What do doughnuts and tacos have to do with employer branding? Well, as it turns out, you may be accidentally applying the wrong marketing and sales techniques to recruitment marketing. Employer branding author, keynote speaker and podcaster James Ellis shares an excerpt from his NEW book, Talent Chooses You, available on Amazon. He explains why hiring is a game of quality, not quantity.
Talent Chooses You has been referred to as the “the roadmap for the next hiring revolution” and “the new bible for the employer branding practitioner and the novice alike.”
Let’s pretend you are selling tacos. Or doughnuts. Or toothbrushes. It really doesn’t matter. These things are cheap items, maybe costing a dollar each. So you set up a stand or cart and hawk your wares. Anyone who walks up with a dollar in their pocket is a viable customer, and your job is to convince them that your item is worth the dollar to them. Perhaps it will give them more than a dollar’s feeling of satisfaction to eat that taco. Or it will crave that sweet tooth in a way they’d be willing to spend two dollars. Or that brushing will keep them from needing costly dental work down the road. Either way, your item has value, and they’d be a fool to reject it. The conversation is about value conversion.
Which is fine. This is typical commerce: I have a good or service to sell, and I will sell it to whoever can pay for it. You have a dollar. I have a taco. Let’s make some magic happen! Your goal in this space is to replicate this transaction as many times as possible. Having sold the taco, you look to sell another. You are rewarded for selling lots of tacos. Becoming the best taco salesperson is a game of quantity and nothing more.
In this process, do you ask your buyer if they have a college degree? Did you confirm that they have a reliable mode of transportation? As you are both in the same place, you don’t wonder if they live close enough to you. But are they certified to eat a doughnut? Do they have at least five years’ doughnut-eating experience? Can they provide names and contact information for three people who can confirm they know their way around a doughnut? How many different varieties of doughnut can they discuss with confidence? Hmm…I see a gap of three months in which you were not eating doughnuts. Can you explain that gap?
Have you ever heard of someone saying they only had one doughnut and were going to sell it to the “best” customer? The one who was a cultural fit to the mission of your doughnut?
Of course not. That would be insane. Again, you have a doughnut and they have a dollar. To quote comedian Mitch Hedberg, why do we even need a receipt? This transaction is completed. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a work visa, a degree, or can pass a drug test.
Dollar. Doughnut. Done.
But when we’re hiring, we aren’t selling doughnuts or tacos. We’re looking for a specific person to do a specific job. We wonder what school they went to, what other jobs they’ve had, and what the outcomes of their work were. We immediately reject them if they don’t have enough experience. We reject them because they don’t “fit.” We reject them because they were arrested and tried for fraud. We reject them because someone was just a little bit better.
Hiring isn’t a game of quantity, because we’re generally filling one role and we want the best possible person to take that job. We want one person, so we seek the best person.
“We live in a world driven by quantity, and blindly applying marketing and sales techniques designed for quantity to a model designed for quality is a disaster waiting to happen.”
This seems prima facie obvious, but it is the difference that underlies all hiring and differentiates it from almost any other kind of profession. It is foundational to everything and what differentiates employer branding from every other kind of marketing and branding in the world. The rest of the world is looking to bill more hours, sell more time, build more widgets, train more people, take more cases, fix more pipes, and take on more clients. We live in a world driven by quantity, and blindly applying marketing and sales techniques designed for quantity to a model designed for quality is a disaster waiting to happen.
If you’re selling tacos and you sell a million tacos, you’re getting a raise. You’re getting a bonus. They’ll put your picture on a wall above the words “Salesperson of the Year.”
But if you’re “selling” jobs and you get a million people to apply, you’re getting fired.
Applying great, clever, or even genius-level marketing thinking won’t solve recruiting and hiring, because they are so different. Tennis, golf, and billiards are all played with round balls, but you can’t switch one ball for another and pretend it’s the same game.
This difference isn’t academic. It is an industry built on a very different foundation to almost everything else we know and do. But embracing this difference is the beginning to solving your hiring problems.
Talent Chooses You has been referred to as “the roadmap for the next hiring revolution” and “the new bible for the employer branding practitioner and the novice alike.” Unlike any other employer brand business book, it is designed from the ground up to be a call to arms to and for talent acquisition to see a better way to hire. One that doesn’t put candidates and recruiters on opposite sides of a fight. And unlike other books, it literally was designed to not make any money, so James is now selling it at cost (he isn’t making a cent on sales) to ensure it gets in the hands of the people who are looking to start their own talent strategy revolution wherever they are. Get your copy now.
It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.
(Listen to thetalentcast.com podcast here!)