Becoming Choosable w/ James Ellis

The boys are back and this time they’re dragging employer branding out of the “fluffy BS” corner and into the boardroom. James Ellis joins Chad & Cheese to unpack his new book Becoming Choosable — and why most companies still treat talent like interchangeable parts while crying about “culture.”

Expect hot takes on:• Why “apply to everything” broke hiring• ATS robots vs. actual humans• Employer brand ≠ pretty career site stock photos• Influencers, employee advocacy, and the coming brand trainwrecks• And yes… Super Bowl ads, butt jokes, and bald-guy energy

If you think recruiting is a numbers game, James says you’re already losing. Stand out or get ghosted — by candidates and your own future workforce.

Snark level: high.

Truth bombs: higher.

HR feelings: probably hurt.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Joel Cheesman (00:29.397)

Two guys who are still in a cage despite all our rage. Hey kids, it's the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is riding shotgun as we welcome James Ellis to the show. He's the chief brand builder at Employer Brand Labs and the author of a new book entitled, Becoming Choosable, Build the Talent Strategy That Grows Your Business, as opposed to his other book idea, which was How to Destroy Your Business.

Chad Sowash (00:40.618)

Sup.

Joel Cheesman (00:58.985)

James, welcome once again to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.

James Ellis (01:03.07)

So thrilled to be a three-time host. Only two more to get the jacket.

Joel Cheesman (01:06.143)

You look thrilled. got the red glasses on, which tells me you're spoiling for a fight. You're ready to bring it on this episode.

Chad Sowash (01:06.394)

yeah.

James Ellis (01:08.611)

Yeah.

James Ellis (01:12.386)

I'm always, It is quite choosable, yes. It's all about aerodynamic. Yeah. One day.

Chad Sowash (01:12.882)

He also has a choosable haircut, just so you know.

Joel Cheesman (01:17.003)

I chose it for sure. I'm still on the fence. I'm still on the fence. My 19 year old told me, dad, you still look good. You got your hair. So as long as I'm getting those comments from my kids, I'm still, I'm keeping the wig, keeping the wig.

Chad Sowash (01:18.078)

Ha ha ha!

James Ellis (01:28.15)

If that's all you got, keep it, right? That's all you got.

Chad Sowash (01:29.514)

Well, he's hoping that you keep yours as long as you possibly can so that he can. It's the whole heredity thing. He's a teenager. that's a good call. Yeah, that's a very good call. Sexy with glasses, huh? Get it.

Joel Cheesman (01:37.109)

James is kind of like if Chad and I had a baby, it would be bald with glasses. I guess that's kind of what, and the beard is kind of in between what we're doing. Anyway, James, for our listeners who don't know who you are, who are those people? Tell us a little bit about you.

James Ellis (01:50.51)

Yeah. So I'm James Ellis, live in Chicago. I'm a Virgo. I like long walks around the lake, I guess. I don't know. I don't want to say. I think about employer branding more than any other human being should be allowed to think about it. And that's kind of what I do. I've been doing this for about 13 years and I love. Yes, truly. It is a medical condition. The doctors have been alerted. There is no cure. There are a series of trials I'm expected to start with, but know, fingers crossed we have hope. Yeah, one day.

Joel Cheesman (02:03.371)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (02:04.691)

Hmm get the straight jacket

Chad Sowash (02:13.663)

Ha ha ha.

Joel Cheesman (02:17.717)

James has been going deep for a long time. Yes, yes. So James, before we get into the book and all this work branding stuff, we just had the Super Bowl. I'm curious, you as a branding expert, what did you think about the Super Bowl? You can talk about the ads, the halftime show, whatever. What were your thoughts?

James Ellis (02:20.29)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (02:21.176)

Yep, I hear it.

James Ellis (02:25.931)

stuff.

James Ellis (02:38.786)

Yeah. Well, aside from the fact that the first half is the most boring game I've seen in a very, very long time. And I look, I'm old enough that I remember that Super Bowls used to be all, you know, it's three to six wins, like that level of, you know, defensive stuff. It was a pretty boring game. think we've all expected a lot more, you know, touchdowns, a lot more excitement, a lot more stuff going on. That said, I am...

Chad Sowash (02:43.775)

A lot of field goals.

