From the Vault: Your Employer Brand Is Bland

[00:00:00] And we're going to foist an AI or a one-way interview on you. We will decide what our process is and you will follow suit. And if you don't, you do not get a job. And you're like, screw you. I'm more valuable to you than you are to me. I'm sorry. If you hire me, I should be generating three to ten times more value to the company than the salary I get. So explain to me who's in charge there, Meathead. Give me a break. Recruiters, turn it up. Recruiting has some explaining to do.

[00:00:28] And these two? Two industry vets, zero filter. Bringing in sharp guests and leaving the corporate script at the door. Make some noise for Talentless. For recruiters, by recruiters. Let's get into it. From the Vault, in 2025, James Ellis torched every Bland Careers page on the internet and it became one of our top episodes ever. Stay to the very end because James is coming back and not as a guest.

[00:00:58] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the next episode of Talentless where we talk all things truth with zero real talk and zero fluff. But I love marshmallow fluff. I love marshmallow fluff. What do you mean zero fluff? What is this madness? Such constraints you put on ourselves. I know. Well, I am. We are so excited today because we are joined by James Ellis and I'm going to read his bio because to me it's super cool. So Ashley always gets me about reading, but I'm going to read today.

[00:01:28] Hey, reading is fundamental. Let her read. If she needs to read. We'll allow it. We'll allow it. Okay. All right. Let's get into it. So James is an authority on employer branding, especially for companies who think they have no choice but to post and pray for talent. Over the past decade, he's built the brands for more than a dozen companies and supported the development and activation of dozens more. James is the principal of Employer Brand Labs in Chicago, an author, keynote speaker, practitioner, and podcaster.

[00:01:58] Guys, that's a lot. With a wealth of experience across multiple industries, he's managing the number one employer brand newsletter in the world and helping companies globally establish and develop their ability to hire talent. In other words, he's the guy. That guy sounds cool. He's super awesome. That guy sounds great. You should get him on. We probably should. With everything he's done, I can't even imagine he'd have hair. So to have that, I mean, could he fit in? I don't know. Hard to say. Hard to say.

[00:02:28] Just kidding. Oh my goodness. Well, this is one of my favorite topics, James. I have a true love affair for it, even though I'm not sitting in it all the time. Those two facts may be related. I'm just saying. They may be related. Absolutely. I do work in marketing now for the past year and did in the beginning of my career. And I find this fascinating that employers still can't do this well. Oh God. Right? No. So I would love to...

[00:02:58] I know you said that every company has an employer brand, but they still don't know what that means. So tell me a little bit about that. Well, okay. It's Monday. We're recording this. I'm a little salty. See? So, you know, you're getting a little more of the salt than you may have asked for. I love it. Here's the deal. We all got sold this bullshit bill of goods. That employer brand, which was invented by big, big, big companies, is only four big, big companies. It's a round, big, big... You've got to spend a lot of money. You've got to get a tech stack.

[00:03:28] You've got to spend six deep, six figures to come up with this magical three-letter word called an EVP, whatever the heck that means. And by the way, ask four employer branders what EVP is, and you'll get six different answers. It is all over the map. It's designed for other companies. And here, it seems like there's so many more companies that are 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 500 people who are hiring, who are growing, and they're expected to just get in line. Just do it the regular way. Post to job boards all day long and hope for the best. Don't stand out.

[00:03:57] Don't do anything different. Make your job posting look like everybody else's job posting. Make your career site look like everybody's career site. Make your ads look like everybody's ads. Say the same damn things on LinkedIn over and over and over again. Hey, every recruiter should post, we're hiring, as if that matters, as if anybody cares, as if anyone has ever clicked or stopped on that thing. Uh-oh, I got ramped up here. That is what we think of as employer brand, and it's all garbage. It is all absolute trash. It is garbage designed to serve massive agencies who are there to serve massive companies and leaving the rest of us in the dust, and that's crap.

[00:04:27] Employer brand is very simple. Why are you different, and why would I choose you? Answer those questions, and you are like light years ahead of the biggest companies in the world, and I don't want to get sued, so I won't name them, who's got these elaborate employer blands. Yes, I said that very exactly. They are bland, boring. They say nothing. They are pretty pictures. They are fig leaves. They are the lipstick we slap on a pig because you don't know what else to do, and you go, I'm going to make this thing sound good. I'm going to buy my weight in awards.

[00:04:55] I'm going to go ahead and bolster my glass door score as if anybody notices those things. I'm going to be nice and pretty, and the truth is when everybody posts nice and pretty, everybody looks the dang same, and no one can choose, and I have had personal experience. I have had jobs that were great, and I've had jobs that were nightmares, and then from the paper, from the job posting, from the career site, they looked exactly the same, and that should be illegal, right? If you go to Amazon and one product has five stars, another product has five stars, and

[00:05:23] they're completely different products, what that, how, how? You should be able to do something about these sorts of things, and we can't, and that's what employer brand is here to do, to say, hey, companies, this chase for 400, 500, 1,000 applicants per requisition is killing you, by the way, and you really just want two. Two, not 200, not 2,000, two. The one you hire, the one you say, oh, it was really nice to get to know you, and maybe we'll keep your resume on file, but you're both amazing, and we had, it was such a tough choice.

