There are few things in business more absurd than wanting extraordinary people while presenting your company like a beige filing cabinet with a benefits package.
And yet, that is exactly what many organizations do.
They say they want A and A-plus talent. They say people are their greatest asset. They say growth matters, innovation matters, speed matters, culture matters, leadership matters. Then they roll out a recruiting page that sounds like it was written by three tired lawyers, a suspicious compliance team, and somebody’s least inspired intern using a job description from 2009.
It is no wonder so many companies struggle to hire well.
That is what made my conversation with James Ellis so useful. James is the principal of Employer Brand Labs, a bestselling author, and one of the sharpest voices in talent strategy. He helps companies like Webflow, Roku, and ASICS unlock growth by rethinking who they hire and how they keep them. And what I appreciate most is this: he does not think like traditional HR. He thinks like a business leader who understands that people are not some support function floating politely around the edges of the company.
People are the engine.
They come up with the ideas.
They build the ideas.
They sell the ideas.
They service the ideas.
They invoice for the ideas.
They improve the ideas.
In other words, every meaningful outcome in your company is made real by people.
So if better people increase the odds of better business outcomes—and they absolutely do—then it follows that better hiring is not an administrative function. It is a strategic growth function.
That is the drum James is banging, and frankly, more executives need to hear it.
If You Hire Great People, Your Company Grows
This should not be controversial, but apparently it still is in some rooms.
James said it clearly: if you hire A and A-plus caliber talent—people with more skills, more experience, more leadership, more perspective—you dramatically improve the odds that your company will grow.
Not guarantee it.
But improve the odds exponentially.
That distinction matters.
Because there is a strange tendency in business to act as though hiring is operationally important but strategically secondary. Companies will spend extraordinary amounts of time obsessing over revenue models, go-to-market strategies, product roadmaps, AI tools, pricing structures, and process efficiencies. All of that has value. But then they approach talent acquisition with the strategic depth of a vending machine.
Post the job.
Wait for applicants.
Pick somebody.
Move on.
That may have worked in 1987. It is not 1987.
Today, companies are competing in a crowded, noisy, algorithm-infested talent market where everyone says they are innovative, everyone says they care about people, and everyone thinks their values page is somehow special because it includes words like integrity, collaboration, and excellence.
Please.
Those words are table stakes at best and wallpaper at worst.
When every company sounds good, every company starts sounding the same. And when every company sounds the same, the candidates you most want have no compelling reason to choose you.
That is not a talent shortage problem.
That is a differentiation problem.
Most Recruiting Is Built on the Wrong Goal
One of the smartest shifts James offered in our conversation is this: the goal is not to make your company look good.
That line should be printed and handed to every executive team.
Because most recruiting systems are still built around the assumption that if we make the company sound attractive enough, people will apply. And yes, on the surface that sounds logical. But when every organization uses that same playbook, the result is a sea of polished sameness.
The career site looks decent.
The job post has been run through AI so it sort of sounds human.
The values page says the approved corporate things.
The outreach message is standard LinkedIn boilerplate.
The interview questions have not changed since the earth cooled.
And then companies wonder why recruiting feels harder than it should.
James’s point is that “looking good” is no longer the advantage. We have all reached a baseline where most companies can achieve a minimally acceptable level of presentability. The real opportunity is not to look good. It is to understand and communicate your differentiated value as an employer.
How are you actually different?
Not better in some vague way.
Different.
How is your company not like Goldman Sachs, Disney, Boeing, or the thousands of others fishing in the same talent waters? What is true about your company that would matter to the right candidate and repel the wrong one?
That is where the work begins.
Better Recruiting Is About Better Fit, Not More Volume
Another lazy business assumption that needs to die is the idea that more applicants equals better hiring.
No.
More applicants often means more noise.
James made this point beautifully. Recruiters do not need more applications. In many cases, they are already drowning. Hundreds. Thousands. AI-assisted application spam flooding applicant tracking systems with more volume than value. The haystack is getting bigger, but that does not mean it contains more needles.
The goal is not one thousand applicants.
The goal is two exceptional ones:
- one you hire immediately because they are exactly right
- one you almost wish you could hire too because they are nearly as strong
That is a radically different way of thinking, and it changes everything.
Once you stop optimizing for application volume, you can start optimizing for quality, alignment, and time to value. And that last part matters enormously, because James also challenged another stale metric: time to fill.
Time to fill is an administrative metric.
Time to productivity is a business metric.
Time to value is a leadership metric.
That is where executives need to shift their focus.
The purpose of hiring is not to complete a staffing transaction quickly. The purpose is to bring in people who create value faster, better, and more sustainably.
That is not HR language.
That is business language.
The Employer Brand Is the Beginning of the Employee Experience
One of the things I said during the conversation is that this should be treated like the beginning of the employee journey, and James took it even further. He made the case that recruiting should be approached with the same thoughtfulness organizations bring to customer experience.
He is right.
If your customer journey is curated, strategic, intentional, and emotionally aware, why would your candidate experience be lazy, generic, and stuck in 1992?
A potential employee is meeting your brand before they ever sit in a chair at your company. The signals you send in your career site, your job descriptions, your outreach, your interview process, and your follow-up all tell a story about who you are.
And right now, too many companies are telling a boring story.
Worse, they are telling an untrustworthy story. Corporate language has become so standardized, so polished, and so drained of specificity that candidates often hear it the way adults hear the teacher in Charlie Brown: noise without meaning.
That is why proof matters.
Not claims.
Proof.
The Glassdoor Story That Changed the Narrative
James shared a fantastic example of this with a company that repeatedly received brutal Glassdoor reviews. The message was consistent: this place is chaotic, the inmates are running the asylum, nobody knows what is going on, there is no process, no structure, no clear reporting, and it is a nightmare.