James Ellis (02:59.15)

Look, here's the deal. The NFL wants to go international. They want a team in Mexico. They want a team in Canada. They want a team in England or Germany or something, wherever they want. And I love that on some level they have to be realizing that this whole America 250, fly the fighter jets, here's the American army, they're doing the thing. It's like, you know what? You can't want that at the same time you want that. Those two things are somewhat problematic together.

Chad Sowash (03:06.522)

Spain. Yeah.

James Ellis (03:28.27)

from a branding standpoint of knowing what you stand for, knowing what you're offering, knowing what you care about, that is the decision I'm fascinated to watch the NFL make over the next, let's be fair, 10 years. It's gonna be a while. They'll throw a couple of games across the ocean, they'll throw a couple of games in Mexico or whatever, but it's gonna take a long time before that first team happens. But once that happens, there's a whole lot of other changes that have to be made because of who that organization is and what they stand for and what they're all about, what they're offering. That's really, to me, that's the big move.

Joel Cheesman (03:36.149)

Mm-hmm.

Chad Sowash (03:55.444)

Yeah. I think they're doubling up on games next year. Obviously, they have different venues that that they already go to. They have been going to for years. But yeah, it's all growth, man. I mean, the US is a big country, but it's not everything. And when you've got, I don't know, Spain and Spanish being, you know, 600 million plus people speak it. That's not bad. That's not bad.

James Ellis (04:15.939)

But.

Joel Cheesman (04:20.52)

If the future is more hot Latinas, I'm here for it. I'm here for it.

James Ellis (04:20.547)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (04:24.411)

Amen. Amen.

James Ellis (04:27.118)

Yeah. mean, honestly, if the, I just want to finish this. If NBA can go China, why can't NFL go China? That might be, hey, pick a direction. If they said NBA has already gone that way, we're going to go other way. I buy that. buy that. Favorite commercial. There were not a lot of great commercials. There just seemed to be a lot of, there's a lot of butts, like a lot of focusing on butts. That just struck me and I don't know what kind of change of life that's, that's, you know.

Joel Cheesman (04:27.925)

Favorite commercial, favorite commercial.

Joel Cheesman (04:43.283)

Okay.

James Ellis (04:53.064)

revealing about me as a human being, I don't know, but it was like, okay, so we're really kind of the jeans commercial with the butts and then the tight ends with the butts. Okay.

Chad Sowash (05:02.355)

The clenching, the clenching of the butts, yes. It really did, yes, yeah.

James Ellis (05:02.382)

All right, we're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the tight ends. That was a lot of awkward. It really did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know if I have a favorite. I just have ones that were stood out, which honestly, from an advertising standpoint, standing out is like nine-tenths of the fight.

Chad Sowash (05:17.182)

Yes.

Joel Cheesman (05:18.091)

All right, James, you got a new book and you have a hype video, if you will, for the book. So I wanna play this for the kids and then we'll get into why the hell the world needed another branding.

James Ellis (05:20.622)

It's true.

James Ellis (05:29.259)

Exactly.

Chad Sowash (05:49.599)

For all the audio, that's two James, by the way.

Chad Sowash (06:46.399)

So if anybody wanted to know what it sounds like in James's head, that's it.

Joel Cheesman (06:46.603)

Hmm.

James Ellis (06:51.758)

That's a pretty fair, yeah, yeah, think that's about right. It's dangerous having that much knowledge of DaVinci Studio. That's all I'm gonna say. Yeah, I'll clone me, yeah.

Chad Sowash (06:57.833)

Ha

Joel Cheesman (06:59.401)

You can never have too many James's is what I say. Never too many James's. All right, why the book James? What was the catalyst? What made you want to write this?

Chad Sowash (07:02.183)

yeah.