[00:05:53] That's all you want, and everything else is absolute noise and getting in your way, and you wonder why recruiters are burning out, and you wonder why hiring managers don't respect recruiters and recruiting teams, and you wonder why companies are reaching for agencies to kind of do all their hiring for them. This is why, because we've turned it into, how do I gin up as many job postings to push on as many job boards, to post as many LinkedIn processes as possible, and it's getting us nowhere. Wow. Woo. When do we start recording? I know. I had to kind of get ready to-

[00:06:23] That was a really good intro sentence. Yeah. It was so good, though. That was a single sentence. Exactly right. I wouldn't even say it was a run-on. You had good, like, comma, conjunction. There was seven semicolons. What the hell? How did he do that? It was done well. It was done very well. It was so good. I wonder why it's so hard for employers to answer those two questions, though, or why they're not putting them out there. What is the- what you've seen from- why do they struggle with this? Yeah. There's two real obvious flavors of this.

[00:06:51] The first is the cynical one, which is everyone's lying to you, and it's capitalism. You know, it's late-stage capitalism. Well, I take that route, but- Yeah. I mean, again, it depends on how salty you're feeling. And it does really- you know, there are cases where that's absolutely true and cases where it's not. The other case is that companies simply don't see it. They're in their own pickle jar, and they can't read their own label. And so they don't realize- like, here's a great example. And I won't name a company, even though I like them, and I want nice things to happen to them. Talk to me about their employer brand, and what- you know, we're talking about. We're doing an interview. What makes you special?

[00:07:21] And what's different about you? And they kept coming back to, well, we really care about each other. And I'm like, oh, God, no, please. Oh, that's the most garbage, bullshit, crap, nothing, say nothing, do nothing. Oh, my God. And I kept digging, and it was 45 minutes into this phone call. 45 minutes. I owned the example that breaks all my rules where I can't say anything different about them, and I'm just about to panic. I'm literally about to panic. And they say, yeah, like, we really care about each other. Like, a couple weeks ago, I got sick, and they door-dashed food to my house. I was like, what? What?

[00:07:51] And they just could not see that that was so randomly crazy, weird, cool, that they just couldn't see that. Like, if I had asked them, do you think other companies do that? Not really. He goes, do you not get how that makes you different? And these questions I've been asking you about how are you different, you couldn't, you didn't come to this? How are you burying the lead like this? And sometimes it just takes someone digging to go, really, what makes you different to help kind of identify what that is? So it's either straight up painting, you know, whitewashing everything and painting a big smiley face on everything, or they just can't see it. They just don't know.

[00:08:21] You know, I won't give measures to which is more common or not, but those are the two real reasons why they can't do it. And the problem is, is that they're not serving themselves and they're not serving their companies. They're not serving their employees. They're not serving anybody. Look, if you look at the current state of recruiting right now, is there anybody happy with this? Hiring managers hate it because they can't get good talent and they can't predict when the talent's going to show up. Recruiters hate it because they're exhausted. Talent leaders hate it because they don't know how to manage this because it's not a manageable process.

[00:08:50] This leaders hate it because it makes no sense at all and they keep throwing money on it like they're shoveling coal into the Titanic. Candidates hate it because they don't know what the hell they're getting into. And you're like, where are the processes where nothing is happy? No one is happy with this process, but it keeps maintaining itself. That makes no sense to me. No one likes this process. But if we say, here's what's different. Here's what you should expect. Here's what day one is like, what day 30 is like, what day 90 is like. This is how we're not like that company, not like that company.

[00:09:17] Everybody's got this sense that there are good companies and bad companies and there's no such thing. There's no such. The most toxic company in the world. And I'm naming the social media platform that just came to mind. And I could come up with two of those answers, by the way. I was thinking Tesla. That was what came into my mind immediately. Interestingly, I think my CEO and your CEO are the same CEOs. Anyway. Okay. So we're on the same page. Exactly. It doesn't matter how toxic these companies are. There's somebody who goes, I want that. The challenge is, what are you offering? To whom is that valuable?

[00:09:46] Connect those dang dots and stop trying to splat lipstick all over things. It's crazy. Totally nuts. Absolutely. And I honestly, I feel like you hit on a few things. One is, I don't feel like companies see employer branding as a tool. No. I don't think they see it as a strategy, as a way of sourcing, pipelining, partnering, all these different things. And it's interesting because we put so much money and care into the branding whenever it's what's going to be purchased.

[00:10:16] But we do not put as much branding in the care as to whenever it's who are we purchasing to do this labor, essentially. If you want to scare the crap out of your leadership, you say in a meeting where you say, okay, let's be very precise about what we're saying around this brand. And you raise your hand and you say, how many people are the recruiters talking to on a daily basis? And has anyone ever looked at anything they've ever said under your banner of brand? Anybody? Anybody? No, I'll just sit back here and let the chaos unfold. Like it's just like they have no idea.

