Why Employer Content Matters More Than Job Posts

Lance Christensen (00:00.078)
I think trust is a huge factor in TA now because of technology, because of transparency. Candidates are able to make a much more educated decision when they're finally deciding to work for a company.

Exactly. It's 2025. People will go on Reddit. They will go on Glassdoor. They will go on TikTok, LinkedIn, and then you find the skeletons.

Most companies ignore Reddit Entirely, which I think is a huge mistake. Do the research to find out what they think of it before they ever even apply.

How should companies think about content as part of their targeting strategy, not just their awareness strategy?

when companies take the approach of trying to play it safe when it comes to content, they're just not seeing the big picture.

Rhona Pierce (00:46.294)
In a world full of AI noise and over-polished employer branding, candidates don't trust job posts anymore. They trust signals. And few people understand those signals better than Lance Christensen. With 36 years in the recruiting industry, he's seen exactly how companies repel the right people and attract the wrong ones. Today, we're digging into why candidates make decisions long before they apply and how to stop catfishing your own talent. Lance, welcome to Workfluencer.

Yeah, it's great to be on.

Amazing. So for those who haven't met you yet, can you share a bit about who you are and what you do best?

Well, I have been in the talent acquisition space for, like you said, over 36 years. Made my first hires as a manager in the restaurant industry. And then went off into operations and transportation and ultimately ended up becoming a staffing and recruiting leader and then a company founder on that side of the house and been in advertising ever since.

Amazing. you've seen a lot because 36 years in this industry where everything changes every day, you've seen a lot. You've watched how talent makes decisions. What's actually changed about how candidates decide who to trust?

Lance Christensen (02:08.75)
Well, I trust is a huge factor in TA now because of technology, because of transparency. Culturally, we have access to so much more information and so much more knowledge. It's not like the olden days where you would just drive past a business and they had a nice little help wanted sign in the window and you walked in, hands and accepted a job. Sadly, those days are long gone.

to the benefit of the technology, now we have the ability to know exactly what you're getting involved with and what companies stand for and the leaders that are behind them. And candidates are able to make a much more educated decision when they're finally deciding to work for a company. They're not just working for the company, they're working for what it stands for and the leaders that are behind it. And it's more complicated.

But honestly, I think in the big picture, I think it's easier for the right employees to work for the companies that they're most suited for to be successful.

I mean, and it makes sense with all the information that we have at our fingertips and how everything has changed, that candidates are leaning more on these things that they can see versus what we say. So I want to talk a bit about something that I'm calling employer brand catfishing, which is when the content says one thing, but the reality when you hit that job is says a totally different thing. How do you think companies are accidentally catfishing candidates?

There's a couple of different ways that they're doing it. mean, part of it is the way that you advertise your EVP, your employment value proposition. There's a reason for somebody to come and accept a job. And if that reason is not genuine and accurate and true, again, yes, you're catfishing. You can advertise something

Lance Christensen (04:14.226)
as being on sale and you get in there and it's regular price.

You were were you were lied to. mean, honestly, people people lie to get the results that they want. Sadly, that that happens in recruiting. You advertise a job is having a certain level of flexibility and autonomy and you get in there and it's the exact opposite. Yeah, it's it's sad that that would occur, but there's ways to work around that.

I mean, honestly, there are companies that have horribly toxic cultures and then you read their job advertisement and it does not fit what you hear about those employers.

You just have to do your homework.

How do you think? Because I am of the thought that most people, and I'm going to say most people that advertise something in a job ad and it's not the reality, aren't doing it on purpose. They don't have this plan and they want to do it, but they also don't want to or can't write.

Rhona Pierce (05:31.106)
this is a toxic place to come and work at. mean, that would get you fired, right? How can recruiters or EB folks or recruitment marketing folks send those signals to candidates without flat out saying this is a toxic workplace?