Now, many companies would panic and treat those reviews as purely damaging.
James did something smarter.
He reframed the complaint through the lens of differentiated value. Instead of pretending the criticism was false, he responded by translating the underlying reality:
This company offers extraordinary autonomy. It hires people to tell leadership what to do, not the other way around. It is a place for self-directed builders, not for people who want rigid instruction and carefully controlled process. That level of autonomy is not for everyone, and that is okay.
That is a strategic move.
He did not turn a one-star review into a five-star review. He turned a generic negative into a specific signal. Suddenly, the company was no longer a random chaos machine. It was a place for a certain type of person to thrive.
That changes the math.
The wrong candidates opt out.
The right candidates lean in.
And that is exactly what great employer branding should do. It should not try to appeal to everybody. It should create magnetic clarity for the people who fit.
Not Every Company Should Be for Everyone
This is one of the biggest mindset shifts executives need to make: the more you are truly yourself as an employer, the less you are for everyone.
And that is not a problem. That is the point.
James used Goldman Sachs as a great example. When public stories emerged about brutal work hours and miserable conditions, application rates actually went up. Why? Because the story did not damage the employer brand for the people Goldman wanted. It reinforced it.
Nobody chooses Goldman Sachs because they are looking for a tender, nurturing, work-life-balanced cuddle puddle of affirmation.
They go because they want intensity, prestige, and the kind of high-pressure environment that can translate into enormous career capital and financial upside. The article served as proof of the bargain.
That is a hard truth many companies avoid.
If you are trying to be universally appealing, you end up being forgettable.
If you are specific, you become legible.
If you are legible, the right people can find you.
That is how strategic hiring gets easier.
You do not need everyone to love you. You need a qualified pool of people who genuinely want what you offer. If you know how many hires you need in a year, James suggests aiming to have roughly ten times that number in your aligned talent pool.
Not random people.
Not generic interest.
Aligned interest.
That is far more powerful.
The DoorDash Story: Proof Beats Platitudes
Another client story James shared is one I absolutely love because it demonstrates how tiny details can become enormous strategic assets.
He was working with a well-known company in Utah that was beloved locally but had gone through a rebrand under a larger umbrella entity. Suddenly, the employer identity had become blurry. In early conversations, all he heard was the usual bland nonsense: we are a great place to work, we care about each other, we are like a family.
Every executive has heard this language.
Every candidate has heard it too.
It means almost nothing.
Then someone casually mentioned that when they had gotten sick, coworkers DoorDashed them food.
Now we are getting somewhere.
That is not a slogan. That is evidence.
James immediately recognized that as a proof point for how the company actually cares for its people. Not through a mural in the break room. Not through a values slide in orientation. Through behavior. Through money spent. Through tangible action.
And once you identify a proof point like that, it opens up an entirely different way of recruiting.
Now the company can ask:
- how much did we spend on DoorDash last year for employees who were sick or struggling?
- where else do we have evidence of care in action?
- what stories, messages, headlines, and campaign ideas can emerge from that truth?
Instead of saying “we care about our people,” they can show what that means.
That is the difference between a claim and a brand.
Recruiters Have Been Asked to Win Without Tools
One of the most important and generous observations James made was about recruiters themselves.
He loves recruiters, and so do I, but let’s be honest: many have inherited outdated models. They were trained by other recruiters who were trained by other recruiters, and the chain of thinking goes back decades. They are often expected to compete in a modern talent market using vestigial strategies that no longer serve them.
That is not a recruiter problem alone.
It is a leadership problem.
If executives want better hiring outcomes, they have to stop treating recruiters like order takers with LinkedIn licenses. Recruiters need proof points, stories, differentiated messaging, strategic clarity, and tools that help them present the organization in a way that candidates can believe.
Without that, they are often reduced to the perception of used-car salespeople: “Hey, have I got a job for you.”
That is not fair to them, and it is not useful to the business.
James’s work gives recruiters substance. It arms them with the narrative and evidence they need to speak credibly, specifically, and persuasively about why the company matters.
That makes them stronger.
And stronger recruiters help create stronger companies.
What Business Executives Should Learn from James Ellis’s Journey
James Ellis’s journey is not just about employer branding. It is about a larger business truth that too many leaders still underestimate:
The way you hire determines the future shape of your company.
If you hire thoughtfully, strategically, and distinctively, you improve your odds of growth. If you hire lazily, generically, and without self-awareness, you make growth harder than it needs to be.
This is not about making the career page prettier.
It is not about adding more perks to a bulleted list.
It is not about manufacturing fake culture for public consumption.
It is about understanding what is true, specific, and differentiated about your company as an employer, then proving it in ways that attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.
For business executives, the lessons are clear:
- great hiring is a growth strategy, not an administrative task
- more applicants do not equal better applicants
- time to productivity and time to value matter more than time to fill
- generic employer messaging is useless in a crowded market
- proof points create trust in ways platitudes never will
- being more specific makes you more attractive to the right talent
- recruiters need better tools, not just more pressure
Most of all, James’s story is a reminder that if people are the engine of success, then the story you tell to attract those people had better be worthy of them.
Because extraordinary talent is not looking for beige.
It is looking for signal.
It is looking for truth.
It is looking for evidence.
And it is looking for a place where what is promised actually shows up in practice.
That is how companies stop hiring like it is 1987.
And that is how they start building a future worth recruiting for.
Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network
Watch the episode: DI 166 Rethinking Recruitment: Strategies for Success
Check our website: LcubedConsulting.com
This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.