[00:10:44] The chances are in many companies, the recruiters are touching more people with a brand identity and giving a brand setup than their entire sales team. Like it's crazy and they completely ignore it. The truth is business so hates recruiting and so hates talent acquisition. And they have decided to call it a cost center as a way of squeezing it to the smallest possible thing. I come from poli sci background and there's a great quote that goes, I want to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

[00:11:14] I think most businesses want to turn recruiting to the same level. I want it just small enough that I can kill it and never have to think about it again. And the truth is every thing that's good in your company came from someone your company hired thanks to a recruiter. Everybody who invented the product or added the features and tested the features and built the new tools and sold it and marketed it and supported it and built for it. Every one of those people came from a recruiter.

[00:11:40] So if you don't understand how talent acquisition is legitimately the thing that grows the company, you are missing the point. And the more companies can say, I don't see that. I don't have to. I can pretend that this isn't true. The more they can squeeze it down to nothing. What I want is for talent leaders around the world to stand up and say, I grew this business. I want my fair due. And I want the resources to continue that growth because that is where we need to be. Business growth is not a function of optimization. It's a function of creativity.

[00:12:09] It's a function of generation of generating ideas and generating processes and making amazing things happen. And I don't care. And I'm a huge AI proponent. It's people who make that happen. And the people come into your business through recruiting. Serve it and let it drive because that's what it's got to do. The problem is, even if business leaders allow that happen, most talent acquisition leaders wouldn't know what to do with that kind of responsibility. That would be my point. That would be my point. I think most TA leaders would be like, what's happening?

[00:12:39] And they were like, go with this. Why do I have a chainsaw? How did this happen? What happened? Who? Take this away from me. I don't think they would have a clue. It's what we all say we want to have happen. But I don't think most TA leaders would know what they were doing, where to start. Because they've been pigeonholed. Look, we have built these processes such that they are designed to be... Look, the modern recruiting has been waiting for AI to show up to destroy it.

[00:13:05] It has been built around optimization and processization and made more efficient, not effective, never effective, always efficient. Everything in recruiter world is about creating, spamming more people, spamming more job boards, posting more stuff that doesn't say anything or say anything interesting to just crawl the seabed for talent and let the hiring manager figure out what's what. It has been designed that the recruiter has been turned into a cog that will be automated out of existence.

[00:13:34] And the truth is most recruiters I know are flipping smart. They're flipping creative and they're interesting. I know some who code. I know who some develop AI. I know they're smart, smart people and they're consultants. And if they're not allowed to consult, all you're going to get is what everybody else gets. And I think that's what's really interesting. Companies assume that if I can use the same process as every other company is using, somehow I get the best talent. I know. I'm so rich. Say that again louder because I don't think you're hearing yourself when you say stuff like that

[00:14:04] because that's not right. And it's just there's this disconnect between how the company sees talent acquisition and how the talent acquisition see itself. Yeah. And how businesses grow. It's just it's terrifying. It is terrifying. Yeah. I completely agree with the view of the self and then how the company views. I think some of it has to do with the fact that once you say out loud that recruiters are fundamental to a business. You got to tell him. It changes everything. It changes everything. Like once you because I've worked in businesses where they say recruiting is fundamental to

[00:14:34] this business. And that's a very different company to work at versus we're one that's just a slap on once someone's already left and we'll think about it later and we get all the resources later. Yeah. And then and I think because there's such two different juxtapositions and whenever people are left to their own devices and finally able to create an EVP, there's so much confusion around quantity versus quality. Now they're creating branding that just attracts a pooey of people.

[00:15:02] None of them are actually quality because we haven't looked at our attraction data to see what we're actually reeling in. Yeah. And so those type of things to me, like it gets more intricate, but it's just interesting to see and how you're kind of framing like the very first like the first wall we're going to hit. Yeah. It's like they don't even know what they're talking about. Well, the thing is, is that everything most employer branders have learned from marketing and marketing worships at the church of more. We want more leads, more share of wallet, more share of voice, more impressions, more

[00:15:30] views, more, more, more, because it turns into more leads, which turns into more sales because in marketing and sales, every dollar is a good dollar or every euro is a good euro. I'm not here to be completely Western centric, but every dollar is a good dollar. But if recruiters know every candidate is not a good candidate, they're radically different in value to the company. And so it is a game of quality because you can only put one person in that seat. You can't put as many people as you want in that seat. You can put the best. So it's about, not about how do you generate the most views and most visibility, but how

[00:16:00] do you get the best person to go? That's where I want to be. I haven't heard that before. That's really interesting. I want to enroll. I want to engage with this. I want to be, have a relationship with this company. I want to be part of where this company is going. I buy a candy bar. I don't go. I really hope that the Hershey's company and my morals align on a really core basis. I don't flip it. Hey, sometimes, some loony tune might. Maybe. Who knows? But when's the last time you thought about your candy bar or your milk or your whatever, but your company, it matters on that stuff.

[00:16:30] But we are taking the wrong lessons from marketing and saying, oh, well, they buy all these tools and they have all these resources to generate more. I guess that's what we're supposed to do. And the answer is no. This is where employer brand is this really, really, really tiny little radically weird sect of marketing where everything is the same except for the idea that we don't want more. We want better. And that changes all the math. Yeah, absolutely. That's a beautiful call out. Sorry. Keep going down. I'm just really curious.

