The Law of Fit 🧩🧩🧩 EBH

No employee is an island

How do you talk to your Board, your founder, your CEO, your CMO, or your Head of TA about employer branding and talent strategy? You’ll just have to listen to the latest issue of The Brand Plan (it came out 6 hours ago, so it’s probably still warm).

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The classic model of recruiting is pretty straightforward: post the job in as many places as possible and see who applies. This might be augmented with some sourcing, where you try to promote the job to potential candidates who seem to have the background the hiring manager is looking for.

It’s an approach commonly seen in fishing, where you drag a net through the ocean and see what you get. Sure, you grab some tuna, but you’re also capturing octopus, dolphins, rocks and things that aren’t just useless, but cost you money to manage around. 

Trawling the seafloor only makes sense when you think that every nurse is pretty much the same. That every salesperson is roughly equally effective. That every leader exists within a fairly well-defined band. You can lose a nurse and grab a new nurse's resume from the pile and go about your day.

And when jobs are all about following rules and meeting specifications, that kind of “commoditized talent” makes sense. You wouldn’t search through a bag of nails to get the “best” one, would you? When each one is roughly like another, why bother hunting too hard for something better?

Sadly, that’s not how businesses work anymore. The variance of value is incredibly wide (look at the difference between your best and worst salesperson: in many cases, the difference is measured less in degrees but in orders of magnitude) because jobs aren’t about connecting dots as they are about finding new dots to connect and new ways to connect them. Jobs are more creative, and more complex (especially since anything that could get automated or shipped overseas already has been), requiring people who are willing to take their experience and apply it to a brand-new situation.

Despite more than a decade of begging Talent Acquisition teams to reject “post-and-pray” recruiting models that made sense 40 years ago, it remains the core of how most companies hire.

But “talent” (and that’s a flexible word if ever there was one) is only half of the picture. Do you think Jony Ives would have become the designer of his generation if he worked at Caterpillar? Nothing against CAT, but their appetite for compelling design isn’t the same as Apple’s. 

And I get that that’s a bad example. Frankly, all examples that involve Apple are almost outliers. 

Let’s use a sports metaphor: If you’re the greatest wide receiver in football, how much better would you look if you were paired up with an amazing quarterback who loved to throw it to you? Imagine how much worse your numbers would be with a quarterback who wasn’t as good at passing more than 10 yards.

Or think about yourself. Think about the best job you ever had. Was it the best job because you were amazing? Maybe partly. But were you in a team that supported you the way you liked to be supported? Were you expected to deliver things you could excel at? Were you at a company that valued what you did? 

Didn’t having those things make you perform better? Didn’t they make you happier at work? 

If that job didn’t hire you, but instead hired someone equally skilled but who worked in a different way, who delivered work at a different cadence, who preferred to make blog posts instead of social content, would they be equally happy?

Success at work is a function of the fit between the person, the role, and the company.

And employer branding is a major part of making that fit happen.

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***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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