Recruiting is brand marketing

Yes. The short paragraphs were starting to become a device rather than serving the writing. I’d preserve them only where the isolation actually creates timing or emphasis: “Fine. Normal. Okay.” and “Interesting.” Everything else can breathe more naturally.

Six months of silence. Four minutes of hope. Welcome to the 2026 job market.

Six months ago, I applied for a job. I remember putting a lot of effort into the application because it wasn't an easy fit. But it was interesting, and it was absolutely something I could excel at.

I never heard back. Fine. Normal. Okay.

Then yesterday, someone from the company looked at my LinkedIn profile. Interesting.

This morning, I got an invitation to interview. I responded. We scheduled a meeting. I accepted it.

Four minutes later, the meeting was cancelled. They'd received an update on the role and needed to cancel.

Honestly, I mostly laughed. I didn't have time to get my hopes up. I hadn't prepared. I wasn't emotionally invested. I hadn't even had enough time to start imagining myself in the job. So nothing was really lost.

But it did get me thinking about something I've noticed throughout my career as a marketer. Companies put an extraordinary amount of energy into the experience of prospective customers and surprisingly little into the experience of prospective employees.

Maybe I put too much weight on brand and customer experience because I'm a marketer, but I've always thought prospective employees are essentially customers in the recruiting process. You're trying to woo us, too. You want us to believe in your company enough to come work our butts off making it successful. You're asking us to choose you.

Yet recruiting often seems to operate completely outside the kind of thinking we apply to customers.

Applications disappear into black holes. People go through multiple interviews and never hear back. Candidates spend hours on assignments. Jobs get reposted while applicants are waiting for an answer. And, apparently, sometimes an interview has a four-minute shelf life.

I'm not even criticizing what happened to me today. Roles change. Budgets change. Priorities change. The recruiter clearly got information she didn't have when she scheduled the meeting.

What I don't understand is why so few companies seem to think about what happens to all the people on the other side of these interactions.

The person you don't respond to today could work for your competitor tomorrow. They could become a customer. They could be someone you're trying to do business with someday. Or someone might simply ask them what they know about your company.

That's a lot of potentially valuable relationships to treat as disposable.

I've worked with HR teams during my career on employer branding, recruiting materials, job descriptions, job advertising and onboarding. I always liked that work because marketing actually has something useful to contribute. We spend our careers thinking about the people we're trying to reach and what their experience with a company looks like.

But those opportunities have been surprisingly rare. And maybe there's a practical reason for that.

How do you quantify the value of treating the 500 people you didn't hire well?

Recruiters are measured on filling roles. Nobody has a line on a dashboard for the people who walked away thinking a little less of the company.

And yes, perhaps I care more about this right now because I'm one of them. I don't expect the job market to change because another job seeker complained about it on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure we've got that covered.

But if you're asking people to come work their butts off to make your company successful, maybe their experience with your company should matter before you hire them, too.