[00:16:57] Like, how do you identify when you go to work with some of these companies? How do you determine if there's success in their employer brand? Like, what are the markers for that? Yeah. I have a couple of tools that I use. You know, the first of is to look at their career site because let's be fair and raise your hand if you've been a part of a career site generation process. You have the scars. Yes, of course you do. And, you know, let me put anybody who hasn't been in that room in. Let me set the scene.

[00:17:23] It is nine people, most of which have never recruited for a role in their life. Some of whom this is the last job they'll ever have because they're in the C-suite and anytime they, you know, their next job is going to come through a headhunter and a friend of a friend. And they're going to tell you, employer brander slash recruiter slash TA leader, what to do because they know and because they're paid way more than you are. So I guess they get to, you know, push their way around. It's called the hippo effect, the highest paid person's opinion effect. The highest paid person always gets their way because there's no data in this process.

[00:17:49] So what I do is I look at a career site because it is ultimately the compromises of what executives wanted. It's not what recruiters wanted. Recruiters got even invited to that conversation. They should count themselves lucky. The career site is about what cons and marketing and the exec said they want people to know about the company, which is a total PR exercise. And I look at that and I go, the reason why every career site's three years old is because once you've gone through that process and just stated that thing, you never, ever, ever want to do it again. You're like, oh God, please never again. So you kind of pretend it doesn't happen.

[00:18:19] But it's interesting because it is this artifact of how companies think in the aggregate on the executive level. Ever touch again because they know one ever wants to. So they just say the most bland things that will be true forever. Then I go look at our social media channel because they got some 24 year old kid who's writing whatever the heck the 24 year old wants to do. And all they got to do is get past one lawyer, which is like trying to kick one past the goalie. It's not that hard.

[00:18:46] And you've got that is very much the beating heart of what the company is talking about and thinking about and what their Slack channels sound like and what they're doing. And I look at those two things and they are radically different, but put together, you go, that's a pretty good yin and yang of what this company cares about. And so one of the first things I do is say, scrape all that content and I run it through AI tools and I say, hey, based on what they're saying and how they're saying it, to whom are they trying to speak?

[00:19:11] Like if I started to make Taylor Swift references, I'm clearly trying to talk to a very particular woman, right? A very particular person because that's what they think about. That's how they think about it. If I start talking in, I mean, I can't think of an alternate that's really, you know, without completely stepping in it, but you understand we have this in this way of speaking and we don't realize we're speaking to an audience and we're attracting an audience based on how we speak, right? It's a kind of code switching and that's a pile I'm not getting into, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah. Like there's this idea of how you put it out there is what you're drawing back to you.

[00:19:40] And I think most companies have zero clue what the heck that is they're saying and to whom they're saying it and what they're drawing in. And they go, gosh, we're getting these people who apply. I guess we're doing a good job. It's like, are any of them worth hiring? So what I do is I use the tools to say, hey, here's the persona based on everything you said of who you're speaking to. Is this who you wanted to talk to? And if they go, I go, yeah, by the way, here's three more personas of people I think you should be talking to who you are ignoring. And that usually is enough to start to crack the ice a bit to make them go. It's not just about slapping pretty words on a page because it's not. It's about showing how you're different.

[00:20:09] And it really starts by saying your difference is fundamental to who you are as a company, who your leaders are and who you're trying to hire. Who Tesla is trying to hire and who Ford is trying to hire. They're car companies, right? They should be the same, right? No, they're radically different people. They should be talking radically different things to the different audiences because that's how you attract the people you actually want, right? No one has me in a shampoo commercial. Why? I'll leave you to do your own math. It's really simple. I'm not going to attract that audience, okay?

[00:20:39] This is news to me. I know. Don't tell people who can't see. Who can't see. I don't know. But that's the thing is you start by just making people understand that their fundamental understanding of what they think an employer brand is, is probably way off base. And it's really about distilling and understanding this. And I think of it in terms of, I just need one little hook. I just need one little thing that makes me go, oh, you're that kind of company. You're like this. Oh, you're empowering. Oh, you're well-paid. Oh, you're supportive. Oh, you're autonomous.

[00:21:08] There's something. And then people try to make their EVP be like the sum total of everything they offer. I'm like, no, everybody knows your paycheck's clear. And everybody knows you offer insurance. And everybody knows you have a building somewhere. Why do we talk about table stakes stuff? Of the hundred things your recruiter could say that's positive about the company, 99 of them are the exact same as five other companies across the street. So why are you saying those things? Find the one thing that's really interesting and then surround it with all the rest of the proof points to say, and we still pay you and you still get insurance and we still like each other and blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:21:36] But it's fine that tiny little hope to say, we're this kind of company. Because ultimately, what a brand is here to do is to lower the cognitive load on a candidate, on a person. When I understand Netflix, I understand Netflix is like this. When I hear about Tesla, I hear Tesla is like that. Like I have a very crystal understanding of what they are based on a few tiny little touch points and they're very different. The problem is 99.99999% of companies all look and sound the same.

[00:22:04] So I look at them and go, why would I spend 20 minutes filling out your stupid ATS that doesn't work very well? That's 1980s code with a bad horrible front end to try and refill in what my resume already has. Why would I waste my time when I don't know what I'm getting in return? What are you offering? And I think the biggest thing in all this process is that most people have misunderstood what an EVP is. An EVP is what value you offer. It's what you're proffering to the candidate.

