There’s a common assumption out there that communication is just words on a page.
= I write, therefore I communicate (well).
Except… you don’t have high readership and you find most work emails, job ads, or LinkedIn posts fail to generate your desired action (a reply, an application, a comment).
Fun fact: There’s a science behind effective communication [fun + science in 1 sentence]
And at the risk of exposing my true nature and going super geek right now, I’ll explain how communication works (and what that looks like in HR/recruitment).
Communication is the sending **and receiving** of a message. Meaning: how your audience interprets the words you use affects your message delivery. But for many people, they just focus on the sending without considering how it’s received.
Depending on the theory (modern communication exchanges would align better with transactional communication model), the main elements of communication are:
A sender / communicator and their message
A transmitter / encoder
A channel
A decoder
The recipient / audience (their demographic, background, experiences, education, and cultural, social, and relational norms they’re bound by as a result)
And then how that message is fed back to the sender that determines if the message was successful or not (did they respond / take your desired action?)
Shannon & Weaver’s basic Model of Communication for 1:1 exchanges. One-to-many exchanges like via email and social media are better aligned to the Transactional Model where meaning is co-created and continuous (but I wasn’t sure which images are copyright protected!).
Which means successful communication is more than words on a page
This is all important to understand because just because you assemble a few words and send them out onto the interwebs, does not mean the message you have sent will be received and interpreted as you intended.
A very basic example. You may say “We’re going through a restructure”, but depending on the encoder, channel (all of staff email vs. line management in person) and decoder, that message could end up as “We’re going through a restructure tomorrow and many employees will be fired immediately because we’re losing money and we don’t value you as humans” and it may result in chaos and emotional turmoil before anything official is proposed to the contrary.
What gets in the way are things like, connotation, innuendo, and language choice, which may change depending on each recipient’s background and experiences. For example, a 60-year-old woman who was made redundant twice in the previous year may immediately fill with dread and crippling self-doubt that she’s about to lose another job.
A graduate with zero negative history and buckets of youthful optimism might think, “Sheet, that’s exciting. I hope there’s an opportunity for me to move into X role / team so I can work on ABC.”
Common recruitment messaging mistakes
Let’s explore how this shows up in your job ads and recruitment marketing messages. Some possible scenarios could be:
Young tech marketing bro writes a job ad using hyped up masculine coded language that deters women applicants unknowingly (encoder/decoder)
Posting job ads on a job board where your desired candidates aren’t looking, instead they’re reading case studies and/or approaching industry professionals at networking events (channel)
Sharing job ads in text form only when desired candidates absorb info on video / tiktok (channel)
Sharing dull, repetitive, vague messaging on social media that is drowned out by everyone else sharing the same dull, repetitive, vague nonsense (channel/noise)
Using recruitment cliches and jargon that bewilders and deters (what does ‘work hard play hard’ mean for a mother vs a grad, or does ‘hit the ground running’ mean you’ll have no support, that your workload is so unmanageable you’ll burn out within a month based on your previous experience applying for a role asking for the same thing (encoder/decoder)?
Communication can even be affected by the colours and imagery you use.
True story of a time early on in my business where I was in a Facebook group for local small businesses and the admin posted an event graphic inviting us to a panel event covering business financials.
They used a corporate blue flyer with little blue men graphics all over it. It was an all-male panel with a male host. The event was held at Tattersall’s gentlemen’s club.
A man looking at this might think it’s great and inviting.
A young woman looking at this felt isolated and unwelcome, despite their assurances to the contrary.
This is where connotation comes into play and can wreak havoc on your message (connotation: ‘an idea or meaning associated with a word or thing’, depending on a person’s background and experiences).
How connotation influences your recruitment messaging
Some real-life scenarios where your image tells a different story to your words. You must take a shot of tequila for each one that applies:
Claiming you’re a fun, friendly, employee-focused workplace and sharing a heavily scripted employer branding video with wooden deer-in-headlight employees struggling to remember the scripted lines forced upon them which comes across a bit like “We don’t trust our employees to authentically share ‘the message’ so we’re making them.”
Claiming you’re a young and innovative company and using cheesy, smiley everyone-wearing-collared-shirts-pointing-at-scribble-on-a-glass-window with blue hue stock photography that actually says, “We’re a soulless conglomerate that doesn’t celebrate our people.”
Writing overused, vague recruitment rhetoric like “exciting opportunity” to work with a “fantastic team” accompanied by a job ad-description that lists every single potential duty in minute detail that signals the role is not very exciting and is potentially a bit micro-managey with that level of specifics. Where are all the fantastic teammates excited to work in similar roles?
So, why should you care? What happens when your communication fails
Because this is the important bit, the bit you must pay attention to because it’s affecting the quality of your applicant pool and hiring choices.
The consequences of poor communication in recruitment might look like:
the wrong people applying
no one applying
candidates ghosting or last-minute offer reneges because they finally ‘figured you out’
high new hire turnover with similar reasons provided (e.g., I was expecting xyz…)
new hire disengagement because they feel duped or sold a lie and that disengagement spreads like a virus
Let’s not forget… the potential for employee disengagement because you invited them to share their experiences for your recruitment campaign (‘We care about your experiences!’) and then disempowered them by pushing them to recite lines from a corporate script inauthentic to them (‘What you think isn’t as important as what we want you to say’), so they now resent you for not trusting them to share their own experiences, and don’t trust what you say because your script doesn’t match their reality.
Gee whizz. This communicatin’ gig is hard!
How to fix your murky recruitment communication
The number one thing you need to do that every marketer worth their money does, is AUDIENCE RESEARCH. Every successful B2C/B2B marketer and business spends most time here because they know you can’t sell a product (read: job) if you don’t know who you’re selling it to and why they will care.
Remember – what you want to say is not what’s most important here, it’s the message your target audience receives, so they’ll do the thing you want them to do.
So, next time you craft your recruitment content, put yourself into your desired candidate’s shoes and ask;
Why send this message? What do we want our audience to do with it?
How are audiences likely to receive this message based on their background (education, upbringing, work experiences, beliefs, etc)?
What do we need to change to ensure our messaging is more inclusive and appeals to the people most likely to thrive here?
What channel is our target audience spending their time on and are we there?
What language and brand narrative will our audience most resonate with?
If your recruitment communication is falling flat, get in touch to explore how I can help tighten your messaging for candidate connection.