James Ellis (07:10.188)

Yeah, first off, was talking to another author this morning and I said, she's like, well, I was really mad because this thing happened at work and I wanted to kind of explain why that was wrong. I said, yes, no one writes a book because they're happy. No one goes, everything is great, here's a book. You are angry at something, you're frustrated by something, you're grumpy at something and that's the spark, the spite level that kind of drives through a very long process, which is writing a book. For me, I am exhausted by one, no one understanding one employer brand.

is, they think it's the pretty pictures you stick on a career site, they think it's the tag lines that you stick anywhere and kind of the pretty, the smiling faces that you stick everywhere, the awards, the great culture, all that junk. not, hey, this is how we're different. This is how we are not like every other company. So that was a big driver. And the two is I had to come to the realization that the second I talk about employer brand,

90 % of people turn off. go, it's stupid, it's fluffy, it's dumb. They have been poisoned by what they think employer brand is and whatever. And so I realized if I want to get people to get excited about how employer brand, presenting yourself as different as an employer isn't just about, we can find a way to come up with a video topic, but it's really more about how do we show ourselves as being a different kind of employer so that people can choose us rather than just kind of default to us. with all the tools where you can apply to a thousand jobs in a single click,

we need to be leaning more into, I don't want 1,000 applications, I want two, but they both need to be killers. They both need to be amazing at what they do. And the only way to make that happen is to be clear on what you offer and clear on what you're looking for. And that, at its heart, is employer brand, but I figured if I said employer brand, no one's gonna buy the book and no one's gonna care. And I wanted to really tie it to that idea of business growth, that it's stuff you guys have been talking about for longer than I have probably, is that everything that happens inside a company,

starts with the recruiter, starts with talent acquisition. You can't buy, sell, make anything. You can't bill for anything without the recruiter having brought someone in to make that happen. And if you understand that every company is just a bunch of people, it stands to reason that better people make a better company. Well, you don't get better people by recruiting harder. You don't get better people by just recruiting more. You get better people by being clear on what you offer so that people want that. And that's really what it's all about, is trying to get past your preconceived notions of what you think employer brand is.

James Ellis (09:28.204)

and get into, let's talk about this in business terms. And I think the more we do that, the more the talent leader, the more CHRO, the more the recruiting leaders can kind of embrace the idea that they're not just this add-on admin function that just pushes the paper in the ATS, they are the ones driving business growth and they need to kind of embrace that. They need to own that for them to claim that seat at the table, for them to really show their value to the business.

Chad Sowash (09:52.244)

Well, and making it a business book as opposed to an employer brand book, you're starting to open up your total addressable market and again talking about how all of this impacts business and why CEO should be reading a damn book. Come on.

James Ellis (10:06.74)

I wish, I wish. Yeah, I mean, that would be great, but I think I'm gonna need Oprah to kind of endorse it to get more CEOs to read the book. But, you know, if it trickles through, I'll own it. You know, you guys are great, but how many, you know, the CEO...

Joel Cheesman (10:15.317)

What do we chop liver? What? You better tell your publisher to buy a few more copies after this show, my friend.

Chad Sowash (10:17.087)

Ha

Chad Sowash (10:22.301)

Hahaha

James Ellis (10:24.152)

Yeah, my publisher being me. Thanks. Okay.

Chad Sowash (10:27.465)

So is this like, because your last book, I think your last book was Talent Chooses You, and now you're becoming choosable, right? So I mean, are we going down the choice funnel? Is there another one? Yeah.

James Ellis (10:40.428)

Isn't that what we all want? When we want a job, we're changing our lives. We're deciding, do I want to work at Coke or Pepsi? Do I want to work at Nike or Adidas? Where do I want to work? It's a choice. It's like everything else is a choice. The problem is, if I'm choosing Nike or Adidas, I have so much information about the difference between those shoes. If I'm choosing Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Honda, whatever, I have so much information about what that choice entails. There's so much meaning around that choice. I'm choosing between two companies as an employer.

I know so little about what it's like to work there. I know so little about what to expect, what the management style is like. All I know is they've got, went and spent that money on that award and stuck it everywhere. So good for them, I guess, you know, but they're one in 20,000 who did that. What does that mean? All I know is that they say that they are helping me grow. What does that mean? In what way? How does that entail? How does that manifest? How do I see that? How do I expect that? None of that is really clear. It's a bunch of platitudes stacked on a really minimal website. We hope to God somebody applies.

Chad Sowash (11:19.551)

Mm-hmm.