[00:22:31] And we talk about, and most EVPs are all about, this is what we like. And this is what we think about. And this is how we do it. That's not value to a candidate. That's not what you're offering. And that's where it needs to be. What is the difference of the value we're offering me relative to literally millions of other companies so I can make a choice? Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. And I feel like you hit on something that's like one of my favorite things to discuss. And that is, well, two things.

[00:22:56] One, I think employer branding, how I mentioned it's a tool, I highly also feel like it is a talent enablement tool. Like this should be trimming like an hour off of screens. Like we should be that direct in how we address these specific roles and whether it's landing page, whatever. But the other piece is when you do have a low EVP, the odds of you creating this want or desire for effort justification to try to apply to your job.

[00:23:26] Like I talk about this all the time, but I talk about Workday and how they make you sign in and make your own profile. And to me, depending on the brand, that is just enough effort justification to where I don't do it. I'm not going to apply for your job because if you don't have a brand I love, no flipping things. I'll have a friend who will call me in a week and ask me to like, and that's not to toot my horn, but that's to say like, if you're someone that doesn't accent why this is going

[00:23:53] to be a beautiful experience for me, I'm not going to. And that's just to make a profile. Yeah. That's not even anything. Yeah. And I love that you use the word that I love, which is desire. Why is the word desire not used very often in what we do? Doing is changing lives. This is not low stakes. This is high stakes. This is life changing stuff. There should be a desire. There are 10 companies I want. I would quit. I would blow my company up to join. Okay.

[00:24:22] That is a level of desire. No, no. Never. We're never telling. Okay. No, here's the deal. And then, you know, for anybody who's self-employed, you understand you were always just on the edge of blowing it all up and going, this was crazy. What was I thinking? Every day. I am the worst boss ever. What have I done? So I'm always on the edge and I don't want to talk myself off the ledge, right? I don't want to go to put myself in a position where that could happen. Anyway, desire is so valuable. And that's what we are.

[00:24:48] We've adopted all of this thinking that recruiting is about, well, the company has the job, so therefore they have all the power. And you, the candidate, will format your entire professional life in two pages, exactly two pages, never more. And if you do have more, I'm going to have a recruiter go on LinkedIn and yell at you for that. And then it's always going to use the same fonts and it's going to look the same. Hey, have you seen this list of 125 power words? Use them. Use them a lot. Use them over and over again. Yes, it sounds like everybody else, but use them. I swear you have to do it. By the way, you have to do it this way. You have to do it this way. Exactly.

[00:25:15] You have to follow these processes and then jump through these hoops and we will dictate when the interview is and we will dictate what the looks like. Oh yeah. And we're going to foist an AI or a one-way interview on you. We will decide what our process is and you will follow suit. And if you don't, you do not get a job and you're like, screw you. I'm more valuable to you than you are to me. I'm sorry. If you hire me, I should be generating three to 10 times more value to the company than the salary I get. So explain to me who's in charge there, meathead. Give me a break.

[00:25:45] This is the problem of recruiting. It comes from way up top, right? It comes from way up top and it says, we own the jobs. You have to dance to our tune and that's not how this works anymore. Yeah. And I think it comes from the same reason that they won't say recruiting is a fundamental sport. It all stems to me from the same power dynamics. They gave us the exact duties that hold all of the power and have relied on us staying

[00:26:14] numb to it and being like, what do you want me to do? Even though now we're the ones with master's degrees in this specific sport, we're the ones that understand. And so now we're like, we don't really need you. And that I think is a terrifying spot for people to be in because not only are we talking about your procedures, policy and practice, we're talking about who oversees salaries, including yours. We're talking about who signs off on paper. Like these individuals hold a lot of power.

[00:26:42] But once you tell that to them, the way they find themselves is very different and they stop asking for permission. And to me, that is why all of this gets a loss is because they won't let us sit at the proper place that we're at based off the plate that we hold. Roy Sutherland, who is a great author and probably easily the greatest podcast guest in the history of all humanity. He is, if you've ever seen the world's most interesting man, he is that, but about marketing.

[00:27:10] And if he's ever finished a sentence, I'm not sure he's ever done it. He just, it's just all one run on life is really what it is. Anyway, one of the things he says is that, and he, it's interesting because he points it at technology. And I think the truth is it should be more accurately pointed to business thinking in the general. And he says, uses this example called the doorman problem. So you have a hotel and you have a doorman and the doorman is expensive and you have to keep a couple of them. And so you hire McKinsey or Facebook and they come in and they reframe the problem and say,

[00:27:39] ah, the doorman's job is to hold a door. You know what? For a lot less, we could get an automatic door and replace it. And you would save a lot of money. And McKinsey would go, ah, we're geniuses. And that's great. Except the doorman does a lot more than just hold the door. There's a status showing there. There's a sense of security. There's a sense of loyalty that the doorman is greeting people who have, or customers who have a sense of what's going on. They're understanding, they're directing and adding value to the guest.

[00:28:02] That that stuff all got ignored because they redrew the value frame for the doorman as person who holds door. I think the more the business's job in very often its own mind is to redraw everybody's job to make it as small and tight as possible so it can be automated away. And I think HR, recruiting, employer brand, marketing, marketing feels this too. They are seeing it too. It's not just, oh, woe is us recruiter type people.

