication skills. Industry experience preferred. Strategic but hands-on. Comfortable influencing senior stakeholders. Able to work in a fast-paced environment.
The recruiter takes careful notes.
Then the recruiter enters the market carrying what is, in effect, the company’s shopping list.
This is an odd way to sell anything.
The hiring manager has answered one question:
What do we want from this person?
The candidate is trying to answer a very different one:
Why should I give it to you?
Somebody has to perform the translation.
In many companies, nobody does.
This is particularly wasteful because the hiring manager often knows why the job is attractive. They simply have not been asked to explain it.
They know the person will work directly with a technically brilliant leader. They know the team has finally been given permission to rebuild the part of the product everyone has hated for five years. They know the person will make decisions that require three levels of approval at a larger competitor. They know two people who previously held the role went on to much bigger jobs. They know the next eighteen months will be difficult, visible and potentially career-making.
Yet none of this appears in the requisition.
Instead, the candidate learns that “excellent written and verbal communication skills are required.”
Then recruiting is asked to create demand.
This is the equivalent of giving the sales department a specification sheet and wondering why prospects are unmoved.
A recruiter’s job cannot simply be to carry the hiring manager’s requirements into the market. Someone has to turn those requirements around and ask the questions candidates are asking.
Why would somebody good leave a perfectly acceptable job for this one?
Why this manager?
Why this problem?
Why now?
What could this person become here that they are less likely to become somewhere else?
And, perhaps most usefully, who should not take this job?
Companies often dislike that last question because they have been taught to maximize appeal. Unfortunately, maximizing appeal usually means removing anything sharp enough to be meaningful.
The more people you try to sound right for, the less clearly you sound right for anyone.
Eventually, sameness gets priced
This brings us to the expensive part.
A candidate considering your company is rarely considering your company alone. They may be speaking to three employers, five employers or simply comparing your opportunity with the job they already have.
They visit the career sites. They read the job descriptions. They speak to recruiters.
Company A offers growth, purpose, collaboration and impact.
Company B offers growth, purpose, collaboration and impact.
Company C, demonstrating remarkable originality, offers growth, purpose, collaboration and impact.
At some point, the words cease to be useful.
Not because candidates are cynical. Because the information has stopped helping them distinguish one choice from another.
Imagine five houses for sale, all advertised with the same description: beautiful home, wonderful neighborhood, tremendous opportunity, perfect for the right buyer. You would very quickly ignore the copy and start comparing the things you could measure.
Square footage. Taxes. Location. Price.
Candidates do the same thing.
When qualitative differences disappear, quantitative differences become more important.
Salary. Bonus. Equity. Vacation. Commute. Title.
This is where generic employer branding becomes more expensive than most companies realize.
The usual assumption is that bland messaging simply fails to add much value. It is worse than that.
Sameness does not create neutrality. It hands the decision to salary.
If a candidate cannot see why working for you would be meaningfully different from working for a competitor, compensation has to carry more of the argument.
This is how differentiation problems become compensation
problems.
It shows up in rejected offers, candidates asking for more money at the end of the process, counteroffers suddenly becoming persuasive, managers insisting that “the market has gone crazy,” searches reopening and roles sitting empty while the business waits.
The company eventually pays for a distinction it failed to make earlier.
Sometimes literally.
A company can spend months telling candidates that it is essentially interchangeable with its competitors and then act surprised when the candidate chooses the competitor offering another $12,000.
What, exactly, did we expect the candidate to use to make the decision?
We are asking people to make one of the largest decisions of their lives using remarkably poor information.
Changing jobs affects income, family routines, status, identity, future opportunity, friendships, commute, confidence and what someone does for most of their waking hours.
And the employer says, “Our people are our greatest asset.”
Then complains that candidates care too much about money.
We are asking the wrong question
The Usual Way begins with a sensible operational question:
How do we fill this job?
That question quickly leads to process. Where should we post it? Who can source it? How quickly can we screen people? How many candidates do we need? How much should we pay? What should the funnel look like?
These are useful questions, but they are not the first question.
The better question is:
How do we make this role worth choosing by the specific people who could create the most value here?
That changes the nature of the work.
Now we need to understand what those people value, what they already have, what might cause them to move and what our competitors are offering them.
We need to know what is unusually good about this job and what is unusually difficult. We need proof. We need tradeoffs. We need to understand who thrives here and who is likely to hate it.
Most importantly, we need to stop thinking of recruiting as the distribution of vacancies.
Hiring is competition.
You are trying to persuade a particular human being, who has alternatives, to choose your organization over another organization or over staying exactly where they are.
That person is not inventory waiting to be allocated.
The best people often have jobs already. Frequently, good ones.
So your real competitor is not merely the company across town. It is inertia.
Doing nothing is easy. Staying put is familiar. Changing jobs carries risk.
A job advertisement, recruiter message and career site therefore have a rather more demanding task than generating awareness.
They have to create a reason.
The good news is that most companies are better than their recruiting
This is the part I find encouraging.
Most companies do not have bad jobs.
They have good jobs hidden inside bad descriptions.
The proof usually already exists in the company.
Listen to a manager talk about someone they helped develop. Listen to an engineer describe the problem their team finally solved. Listen to an employee explain why they stayed during a difficult period. Listen to a nurse explain why she trusts the people beside her when a shift goes wrong. Listen to someone describe the project that made them better at their craft.
You will hear specificity, tension, pride, evidence and occasionally even enthusiasm.
Then look at the careers page.
Somehow all of that has been converted into “At Acme, we believe our people make the difference.”
Companies possess interesting truths and routinely sand them down until they become category wallpaper.
Then they spend money elsewhere trying to compensate for the missing signal.
Better sourcing. Better media. Better technology. Better recruiter training. Better career site UX. Better compensation data.
All useful.
None of them answers the most important question:
Why you?
Until that question has a credible answer, the six problems keep returning.
Because you never had six problems.
You had one.
The Logo-Off Test
There is a simple way to find out whether this is happening in your company.
Take one important job advertisement or your main careers page. Then take the equivalent material from four companies that compete with you for talent.
Remove the logos, company names and any obvious identifying references.
Put the five examples side by side.
Now ask someone familiar with your industry to identify yours.
More importantly, ask them how they know.
If they cannot tell, resist the temptation to call this a copywriting problem.
Bring the result to the next leadership meeting.
What you are looking at is the information candidates are being asked to use when deciding where to work.
If five competing employers become indistinguishable the moment their logos disappear, candidates will find another way to distinguish them.
And sooner or later, they will arrive at the clearest signal available.
The number on the offer.
If candidates can’t tell why you’re different, you’re forcing salary to do all the work.