James Ellis (11:40.334)

As a candidate, I have value and I am driven by certain things and I am motivated by certain things and everybody knows, because everybody's been saying this for a million years, it's not about good talent or bad talent, it's about fit. The thing about fit is you can't evaluate fit in one direction. You have to evaluate fit in both directions, which means the candidate has to be more clear about what they want, what they care about, and what motivates them. The company needs to be more clear about that thing as well. And I think

What's interesting is that the more the company is clear about what they offer, how they reward, how they, you what their day to day is like, what their mission is like, does that mission matter or is it all about making money or is it all about growing, you know, share of whatever? What is the company truly value and offer? It forces the candidate to say, well, gosh, you don't sound like 99 million other companies, you sound specific, do I want that? No, fine, and they can walk away.

Or they can say, you know what, finally someone said something I can get behind, I want a part of that, I wanna join that. We think of applying, we don't think of joining. We need to think of embracing and enrolling and joining. It requires enough information about what you offer to get people to do that. That is the future of talent acquisition. AI is gonna play a part, obviously, and all the technology is gonna play a part. But right now, we are at a arms race of how do I shoot a?

thousand applications in an ATS and the ATS going, how do I defend myself from a thousand applications shot at me? And it's a wonder anybody ever gets hired. But if you're crystal clear on what you offer and what you want, the person who has that and wants that can raise their hand and say, I'm not like everybody else, I want you. And the company can say, I'm not like every other company, this is what I want. And they can make that match. That's what chooseability is all about, making that choice possible.

Joel Cheesman (13:23.499)

So James, you're right about the tsunami of candidates. My question is, we're seeing more and more recruiters, employers saying, you know what, I call a candidate and they ask me, who are you again? What job was this? In a world where the application process is automated and the initial interviewing process is automated, how should both sides even think about branding at this point?

James Ellis (13:36.832)

Exactly.

James Ellis (13:50.68)

Yeah, branding is a loaded term. Branding implies here's a logo, here's a da-da-da-da-da, it's a phrasing, it's a jingle, that's not branding. That is visual and auditory elements of the brand. The brand is what do you stand for and what do you offer? How are you different? How are you not like your other competitors? And the more clear you are on what you offer that's different, the more you are remembered, the more you are understood, the more you're like, you're not,

an interchangeable company where I can apply everywhere and say, who are you again? I can say, yeah, I applied to a thousand companies, but you're the one that stood out because you offer this thing or you talk about that thing and no one else does.

Joel Cheesman (14:29.995)

But bots, bots don't care about brand. Well, how are you define it? I would say bots don't give a shit. Now, maybe we'll come to a day where my bot only applies to jobs that are socially conscious and only offer these benefits. We're not there yet. Maybe we will. But no one is caring about brand at the application if they're automating that process. When you say someone applies to a thousand jobs, it's that person's robot or their agent applying to those jobs.

James Ellis (14:34.499)

That's her.

James Ellis (14:41.422)

I wish,

James Ellis (14:58.04)

Yep. yeah.

Joel Cheesman (15:00.245)

So to me, at what point does brand or the promise or who we are matter? And does it still matter the way that it used to? Should companies think differently about it?

James Ellis (15:11.438)

Yeah, so think about the candidate who applies to 1,000 companies. They're applying the same application to 1,000 companies, which means if there's 1,000 people applying to that company, if they're using these bots, if they're using this technology, they sound very much the same. I'm on Reddit, Recruiter Hell, and rate my resume all day long, looking at these people going, I'm qualified, why am I not getting the call? And you're like, yeah, you're qualified, but so is 1,000 other people.

You are stuck in this space that says, you are like everyone else. So if I have to pick one who's like everybody else, it's a lottery. It's a one in a hundred, one in a thousand shot. But if you're the candidate and saying, if everybody else, this is again, zigging when everybody's zagging, if everybody else is just pounding and it's all about tonnage of applications, I can say, these are the three companies I know something about who I'm interested in. Therefore I can say something that no one else can say about what I offer.