[00:28:28] It is endemic to business that the business wants to shrink it so it can control it. And once it can control it, it can build processes. And process is really just the precursor for automation and destruction. And I think ultimately we are experts. We are experts in this thing we do, in these weird soft skills that we do a poor job generally assigning a value to. And the more we are able to assign a value to the work we do. And if you're a recruiter, it's you're an expert in the talent marketplace. You understand what people want.

[00:28:58] You understand what they're seeing in other places. You have a perspective. You have a point of view. And it's more closely aligned to what the candidate is about than what the hiring manager wants. That has value. And if you don't believe that, go look at what you're paying an agency per hire because that's the value you've just taken from a recruiter and given to them because it's the same value. And that's the thing is we have to understand the value we're bringing to the company. And more importantly, it is how we have to talk to the business. We have to talk to the business about our value and the value we create. And the truth is recruiters talk about time to fill.

[00:29:27] What's the value there? Recruiters talk about number of applicants. What's the value there? There is no value there. But you can reframe a lot of these things to talk and connect to the value that the business cares about because the business only cares about making money, saving money, generating customers, limiting risk. End of list. End of list. And if you can't connect your work to one or more of those four things, go ahead and get yourself a box because it's not going to be long. It is my biggest argument all the time. Recruiters do not understand the value that they hold to the business and cannot explain it. Exactly.

[00:29:57] They don't know enough to be able to explain that to anyone whatsoever. Please do a better job. I'm sorry. It's like you are that person who holds all that power and you have control of people's lives. And there's so much data out there you could be using to prove your point that you hold the value and you make revenue happen. It drives me actually insane that recruiters still cannot do this. I've been doing this a long time.

[00:30:26] And the fact that most recruiters can't do this, it's like the bane of my existence. It's because we've drawn that box to say, hey, recruiters, the second that candidate says, I accept, you're dead. You're done. That you pass it on to HR. And the truth is, every recruiter should keep a list of everybody they've ever hired and then talk to HR and say, please tell me the lifetime value of that hire. Wait, I'll just add them all up because this is take what you've paid me in salary and I will show you the value I've driven in the business.

[00:30:52] And that is where recruiting and HR can work together to say, look, this is my friend Marcus Body talks about how everybody tries to assign an ROI to employer brand, which is kind of impossible. But also, who cares? Does anybody go, what's the ROI on electricity? Does anybody go, what's the ROI on having a building? Does anybody go, what's the ROI of giving a computer to every employee? No. It's just you need to do these things. So you might as well do them well. And that's the thing is we do not assign the value to the right places.

[00:31:21] We're so busy quibbling over the $10,000, $100,000 on this tool or this process that we ignore the millions and tens of millions potentially generated by having a brand that attracts the right people who are ready day one to hit the ground running, drive value, create value and make that company grow. And we don't talk about that nearly enough. Yeah. I also feel like branding and attraction is the area where everything gets monetized.

[00:31:46] So like whenever I'm looking at recruiter effectiveness, efficiency, like everything, because now we've given everyone like every open job has a vacancy value. Everything has a specific cost to where we can do that math. And now and essentially what branding has allowed us to do by entering a form of a P&L and something in the chat is actually allow us to do that item line and be like, look at the impact and speak the language of the business.

[00:32:15] Because until this point, the only way we could say we mattered is, well, we're getting you people and the people are how you get it. That's how you got in your seat. That's, you know, like how could you be this crazy to forget? Yeah. But it is something to where it's like in order to speak the language they care about, it needed to be dollar signed. It needs to be shown the effectiveness because really and truly, and I got close one time, but then we had layoffs. But talent can be a profit center if you want it to be. Yeah. Right.

[00:32:43] If you say, yeah, here's the baseline value, what we expect this hire to generate over the course of months, years, whatever. And then here's actual and every dollar actual over expected is that goes straight to the recruiter. Right. That is what the recruiter did. Right. If you say, if I pulled off somebody, some random off the job board and this is what they'd make and you make this much, guess what? That's on your bill. That is on you, what you are bringing to the table.

[00:33:11] No one wants to do that because the second you do that, you have to divvy up the rewards too accurately and too efficiently and too effectively. And no one wants to do that. It's easier to make recruiters just kind of sit in the corner and shut up. Yep. Yeah. It's easy to be the one that just were the bullet point on their job description. Just fill the job, kid. Well, look, I'm old enough to remember, and I am very old. Don't let the baby face fool you. I remember when you're looking at HR roles, you always measured roles based on years in experience. Hi, I'm looking for an HR, HR BP with five years experience.

[00:33:41] Oh, I'm looking for seven years experience. The hell did you do in those two years that made you so different? I know. I always had it fascinating. I know. And at the same time, I know HR people with three years experience who are geniuses and HR people with 20 years experiences who I think, how did you find your way to the office? By accident? Just pure muscle memory? What the hell? We can't, if we cannot assign the value to who they are and what they're doing, it's so hard. And you're left with these proxy metrics of years in the seat or years of experience or

[00:34:08] God help you SHRM credits or whatever that means. Oh my gosh. Let's, yeah, a can of worms. Here we go. Yes, I know. Don't open that one for me. Yeah, yeah, sorry. That's a bad one. It's open. Yeah, but that's the thing. It's like, if you can't, it is on every recruiter to say, I want to matter. And thus, I want to be held accountable to the value I bring to the company. Therefore, help me see my value. Help me measure my value. And it is a double-edged sword because there are plenty of recruiters who will find that they're just filling the seats and not doing adding any value. Yeah.