No, I think the important thing to do is anything that goes in print, anything that gets published needs to be honest. I mean, we have to have to own who we are and what we're about. Now, if deep down inside, you know that your company has got some skeletons in the closet, maybe you don't talk about the skeletons in the closet. That's not lying.

I mean, it's tough. I I feel for the employers that are unwillingly beholden to unscrupulous shareholders or boards of directors that are forcing them to do things that are untoward their employees. That ultimately is what causes these toxic cultures to manifest. It's the leadership that allows it to exist.

How do those companies continue to survive? I mean, they have to continue to hire because, I mean, they're losing people at a good clip. Usually their turnover is atrocious. You have to backfill the positions when the people leave. One thing that I've noticed that is a common thread. If you see job advertisements that read more like a user manual,

Um, there's a reason that there's, there's no color. There's no creativity. There's no, you know, funny term would be chutzpah. There's, there's, there's nothing exciting about that job. It reads like a glossary or a manual. Um, they can't, they won't lie.

Rhona Pierce (07:45.538)
I think it's just left up to candidates to read between the lines. mean, yeah, if your company isn't flexible or like the common one that we see, if the job isn't remote, don't write that it's remote. If you want people to go into the office four days a week, it's not a remote job if I'm going there every day but Friday. So like things like that, like, yeah, you don't have to write, it's toxic, but just write things like.

We value in-person collaboration and that's why we blow up four days a week.

everybody on site. Exactly.

And whoever thinks that's cool is going to be like, yay. And whoever thinks that's not cool is going to be like, hell no, and move on. So it's that type of thing where I think people find a template or go on ChatGPT and write these job ads. And it's like, this doesn't reflect the reality of what's happening in there. It's not flexible. It's not remote work, that type of thing.

JadGP has definitely done us a disservice there. I not to knock them, but too many people are using AI to craft job descriptions. And while they sound interesting, they're not honest. I mean, you can't expect it to know everything about your company. It's funny how you phrase that, you accentuate, I've written on this one, mean, accentuating the positive is important.

Lance Christensen (09:10.646)
know what your positive is. Even those companies that have a high level of toxicity, there's reasons people stay there. It's not just that they're wearing hazmat suits and they're able to survive even though the worst environments. Usually there's something like pay or a certain level of benefits or there's camaraderie. You think about the military and there's units that are deployed in horrible circumstances.

But the camaraderie that the men and women in those units share together makes it worth doing. They're in it together. And sometimes when you get those toxic cultures of companies, there's a good core group of people that they're in it to win no matter what.

If you've made it this far into the episode and you're not subscribed yet, now's a good time. Yeah, and that's what you should focus on, I think, when you advertise it because there's BS at every single company and there's people who tolerate and are okay with that BS. So just write to them.

so that you can attract those people and the people who think that that's not cool. Like I've worked at places where things that I'm like, yeah, that doesn't bother me. That would bother someone else so much. And vice versa, there's things that I've been at companies where everyone's accepting one thing and I'm like, absolutely not. This is not where I want to be. And like that type of thing. So there's always someone who likes it. So I found a pretty old article that you wrote, but that I loved.

where you wrote about how candidates have seven and sometimes 31 touch points before they even apply. In that journey, what signals are candidates actually paying attention to? What separates companies' candidates' trust from the ones that they ghost?

Lance Christensen (11:11.31)
I mean, the reality is it's recruiting is sales. When you're trying to bring somebody into a company, they have to have some level of buy-in. There's a certain point where it changes and that trigger switch engages and they're, hey, I want to go work for that company. I'm in it. How long it takes to get to that really depends on what's presented to them. If you've got this overwhelming

incredible culture and so much positive collateral out there. Maybe it's only going to be two or three touch points. I mean, they see enough compelling information and truth out there and they'll commit to the job right away. If there is a void of information, you just keep searching and searching and searching and digging deeper and you're looking for every little snippet that you can to find out what is this company really about.