and I am going to inherently stand out. And even if you're using AI tools to do stack ranking and sorting to kind of identify and float the best people up, someone who says something different stands out. AI is primarily pattern recognition. It's all about pattern matching. It's understanding that, well, gosh, everybody else looks this way because everybody used AI to write their resume in the exact same way with similar prompts and similar formats and similar language. But here's three candidates who are saying something different who are also qualified, but they seem to be

talking about things that I haven't considered yet, they float to the top of the pile. And so by understanding that what the company offers and what they value, you can speak in those terms and that's how you get the job. And you go to social consciousness, which is I think is a small way of looking at brand, but it's also a very easy way to look at the brand, because everybody kind of gets that. And if you're trying to apply to the World Wildlife Federation,

as a developer, because they hire developers, everybody does, you don't apply in the same way that you apply to Facebook and Google and OpenAI and all these other companies. Because if you do, you get bundled up and they qualified, but who cares? But if you're one of the handful of people who say, look, I spent the last two years building apps to help me save this polar bear, to help me do these things, let me show you examples, and it's tied to what the company clearly cares about, you float up to the top. That's how you're going to win. It's not

Joel Cheesman (17:09.227)

Mm-hmm.

James Ellis (17:26.232)

You know, we're all old enough to remember the days when being qualified meant that you probably got a phone call. Those days are long, long gone. Everybody's qualified. The ATSs are filled to the brim of qualified candidates, but they're all getting friend-zoned. They're all getting stuck in this messy middle of everybody sounds the same. They're all great. And I guess I'd be fine with them, but I'm not in love with any of them. It's the handful on the edge. I was looking into the camera, sirs. I could have been talking about anyone and certainly not myself ever.

Joel Cheesman (17:40.491)

You

Chad Sowash (17:45.823)

Why do you look in at Joe when you say that? That's not nice. That's not nice.

Joel Cheesman (17:55.241)

I brought my A game to James and he just zoned me. Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's true.

James Ellis (17:58.306)

Yeah, that's what I did. But that's the game. You want to stand out. Now, I think that the underlying challenge here is that recruiting has been put in this box to say, the ATS makes decisions. The ATS tells you how to make, you know, how the process should work. You have to do the following steps. The recruiter is pushing papers inside the ATSs. And the better the ATSs get, the less freedom and power and authority and value the recruiter can bring. And recruiters who've

allowed that to happen. It's frog in a pot of water. They've allowed themselves to kind of be dominated and driven by the ATS and the technology where they are just kind of connecting the dots between the technology. And that's the fastest way to get automated out of existence by sounding and looking the same. And that's why recruit, all recruiters kind of sound the same and they have the same processes because it's all ATS and tech driven. The handful of companies who go, you know what, if we want to better people, interesting people, engaged people, we can't do it the same way everybody else does. We have to break.

process the cycle of the systems and we have to say something different, we have to show something different so that people can say finally, a toehold on which I can speak my particular language. It is not an easy leap, but it is where we need to be.

Chad Sowash (19:07.209)

So talk about being choosable and being the company brand being choosable. There are a lot of CEOs that are out there at hell, a of CHROs and VPs of talent acquisition. There's no choice. Demand is low. Supply is high. We are choosing you. You are not choosing us. So at this point, and I know the cycles change, but the thing that really gets, I mean, really bothers me

is that that's generally the idea. And we've talked to companies around, know, this to me, it feels like disposable talent that, we can just throw these guys. We'll find another one. It's not a big deal. And when we start looking at humans, I mean, as in organizations as a machine, how the fuck are we going to win? I mean, because it just it doesn't feel like there's any brand winning. And to be quite frank, it doesn't.

James Ellis (19:42.819)

Yes.

James Ellis (19:46.328)

Yes, yes.

James Ellis (19:56.078)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chad Sowash (20:03.369)

feel like they really care.

James Ellis (20:05.112)

Yeah, the funny thing is when companies start to talk about, there's a huge demand for our jobs and we have a handful of jobs, we have all the power. What do they do? They lower the salaries. Because to them, every candidate who's qualified is the same. And that's not even remotely true. If a CEO said, OK, we're getting a new CFO, here's 200 CFO applicants and they're all kind of the same, pick one. They would never do that. They would always look for some specific quality. They would always dive deeper because this is someone they have to work.

Chad Sowash (20:12.915)

Yeah. Yeah.

Chad Sowash (20:19.775)

Mm-hmm.