[00:34:38] And they should probably find other jobs. That's not, this is, if you're not here being the expert, being the consultant, adding value, you're just filling a seat and the AI is going to take care of that stuff for us real soon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is always, this is always my argument about AI taking over recruiting is like the good ones will still be around because they're going to be great at being consultants and strategists and, and really connecting the dots and data and all of these things.

[00:35:06] The ones that will be left behind are the paper pusher recruiters. Right. And so, you know, you can argue AI is coming for everything though. Right. I work in marketing right now. It's coming for us. Right. Yeah. So unless you figure out a different way to be valuable to the business, it is coming for you. Right. Can I tell you some, sorry, go ahead. Can I tell you something I rely on though? Just because you were like, it's everywhere. Yesterday I went to the Taco Bell line and it's a robot talking now. It's not a real person.

[00:35:36] And after the third time when she was like, you want a Baja? Can you say that again? The guy popped on and was like, girl, you just want a large Baja black. I was like, yes, babes. Thank you. But you know what I want to rely on? How impatient we are as humans and how distrusting we are of technology. I pray that ish keeps us in a job because if anything certain, anytime you call anything and they're like, I need to speak to an adult, like a real one, like whatever. So I kind of do count on that too.

[00:36:06] I count on how terrible we are as humans to actually want to keep us in the game. And I know that sounds crazy. I'm not as scared as everyone else. We all need something to cling to in the chaos that is today. Please cling to it. If that's your cling to, go for it. I think it is. That's how you bob in the ocean and stay afloat for a little while longer. Do it. Everybody's got, take church, take technology, take whatever. I don't care. Take it. Run with it. Absolutely. Though you've seen all the articles that say how much of what looks like automation,

[00:36:36] what looks like AI is just a big factory in India or the Philippines. You're like, okay, I know. So, you know, I think about this and, you know, I've worked at fairly larger organizations who have taken on this work at some point. What if I'm like Joe Schmo small business? Like how do, and I can't afford to hire you, James. Like what are the things? I'm dirt cheap. I am dirt cheap. Well, I'm going to tell everybody to hire you, but let's say, let's say, let's say they

[00:37:06] just can't. Okay. What would be the steps for them? Yeah. So the biggest challenge is to avoid the potholes and the potholes always live at the top of the office. They're always the leadership who say, you know, look, and I don't begrudge them for this because people who start businesses are people who want to put their names on things. Okay. They want to make a change. They want to make this world different somehow. This is how they're going to put their stamp on the world. And they equate their business with themselves.

[00:37:32] Whether they started it, whether they became the CEO down the road, they merge their personality with the perspective and how people perceive the company. And so consequently, if you let your employer brand be about, does the people like the company? Leadership will walk in and say, we're going to reframe this. So it's what it's really saying is that we're great. It's not the company's great. It's we're great. And once you do that, just quit. Just don't. Just find something else to do. There's another job to be done inside the company because you have now been locked in a box and nothing. You will never say anything interesting.

[00:38:02] You will never say anything useful. You will never say anything different. So avoid that particular pothole. So if you can do that, you're off and running. You're way ahead of the game. And by the way, you're way ahead of many, many, many Fortune 1000 companies. Just saying. Anyway, what you do then is say, look, I'm going to look at three big buckets. Mission, experience, and reward. Mission being, what is this company? Why is it here? What is it here to do? The experience being, how do we do it day by day? How do we interact with one another? What's the work life, you know, in experience, you know, in a nutshell?

[00:38:32] And what's the reward? Really, you know, brass tacks. What are we doing? How do we do it? What do we get when we do it? That is the only three questions every candidate wants answered. That's it. That's it. So you need to think in those three buckets and say, which of those things are different? Now, you got to be accountable. So if you say, oh, we're mission driven. Okay, okay, okay, hold on. Everybody thinks. Look, I, again, old. And I remember in the 80s when everybody had to slap a mission on everything because it was what was supposed to happen.

[00:38:58] And you're like, no, mission is not what's the boilerplate I put in the spreadsheet. Though my favorite mission statement for a company is Pepsi's was just beat Coke. That was the end of the mission statement. Like, I buy that. Well, I say, I like that. Now, will I take a 5% pay cut to beat Coke? Ha, maybe not. Right. Right. Right. SpaceX's mission is to put people on Mars and their experience and their reward structures are not particularly nice.

[00:39:24] But if you care about putting people on Mars, you are willing to accept lower reward and less positive work experience to achieve the mission. If that's the case, you are mission driven and you should talk about your mission. And this is an easy process. But that's like three to 5% of all companies. And I think I may be generous there. That's like every nonprofit. Sure. Every not for profit. Sure. Every academic. Sure. But a handful of for profit companies. If you're not, you got to look at what's the experience. What's the day to day? Autonomy. Work from home.