I think a lot of that is just because people have been burned so many times over and over again and they hear all these horror stories about friends that have worked at places that just really did not live up to the expectations. And I think people, mean, now that we have the resources, be smarter. I mean, if the material is out there. Now, the important thing is that with all that capability, companies need to be cognizant of that.

You need to know what collateral is out there about your company. What are they saying on different job boards in different reddits, subreddits? I mean, some of these things, they just get kind of crazy. Social media. There's companies that just don't even understand how much information about their organization is out there. And if you don't know what it is, it still exists.

job seekers see it. I mean, there's even physical stuff. When you say that we have an incredible warming culture and that we compensate our employees well and our corporate office is great, and then that job seeker pulls up for an interview and the parking lot's not well maintained, there's litter outside the door, people are walking in and out and they do not look like they're happy individuals. It's not

Lance Christensen (13:38.84)
portraying what you're saying you are. You need to know what people think about you. And that's what like a good EVP process is. An employer brand process is do the research to find out, you know, what the outside looks, looks at your company and thinks, what they see, what they hear, what they think of it before they ever even apply. Also,

Research with your employees. What do your employees think about what their jobs are? Now, some companies try to do that internally and they get HR involved. They try to do surveys and internal surveys with HR. mean, one thing, nobody's ever going to tell us what they feel to HR. It's just never going to happen. We're not at a place culturally or psychologically where we're ready to, you know, unload on HR and tell them exactly how we feel unless we're about ready to put in our notice and then maybe...

You'll show the full spectrum of feelings towards the organization, but you have to do the legwork to understand exactly who you are on the outside, on the inside. When you're starting to craft messaging, when you're starting to do job descriptions and populate a website with a beautiful, robust career page, you have to do the legwork or else you're just setting yourself up for

misconceptions. People are going to think something of you that just it's not true.

Exactly. And that's where you get people feeling that you catfished them. And you really didn't. You just didn't really say, like, you don't, if you don't know what's out there and what people are saying, you can't kind of like address that in your messaging or anything like that. So you're just living in this ideal world. People are still going to be saying the, or are still going to be researching. It's like, I think people really need to understand everyone in recruiting that

Rhona Pierce (15:42.326)
It's 2025, people will go on Reddit, they will go on Glassdoor, they will go on TikTok, LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is becoming a place where people are just saying what they need to say, which I absolutely love. You can't dig your head in the sand because the fact that you don't know about it doesn't negate that it exists. And whether candidates find out before applying and don't apply, which is ideal circumstance.

or they find out towards the end while they're evaluating a job offer. So now everyone's wasted time. And I've done it. Like you get a job offer and it's like, I didn't even know this was in my top job. I wasn't even excited, but okay, I got an offer. Let me go research now. And then you find the skeletons and you're like, I'm not working here. Now everyone's wasted time. So you have to know, and you have to address that, either fix it or figure out how to.

send those signals so that people who aren't cool with that don't come in.

So much has shifted towards passive candidates, which I think is a beautiful thing. And with AI and technology and all the resources that have with that, people are learning about jobs without being job seekers. They're just going about their regular life. And all of a of the middle of nowhere, an email shows up. Hey, what do you think about this opportunity?

That's another thing that becomes a little bit problematic because you're recording people that in many cases know nothing at all about your company. So they haven't even seen a real job description. All they've gotten was an email outreach or a phone call. So when you start thinking about that, the collateral that's out there, the first thing that they're probably going to do is jump in our favorite search engine and find out.

Lance Christensen (17:40.364)
what the results are. And now AI has complicated that because depending on how you have it set, what's going to be spit right back out to you is AI results instead of search engine results.

Does AI search the most? People don't understand this. AI is really based on a lot of what you can find on Reddit. So if people are talking about your company on Reddit and someone searches in AI, because now people don't even use search engines, they're going directly and asking AI, that is a scary spot to be in.