James Ellis (20:33.342)

side by side with for the next three to five years, they better like them, they better engage with them, they better have the same approach to the work they do, they better have the same kind of commitment to this work. They have to have something far more than what's sitting on their resume. Now, the fact that we don't apply that same mentality to every hire is a function of treating your employees like crap and saying every employee is just a checkbox, that they're just a cog in a very large machine. And the more you say, because there's a high demand,

we have all the supply, you can push salaries down, you can make demands and that's fine. But the truth is people aren't interchangeable. The value they bring is not interchangeable. Johnny Ives was a developer, I'm sorry, designer for a very long time. He needed to find a spot where his particular genius would be appreciated and fed and they can turn that into Apple. If they hired some other qualified developer, would Apple be Apple? No. If Johnny Ives went to another company, would he be appreciated and given the room to do that?

No, businesses grow on the backs of quality talent meeting places where that talent can thrive. And people being, I don't know, messy people as they are, they aren't the same. They don't thrive in the same way. They don't thrive in the same soil. They don't need the same things. They want specific things. And the more you're clear about what you offer, the more you find that people can say, finally, the place where I can be a 10X player instead of yet another. And I think, yes.

Businesses are you the more their shareholder driven and they're more their shareholder value driven the more they're gonna say How do I lower costs? How do I lower salaries all that stuff? It's the companies who say That person is gonna help us grow Hire them regardless of salary. Those are the companies who do grow who really understand where that growth comes from

Joel Cheesman (22:19.755)

Yep. James, before, pushing record, talked about companies who start podcasts. this isn't about podcasts, but it is about companies trying to figure out how do we market ourselves as an employer of choice, if you will. what are your thoughts on social media and specific or how employers should look at it? And specifically we're seeing more companies embrace influencers, people with a built in audience that can promote their opportunities or their company. How do you look at that?

phenomenon and how should companies sort of maybe be careful of stepping into that area.

James Ellis (22:54.67)

Yeah, and we've seen kind of over the last 10 years this world of the career site was all right. We all remember you put all your information in the career site basket and you know if you've ever been in the room where the career sites get built you understand that it's brutal like there's 17 people too many in the room and someone who has no idea who hasn't had to apply for job in 17 years it's bad it's bad yeah when the vice president of who the hell cares says I like that color blue and they get paid three times what you do guess what you're gonna get that color.

Joel Cheesman (23:12.459)

Yeah, don't watch the sausage getting made, kids. It's not pretty.

Chad Sowash (23:23.251)

Mm-hmm.

James Ellis (23:23.564)

And so when you push the career site out, it is not a launch. It is a birth. It is a gestation. It is painful. There is screaming. Doctors are involved. It is bad news. And you never want to touch it again, which means a career site is really a collaboration, but a compromise on a compromise on a compromise on a compromise. It is what everybody could finally agree on. Social media was amazing because it allowed us to say, OK, you made those decisions three years ago when you launched that site. What's happening today? How are you thinking about things today or this week or this month?

what's going on. Now, is it all about what the CFO, to what conference they're going to or what they're attending? I don't care about that. But truly, you get more understanding what the company is up to through social media channels because instead of having 17 people in a room deciding what the compromise should be, you get some 23-year-old kid who talked to somebody on the Recruiter and Employer Branding Team, wrote a post, had to push it through legal, and that's all the barriers they had to get. And so you get more of the beating heart of what the company's thinking about, caring about doing, which is really valuable.

Well, we're all addicted to that now. What's the next step? Let's have people talking about it. Let's pay people to engage to talk about what that is. I think the leap to influencers is inevitable, but it's still fraught because instead of saying, I'm going to pay money for my ad to be on 20,000 websites and they're all kind of the same websites. Now the person is carrying my banner. I need to know more about that person. I need to know about their audience and what they care about, what they're motivated by. So should Salesforce

bring Mr. Beast in to be an influencer for Salesforce jobs. I don't know that the average Mr. Beast watcher is the average Salesforce killer employee. I don't know that Venn diagram has any overlap whatsoever.

Chad Sowash (25:06.365)

They might be one day, but they're just 12 right now. Yeah.