[00:39:54] How do you resolve differences? Can you speak truth to power? What is the culture? And that's a can of worms. What is it? What is the, is it empowering? Is it collaborative? Is it, there's so many ways to kind of frame it. Find the thing that makes you different. And if that's something people want, you're done. You're good. You're in it. Just talk about that and keep talking about that and keep finding new ways to prove that thing. And if you can't, well, it's time to wander over to the reward bucket. The reward bucket being more than salary, it is bonus, but it's also professional development.

[00:40:23] It's status. It's access to clients. It's access to networks. It's all that stuff. How do you reward me? And to me, it's a, it's like a trickling bucket. If you can't have a mission, what's your experience? If you can't have an experience that's worth negative reward, let's talk about the reward. And if you can't find one of those three things, you're in trouble because you're just sound like everybody else. You got to dig deeper. Yeah. That's the question. Are you earning or learning? I think. And if you're not doing both, you're supposed to leave your job.

[00:40:52] Well, and I think, yeah, and that's a nice kind of like, you know, throw away Hallmark card line. It's valid. Yeah, for a throw pillow. Yeah, exactly. It's perfect for a throw pillow. It's not how I would build an EVP, but it's, but the ideas are there, right? If what is the thing you are offering a candidate beyond baseline salary, right? Now the nice thing is when I talk about this, every company goes, oh, that's impossible. I can't be different than a million other companies. No one's asking you to be. No one's going, should I work at Bob's discount plumbing supply or Google? No one is making that comparison.

[00:41:22] No one's flipping that between. So you have to look at your relative competitive set. So if you're a regional plumbing distributor, you're probably competing with five, 10 other companies. You just got to be different than 10 other companies. That ain't hard. Yeah. You just, but using the bucket model is how you kind of distill and kind of focus and see things and not get lost in the trees. If you're Google, well, you have to compete against millions of companies, but that's okay because you got all the money and that's fine. That's how you're going to win anyway. So to me, think about what makes you different in those three buckets in your relative competitive

[00:41:52] set. Validate that against what your competitors are saying online. And build from there. Now, is that simple? Yeah. Is it going to get you way ahead? Yeah. The bar is so low for this kind of work that just defining what makes you different relative to your competitive set puts you way ahead of most companies. You don't have to worry about buying huge tech stacks or ad spends or consultants or whatever. Just define that. Start there so that a candidate goes, I know what I'm getting into when I choose you.

[00:42:22] You're good. You're golden. I agree with you. The bar is so low. Oh, yeah. I've seen some horrible things out there. I mean, just reading job descriptions lately, I'm like, what is going on? So if they could just do that, this one, that one simple thing, they'd be way ahead of the game to me. It just leaps and bounds. I mean, just totally leaps and bounds. It's so interesting how we all expect everybody to be the same. Right. We teach everybody that there's a model, so follow the model, and we all do it together. It's like, wait a second.

[00:42:52] If we're all doing it the same way, how do we differentiate? It's like if we expect every candidate to write the resume the same way, how do you pick between candidates? Right. You can. They all sound the same. If your job postings all run through ChatGPT like everybody else's job postings run through ChatGPT, you all sound the same. It's about being different. And I think that right there is the nugget that terrifies most TA leaders and most business leaders. I don't want to be different. I want to be better. No, no. You can't be better because you're better to one person is not better to another. Absolutely.

[00:43:21] It's how you're different. And people don't think in those terms. They need to. If they need to embrace the thing that makes them different, and that's where the magic is. Absolutely. That was beautiful. It was. It was really good. All right. This was solid, James. This was so good. But James, we have one more thing to do, and this is the part of this podcast where we talk about the cognitive side of what we've been talking about. Ashley, take us in. All right, y'all.

[00:43:48] Today on Talent Outside of the Box, it's actually pretty short and sweet. So we have been talking about branding and EVP. And one thing we know in talent is attrition rates, high turnovers. And what could be the root cause of this? Turns out, if you look at these drop-off rates and you see high trends, it could tell you where your issues lie.

[00:44:11] And a big piece of this could be in your recruiter's sale of the business, of the EVP, of the role. So all of these different things that you have sold, if you see trending attrition in a certain area in the life cycle of the employee, it could be implications that your sell is inconsistent with their reality. Yeah. So look into your EVP. Make sure you're selling the good things. James, give us a plug party. Where can everybody find you?

[00:44:40] I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm employerbrandlabs.com. Wow. There you go. I love it. I love it. Dang. James, I can't thank you enough for doing this and spending time with us. Thrilled to do it. Just so exciting. And this was good. I feel energized on a Monday day. Me too. I'm like, man, I didn't take on the world. All right. So thanks, everybody, for joining us on this crazy thing we call a rollercoaster here at Talentless Podcast. You know where to find us. Everywhere we are. Everywhere you listen to your podcasts. YouTube, Blue Sky, Instagram.

[00:45:09] I mean, if it's out there, we're on it. Till next time, hiring wins and hiring fails. We'll see you. Bye. Bye. That was James Ellis straight from the vault. Now, the tease. James is coming back to Talentless with something brand new. Real companies, real careers pages, brave enough to raise their hand. Your careers page could be next. We spill everything in November. Follow the show so you don't miss it. And find James at employerbrandlabs.com.