Yeah. I mean, the data that it's scraping the most are things, know, community boards and Wikipedia and it's it's hit in places that you normally would not even think about. I wonder what people think about me on Reddit. Most companies ignore Reddit entirely, which I think is a huge mistake because it is so very popular in the the 20 and 30 somethings.

Yeah, I mean, there could be all kinds of wonderful conversations about your organization that you don't know anything about.

How should companies, knowing that, how should companies think about content as part of their targeting strategy, not just their awareness strategy?

Lance Christensen (19:02.56)
It's interesting when you start thinking about content, most companies do not put enough out there. They just don't. And again, if there is demand for it, the rules of supply and demand, people want to know about your company. And if you're not putting the information out there, guess what? Somebody else will fill the void. And if you don't have any control over what that void is filled with, then, you know,

Shame on you. I think when companies take the approach of trying to play it safe when it comes to content, think they're in a place where they're just not seeing the big picture. There's a place for corporate content that's buttoned up and beautiful and professional, and it's that outward facing for sales and for marketing. And that's important.

because it's telling who you are as an organization and a company and what you make or what you sell. There's the employee side of things and that needs to be out there. Your happy employees need to be out there. Your birthday celebrations, the awards and the ceremonies and the recognition that you have.

the team building activities. If you're not putting that collateral out there and you're not putting enough out there for your corporate image, again, you have a void. So when somebody jumps into a search, what do they find? The only thing they're going to find since you're ignoring the other two, you're finding the social content and the complaints. And yeah.

I mean, if you're not putting the positive information out there, the preponderance is negative. It's going to be the people that quit. It's going to be the people that have a gripe with their managers. It's going to be the people that don't like your culture. People don't stand on a soapbox and talk about how great the company is that they work for very often. Boy, they will get on that soapbox and complain about how horrible it is. Yeah. Does that mean that you're a horrible employer? No. Maybe you're pissed off 2%.

Lance Christensen (21:17.966)
But if that's the only 2 % that people are seeing online, you're screwed. You've got to make sure that that other 98 % has a voice and that that's getting recognized and that's getting published and that's getting picked up by the search engines and by the AI.

Tell us a bit about how you help clients now in the work that you do put out this type of positive, or not positive, we're like realistic messaging. Is that part of what you do in your work?

Yeah, our company has a whole arm that does public relations. And I mean, I would put that more in the public relations category. People don't understand how important public relations is when it comes to bridging that gap between your corporate image and your employee image. What the public sees of you as a company, holistically, envelopes both.

Your public relations nightmare could be a bad product you put out and nobody wants to go work for a company that puts out a bad product. On the flip side, bad PR could happen where you laid off a bunch of people unjustly and it is just turned into an absolute nightmare. And people are not wanting to buy your product because of how you treat your employees.

It's all connected.

Lance Christensen (22:44.664)
To think that the PR as a whole picture isn't relevant to both sides. And there's companies that have no PR budget at all.

Lance Christensen (22:55.598)
That to me just, it blows my mind. I mean, you constantly need to be monitoring the holistic view of your organization. Granted, there needs to be a concentration that's focused on recruiting and there needs to be something on the corporate side. But in the big picture, how those two interplay to get you more customers, more clients, more business and bring in the people that you want to service it. It's an interesting, holistic view that

I am very much a part of this organization.

I love that you mentioned it because so many people think like, well, no, I'm just doing recruitment marketing or I'm just doing recruiting. This is just my lane. I don't know what's happening on the marketing and the consumer on the client side. And same way the client side is thinking like, no, this has nothing to do with it. But it's true. like, I don't want to work somewhere with a crappy product or I don't want to buy from someone who treats their employees bad. Like all these stories of I got laid off.

my email and my everything got shut off while I was on a business trip. People getting this.

I know of a company that let somebody go while they were on maternity leave.

Rhona Pierce (24:11.074)
Yes, unfortunately many, many companies are doing that.

That to me is just wow. Wow. How? How?