James Ellis (25:08.82)

Exactly. one day, hey, Salesforce can make a long plan, right? They have a long horizon. They ain't going anywhere anytime soon. But if you are getting into this, you need to kind of pick people who epitomize what you care about. Now, if you don't know what you stand for and you don't look and sound like everybody else, good luck. Good luck picking the person who's going to align with what your company cares about. And if you don't have that, you're just going to pick the most famous person you can afford. And you're going to get some people who do not align with what your

company cares about or what your candidates want you to care about. You will end up in the same way when we went to performance marketing, where it's all about how do you push ads all over the place in programmatic media. You had ads showing up on some very interesting right wing and pornographic and gun focused places. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, there's that. There's that. let's hope they leave a lot of places.

Joel Cheesman (25:57.033)

nazi biker bars jobs.com. Yeah.

Chad Sowash (25:57.76)

We call it X, yes. Which we'll be leaving France probably sometime soon.

James Ellis (26:08.984)

But now, and that was fine, you had people who were paid to kind of oversee that and were supposed to pull that off when they saw it. Influencers have their own audience and that audience is their own thing and they have less rules and less applies. So the requirements on how you choose an influencer to help promote and talk about not the job, but what you care about as a company is a match made in heaven when it's done right.

but I can see it being an absolute, a subject for you guys to talk about in the next couple of months on a future episode when it goes absolutely brutally wrong.

Chad Sowash (26:43.825)

I think it's interesting because I mean, you know, we we're an explicit podcast and we have companies coming to us all the time wanting us to be somewhat the podcast face of their of their organization, which is incredibly scary. But, you know, we have close to, I think, sixteen hundred episodes that are out there, so they know what they're getting. And in this case, you take a look at these these influencers like the Mr. Beasts and what have you. You know, I.

James Ellis (27:06.082)

Exactly.

Chad Sowash (27:13.021)

I think much like most CHROs and VPs of TA, they have to do their due diligence, but they don't do it now.

James Ellis (27:23.436)

which is why they hire agencies to do all that heavy lifting for them. And you know what? I have a love-hate relationship with agencies. I have a complicated relationship with what they do and how they do it. And putting that much trust in who they choose for your mouthpiece and who is going to influence on your behalf is a big swing.

Chad Sowash (27:26.622)

Yeah.

Chad Sowash (27:34.281)

Uh-huh.

Chad Sowash (27:42.484)

Who is the best choice though? mean, because we've seen that employee driven content with some of the platforms that are actually out there, like the job pixels that Joel and I are both advisors on. That, mean, from my standpoint, if you can get employees who are genuinely happy and they're talking good things, I mean, is that not the first place to go?

James Ellis (27:49.198)

Yep.

James Ellis (28:06.766)

Absolutely, not even a question. The thing is is that to get value out of it, you can't treat them like we've been treating them for so long. Here's your three bullet points. Repeat these. Copy, paste them into your LinkedIn. Go. And at the same time, yeah, exactly. Hold the newspaper so we can prove what day it is. And it doesn't look like a hostage video at all, I swear. At the same time, should be saying, if we're going to leverage those people, we should be encouraging them to be on social media. How many companies say you're not allowed to be on social media, but here we want you to promote us on social media?

Chad Sowash (28:18.163)

Read this, read this.

James Ellis (28:36.598)

So I don't see how that works. I look, social media is complicated and it gets more complicated as people like Alon involve themselves into this process as we sell TikTok to whoever can buy it this week and whoever has access to that data this week. It's a messy, messy process, but it certainly beats not being out there and not having a voice out there. Cause in the end, the game of recruiting is not as transactional as we pretend it is. When I'm on Indeed or LinkedIn or a job board and I see a

Thousand roles and let's be fair. There's still a lot of jobs open out there. No matter how ugly the economy is There's still a lot of choices out there. Why on earth am I clicking your particular logo over a thousand others? It's because I have heard some thing about you. That's positive that I liked I have some sort of mental positive association I'm clicking on that the game is not by influencers use my team as advocates and suddenly I get a million applicants. It's about

creating as much positive understanding about what we stand for, what we offer, what people like us for, so that down the road, they're more likely to click, they're more likely to show up to interviews, they're more likely to say yes to the offers.

Joel Cheesman (29:44.726)

James, advertising for a long time and probably still today is sort of a game of targeting. And we're hearing more about resume Botox and people trying to look younger than they really are. There's sort of all these issues and we talked about politics a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, get Chad's Botox doc number in Portugal if you ever need to go. But like politics,

James Ellis (29:58.68)

Hold on, hold on, just, what? What do mean? What do mean? Just gonna pull that back. No wrinkles.

