The Best Employer Branding Practices = The Worst Ways to Engage Talent

Best practices in recruiting and employer branding get treated like gospel, but most of them were never designed to attract great candidates. They were designed to avoid mistakes. That distinction matters, because a rule built to keep you safe is not the same as a rule built to help you win.

A running list of accepted wisdom gets picked apart: say a candidate's name three times, call outside business hours, dress up for interviews, keep every message short, post to LinkedIn only between eight and ten, make video content as snackable as possible, blast job postings to every board available. Each one gets traced back to its real purpose, which is almost never "this works best." It's "this offends no one" or "this is what everyone else does, so no one can blame you for trying it."

Several arguments run through the material:

• Best practices optimize for volume, not fit. A job posting that reaches a thousand applicants is not better than one that reaches the two candidates worth hiring. Recruiting is not a quantity business.
• Posting to LinkedIn during peak hours means competing with everyone else doing the same thing at the same time. Personal data shows top-performing posts going out on a Sunday morning and a Wednesday afternoon, precisely because that's when a specific audience of recruiters is actually paying attention.
• Long-form video outperforms "snackable" content when the goal is converting the right viewer rather than racking up impressions. A four-minute video that only a fraction of viewers finish can do more than a fifteen-second clip everyone half-watches, because the people who stay are the ones who get it.
• Copying and pasting the same job posting across niche boards wastes the chance to speak directly to a specific audience. Knowing who you're writing for, and writing to them as individuals rather than a demographic, beats broad reach every time.
• Historical parallel: Hannibal won at Cannae by refusing to follow the conventional wisdom of putting his strongest soldiers up front. Following the standard formula would have guaranteed defeat against a larger army.

The throughline is that best practice is what people default to when they don't have a strategy. Real strategy requires knowing exactly who you're trying to reach and being willing to look strange, narrow, or unconventional in pursuit of them.