It's like, I don't want to be a client of those people. It's like, this is what you're doing. Like, this is what I'm funding. Because as a consumer, I am funding these terrible practices that you're doing that end up costing us as a society more. Because you just keep laying people off. You just keep sending people back into

Now having to rely on taxpayer money, so taxes go up. It's just the whole circle. Like everything is related. So gone are the days and actually they should have never been those days where you thought that what you did in employer branding and what you do in consumer branding is totally separate and one thing wouldn't affect the other. That's not a thing.

They're definitely their own disciplines and you need talented individuals directing both of those because the messaging is different. The creative aspects are different. I've seen too much where folks that are really good at consumer advertising try to do a recruiting campaign and it is just, wow, not good, not good at all. And on the flip side of that, I've seen people

Lance Christensen (25:34.914)
from a recruiting standpoint that are trying to be a little more personal and more emotional. And you try to do a consumer campaign that is for a piece of software. it just, no, you can't. Those are two completely different disciplines.

That is very, very true. And there's very few people who can do the crossover, like I like to call it. It's not impossible, but I personally think as some like when you're doing the role, you shouldn't be doing both at the same time. There should be separate people or separate agencies like doing these things for you or different people. Like if there's an agency that does

both things, it shouldn't always, it shouldn't be the same person at the agency again, it's different people, different departments doing that type of thing.

Our company is structured that way. Our recruiting division is nothing but people specializing in recruiting. PR is all about PR. It's all about that holistic view. That's why we've been winning a lot of awards in that department. And then the marketing, consumer marketing side, it's again, completely different team, different creative mindset. mean, even our creative people are different on the teams. So the copy is different. The imagery is different. The messaging and the voice.

Again, because the personas are different.

Rhona Pierce (27:06.4)
Exactly, exactly. So let's get a little tactical. If a TA leader is listening and realizes that they've been sending the wrong signals, right? Where do they start? Like, how do they start building those trust signals into their recruiting strategy?

But the most important thing that I've always done when I was a TA leader is make sure that your TA recruiting teams follow through post-hire. The things that you will find out if you just maintain that relationship into the first 90 or 120 days, you get that feedback loop. You're not waiting for HR to give you what they thought the person was unhappy about.

You sold them on the opportunity. If you stay with them to find out how that opportunity turns out, then you get that feedback. Hey, you told me it was going to be like this and it's not. That gives you the ability to really understand where you missed the mark in your messaging and how you interviewed, how you screened, what you spoke to them, what you communicated to them and all the different touch points.

You adjust it so that it's more accurate.

Exactly, because most of the time you're getting that information from the hiring manager and from the hiring team. And maybe they're not aware of what's really happening. But yes, you get that when you talk. I absolutely love that I am team checkpoints after like any recruiting team that I've led has had to

Rhona Pierce (28:49.782)
You do 30, well, first week you check in every day, then you do 30, 60, 90 checkings with people because again, you sold them, you need to get this feedback and this helps you. Because next time that role is open, you can talk to the hiring manager and be like, well, actually, this is what really happens. Let's make sure that we're looking for someone who's okay with this or.

Like even from the level of training, because everyone's always like, we've got a comprehensive training. And then it's like shadow this person for a week and you're trained and that doesn't work for everyone type of thing. that type of I love that advice.

I always think it's kind of interesting the term hiring manager. I mean, we use it inappropriately, I think, at times. Somebody that's heavily invested in an operation or running a team or building and doing stuff, and you, yes, they have to have that role in hiring the talent that's going to be working on their team. But they're not,

professionals at hiring people. They're professionals at whatever it is they're building and doing and operating. There needs to be a level of trust and transparency between those hiring managers and the recruiting folks that are supporting them because there's horrible miscommunications at times where the two just don't talk to each other. And the hiring manager thinks that everything is just perfect.

And the recruiter thinks it's a complete nightmare. Truth is, it's probably somewhere in the middle, but because the two of them don't talk, they don't communicate, they don't share, I mean, it just ends up being a little bit of a nightmare.