James Ellis (30:09.122)

Mail order, please.

Joel Cheesman (30:12.679)

Used to say like, okay, well, we need the gay vote. So the gays hang out here. So put your ad here and they'll see it. And that seems to be gone now. Content is for everybody, right? It's either good or it isn't. And, targeting becomes much more difficult. How should companies look at brand in a world where, you know, we can't just go to the colleges and give them a college kid brand and then go to this and give them that brand and advertise on this site for those people. Like it's more holistic now.

agree, disagree, and if so, how should companies think about that?

James Ellis (30:45.644)

No, a thousand percent agree, which is why I do think the brand idea, the thing that you offer is so critical because it comes that tent pole around which everything else you talk about is structured. If you are Facebook, you do not say, come join us, we're chill. No one would ever believe that. They are the move fast and break things. No one goes to say, hey, work at Goldman Sachs. We believe in saving the environment. I'm sorry, say that again? Say that louder into this microphone because I don't believe a word you said. There is a thing they stand for.

And everybody believes that they stand for that. And so suddenly, the more they talk about it, the more it finds its own audiences. The people who want that are fed that because we have the algorithms now, which as much as I beat up on TikTok, the algorithms are not bad in terms of understanding. The Amazon one is still bad. The LinkedIn one is still weird. But the TikTok one, they have nailed something. Whatever data science magic, they have nailed that. They are feeding me more of what I want. And so if I like a thing, they're gonna give me more of that thing. And so suddenly all this,

targeting and demographics and God help us persona building suddenly seems very old fashioned. What happens is if you say something specific and interesting about what you care about that is different from what everybody else is talking about, it gets shared to people who want to hear that. Which means it's critical to not just say, we're a great company, we have a great culture, look at our award, we're a family, all that other crap, but instead to say what we offer is maximum autonomy.

Joel Cheesman (31:59.734)

Mm-hmm.

James Ellis (32:09.964)

What we offer is collaboration. What we offer is a mission that you can't get anywhere else. What we offer is the access to clients in a certain space that you're never gonna have access again, which is gonna help you grow your platform, grow your resume and all that weather stuff. Say that, understand what your company truly offers. And suddenly the door opens in terms of what you can say about that. You can allow every one of your employees and every one of your influence to say, we stand for this idea. What does that mean in your world? So suddenly they're fragmenting and localizing that message of,

empowerment or autonomy or collaboration, whatever it is, to developers and program managers and nurses and all these other sub sub sub sub niche audiences. And suddenly everybody else sounds like wallpaper paste and you sound interesting and I'm going to follow you. And the algorithm keeps going, wow, they keep watching this video. I'm going to give them more. And that's where you win. It is about standing for something in a world where everybody, the technology, the ad platforms are all about and focused on how do I show you total number of clicks?

In the same way, the total number of applications is not a metric for recruiting. Total number of views, total number of clicks is not a metric for engagement and reach and power and value and influence. What matters is, the people you actually one day want to engage with, the people who care about what you have to say, are they engaged? That's your win. And you can ride that out for a very, very long

Chad Sowash (33:28.703)

And everybody, you'd better be engaged right now because that is James Ellis and the book is becoming chooseable. Where can we find this book?

James Ellis (33:37.986)

You can find this on Amazon worldwide.

Chad Sowash (33:40.945)

it does it come with crayons because that's the only way Joel is going to.

Joel Cheesman (33:43.083)

Did they say Amazon worldwide?

James Ellis (33:43.502)

There's a big, I mean, there's a coloring section. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Boats and whatever. Yeah, see, there's coloring spots. It's fine. You can work it through it. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman (33:47.883)

Right next to the prestige worldwide office building, I think.

Chad Sowash (33:50.015)

See?

See? See, you got to get some crayons. be good. Get the 64 box, though, because you want all the choices.

James Ellis (34:00.279)

absolutely, really. Show your artistic value there.

Joel Cheesman (34:01.196)

Love it, love it. The world is a vampire, Chad. That's another one in the can. We out.

Chad Sowash (34:07.772)

We out.