I hear some version of this sentence constantly:
“Nobody wants to work anymore.”
And every time I hear it, I become just a tiny bit suspicious.
Nobody? Like… nobody?
Millions of Canadians woke up this morning and collectively decided employment was no longer for them?
Seems unlikely.
There are absolutely real labour shortages. There are demographic pressures. There are skills shortages.
There are industries and communities where employers are genuinely fighting over a painfully small pool of qualified people.
But “there’s a labour shortage” has also become a wonderfully convenient explanation for something employers don’t particularly enjoy examining:
Maybe people just don’t want to work for you.
Sorry. (Not sorry.)
But we should at least check.
Candidates have more information than they used to
There was a time when the employer held almost all the information.
You posted a job. The candidate sent a résumé. They tried to impress you. You decided whether they were worthy.
Cute.
That’s not how this works anymore.
Candidates are researching you, too.
They’re reading your website. They’re looking at your employees on LinkedIn. They’re checking Glassdoor. They’re searching Reddit. They’re looking at how long people stay. They’re reading your job postings and wondering why the salary is mysteriously described as “competitive.” They’re asking friends. They’re looking at who leads the organization.
They’re noticing whether your careers page contains twelve paragraphs about your expectations of them and precisely zero information about what they can expect from you.
And now they can ask AI.
The information imbalance is disappearing.
I think that’s a good thing.
You don’t own your employer brand
You own your logo. You own your careers page. You own the photographs of suspiciously happy employees pointing at a laptop.
You do not own your employer brand.
Your employer brand exists in the collective perception people have about what it’s like to work for you.
You can influence that. You can strengthen it. You can communicate it. You cannot simply declare it.
Putting PEOPLE FIRST on a graphic does not, in fact, put people first. People are annoyingly observant like that.
The labour market is a market
This is the part I think employers occasionally forget: employment is an exchange.
You are asking someone to bring you their skills, experience, judgement, effort, time and commitment. In return, they are looking for something too. Money, obviously, but also perhaps stability, flexibility, interesting work, a good manager, opportunities to grow, a sense of purpose, autonomy, belonging, safety, learning or simply the ability to have a life that exists outside of work.
The exact combination is different for everyone. That’s the point.
Your employer brand helps people understand the deal you’re offering and decide whether it’s a deal they want.
And if the deal itself isn’t particularly compelling, no amount of recruitment marketing is going to make that problem disappear.
Before you increase the recruitment budget, figure out why people aren’t choosing you
When recruitment gets difficult, it’s tempting to jump straight to more: more job boards, more ads, more recruiters, more campaigns.
I’d start somewhere else.
Look at what’s actually happening.
Are enough people seeing your opportunities? Are the right people applying? Are candidates dropping out halfway through the process? Are you making offers that aren’t being accepted? Are people joining and leaving again within a year?
Then look inside the organization.
Are your strongest employees referring people they know? What do departing employees say about working there? What keeps your long-term people around? Why did your best employees choose you in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, would they make the same choice today?
Those answers tell you a lot more than simply saying, “The labour market is difficult.”
Occasionally, the answers are uncomfortable.
Good.
Uncomfortable information is usually where the useful work starts.
Sometimes your employer brand isn’t the problem
There is another possibility.
Sometimes you’re actually a very good employer and nobody knows it.
People stay. They like their leaders. They have flexibility. They’re doing interesting work. There are opportunities to learn and grow. Employees genuinely enjoy being part of the organization.
Meanwhile, your careers page looks like it was written in 2009 by someone being paid by the word.
That is a much nicer problem to have.
And it’s fixable.
This is why employer brand work has to deal with both sides of the equation: the employee experience and the way you communicate it.
You need something credible to say.
And then you need to actually say it.
Please don’t solve a culture problem with a recruitment video
This is perhaps my only plea.
If your employees are miserable, please don’t start with employer branding.
Start with why they’re miserable.
If managers are driving good people out, fix management. If compensation is badly out of step with the market, address it. If employees can’t see a future with you, build clearer paths forward. And if your hiring process takes fourteen weeks and seven interviews, I have several questions.
Then once the experience is something you’re comfortable putting your name on, tell the story.
Otherwise, you’re spending money attracting more people into an environment that will eventually damage the very employer brand you’re trying to create.
Not ideal.
Culture is the product. Employer brand is the story.
That’s really what this comes down to.
A strong employer brand exists when the experience inside the organization and the story outside the organization are reasonably close to one another.
That doesn’t mean everything has to be perfect. Candidates aren’t expecting perfection. In fact, employer branding that feels suspiciously perfect can be harder to believe than something honest and human.
People are trying to answer fairly basic questions.
What is this organization actually like? What does it value? What will be expected of me? What can I expect in return? Who will I work with? Can I grow here? Can I be successful here?
Ultimately: Can I see myself here?
That’s the work.
So yes, maybe you really do have a labour shortage.
But before we blame demographics, government, Gen Z, remote work, the education system, or the apparent collapse of civilization because somebody asked whether Friday could be a work-from-home day, there’s one other possibility worth ruling out:
Would you want to work for you?
Start there.
Think your recruitment problem might actually be an employer brand problem?
Let’s find out.
We can look at what candidates are seeing, what employees are actually experiencing, and whether those two stories match.
Sometimes you need a better story.
Sometimes you need to fix what’s underneath the story.
Usually, it’s a bit of both.
Schedule a time with me for a pressure-free chat.
With love,
Erin