Rhona Pierce (30:40.012)
So other than this very great advice of following up with candidates and everything, is there any other way that you can audit what signals you're currently sending in your messaging?

That's where you start getting into doing a full employer brand or just even an EVP study. You can also work with different platforms that will do external surveys and external personas for your candidates, what your candidates are really thinking and viewing. There's lots of different resources. I we have a whole side of the house that does that.

The important thing is to not try to do some of these things internally while it does save money. There's bias within organizations that will never go away. If the person asking the questions is trying to keep their job or trying to convince themselves even that

A horse is a horse. It becomes difficult. mean, you can't have a non-biased view and interview your own client, your own employees or your own prospective employees because, I mean, you have your internal view. What you want to know is what that external view is.

And within departments even, if you're in HR, your view internally of the company is only from your unique perspective. You're standing in this corner of the room and you're trying to find out what the view looks like on the other side of the room. Who knows what's in the middle and what obstructions there are. There could be monitors facing towards one side and not facing towards another. I mean, everybody's perspective is different.

Lance Christensen (32:43.916)
if you're trying to find somebody else's perspective and you are in the

you're probably not the best person to be trying to find that perspective.

I like that. So last one, what's the biggest myth about recruitment advertising or targeting that you wish TA leaders would finally let go of?

Lance Christensen (33:09.346)
Boy, there's a whole lot to unpack there, unfortunately. One misconception, there are advertising agencies that will help you spend your money.

It's just media. You give me X number of dollars, I put the budget towards whatever makes the most sense strategically to spend your money. Then on the execution side of that, there's a whole lot of things that can be done. The right keywords, the right messaging, the right targeting.

once you start getting into behavioral targeting, and there's different things that you could do to make sure that that money is being spent wisely, not just spent. It's easy to post ads. It's not so easy to post ads and hit the exact audience that you want to. The analogy that I've always used is if you are trying to hire, say, an accountant.

and you can advertise to a room filled with accountants, the number of applications you're going to get is pretty good. Now, if you're advertising to a room where there's only two accountants and you're advertising to all the people in the room that are not accountants, your money's being spent poorly. I'm of a mind that your advertising campaigns need to be targeted as effectively as humanly.

possible if they're their branding campaigns, they're not recruitment campaigns. Now, branding campaigns are great. Making sure everybody as a whole knows that you're a great employer. But if you're looking for that accountant, then you need to target accountants. And there's ways to every platform's got different ways that you can creatively target. Even Facebook, which has gotten very difficult.

Lance Christensen (35:15.022)
There's different ways that you can target within each platform that will get you a better ROI. Good agencies know that, bad agencies will just spend your

Very, very good advice. How can listeners connect with you?

Obviously, I'm rather prolific on LinkedIn. They can find me on LinkedIn. They can also shoot us a message. Our website is scgadv.com. Yeah, I mean, I'm not too hard to find. Just Google me. I'm out there.

Amazing. We should talk about how we found, how I met you. was, we were both at breakfast waiting for our hotel room and for hours and hours and hours. And I just got tired of peopling. So I went upstairs and I guess Lance was also, or he wanted a quiet place to have a meeting. And I just was overhearing one of his client meetings and I was just like, this has to be a recruitment person.

This has to be a recruitment advertising person. And in my head, was like, does he work for HR tech company? Does he work for advertising? And I just like, at the end, I was like, I have to ask. So yeah, Lance is not hard to find. He's a hundred percent approachable because I was the random person being like, so what do you do for work after I've overheard your entire meeting?

Lance Christensen (36:40.782)
Yes, I definitely am one of those people that talks to strangers. Yeah, I know we've been warned not to. I don't heed that warning. I talk to anybody and everybody. mean, I'm very passionate about, there's a great job out there for every individual. Let's help people find those jobs.

Yes, I love that. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. This was a great conversation.

It's, I've always enjoyed our conversations and I hope we have plenty more.

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