Hiring Is Marketing Too: How to Get Good Applicants to Find You

6 hours ago

5 min read

Every owner we talk to in the Rochester area has some version of the same complaint: nobody good applies anymore. The postings sit up for six weeks. The applications that do come in are half-finished. The two decent candidates ghost the interview.

Here's the reframe that changes everything: hiring for a local business is a marketing problem. You are trying to get a specific kind of person to notice you, trust you, and take an action. That is literally the job description of marketing. And the reason your job posting isn't working is usually the same reason a bad ad doesn't work — it's generic, it's about you instead of them, and it's sitting in a place your ideal person doesn't look.

So let's treat recruiting like a campaign.

Your job posting is an ad. Write it like one.

Most job postings read like a legal document that escaped from an HR binder. "Seeking a motivated, detail-oriented team player to join our fast-paced environment." That sentence has been used ten million times and has never once made a good employee sit up in their chair.

A job posting is a piece of direct response copy. It needs a hook, a promise, proof, and a clear next step. Compare these two openings for the same front-desk role:

Version A: "Seeking a motivated front desk associate for a busy local office. Duties include answering phones, scheduling, and general administrative tasks."
Version B: "You'd be the first voice people hear when they call us — and around here that actually matters. Four-day weeks, no nights, a team that doesn't scream at each other, and a manager who will teach you the business if you want to learn it."

Version B tells a real person what their Tuesday looks like. It also filters — the people who want a big anonymous corporate job self-select out, which is exactly what you want.

Concrete rules we use when we help clients rewrite a posting:

Put the pay range in. Postings with a range get dramatically more qualified applicants, and hiding it just makes people assume the worst.
Describe the schedule in plain English. "Mon-Thu, 8-5, closed weekends" beats "flexible scheduling available."
Lead with what's good about working there, not what you require. Requirements go near the bottom.
Cut every buzzword. Fast-paced, rockstar, family atmosphere, wear many hats — all dead on arrival.
One clear action. "Text this number" or "send a two-sentence email to this address" beats a 40-field application portal every time.

Where you post matters more than how often you post

The big job boards are fine for volume, but they are also where every other business in your zip code is shouting. The candidates you actually want — the ones already employed and quietly unhappy — are not refreshing a job board at 11pm. They're on Instagram and Facebook.

This is why paid social has become one of the best recruiting channels for local businesses. You can put a 15-second video of your actual workplace in front of people within eight miles of your front door, in the age range you want, for a few dollars a day. We've had clients fill roles for less than the cost of one job-board upgrade.

A few notes if you go this route:

Employment ads on Meta are a Special Ad Category, which means limited targeting — no age or gender narrowing, and a wider radius. Plan for that instead of getting surprised by it.
Video of real people in the real building outperforms graphics with a "NOW HIRING" banner. Every time.
Send traffic to a simple page or a text-message conversation, not a career portal that asks for a resume upload on a phone.
Run it continuously at a low budget rather than in panicked bursts when someone quits. Recruiting works like brand marketing: the audience needs to already know you exist when they get fed up with their current job.

Applicants research you the same way customers do

Before anyone applies, they Google you. They read your reviews. They look at your website. They check whether your last social post was three years ago. If a customer would bounce from what they find, an applicant will too — and applicants are harder on you than customers, because they're deciding whether to hand you forty hours a week.

So audit your own footprint with a candidate's eyes:

Do your reviews mention staff by name in a positive way? That's gold. Candidates read those.
Is there any evidence of humans on your website, or just stock photos and a service list?
Does your Google Business Profile show recent photos of the space someone would be working in?
If you have negative reviews about management or wait times, have you responded like an adult? Unanswered angry reviews read as "this place is chaos."

One of the highest-return things a local business can do for recruiting is put three real photos of the team on the website and keep a steady trickle of behind-the-scenes content going. It costs almost nothing and it does double duty — the same content that reassures a nervous new customer reassures a nervous applicant.

Track it like a campaign, because it is one

You would never run ads for six weeks without checking cost per lead. Do the same here. An applicant is a lead. Write down, for each role you've filled in the past year: where the hire came from, how many applications you sorted through, how long the role sat open, and roughly what the vacancy cost you in overtime, lost bookings, or owner hours.

Once you see that a six-week vacancy costs real money, spending a couple hundred dollars on a recruiting campaign stops feeling like an expense and starts looking like the obvious move. Most owners we work with are shocked at how cheap applicant acquisition is compared to customer acquisition — it's often a fraction of the cost, because you're not competing with a dozen advertisers for the same click.

The unglamorous part: speed

Here's the piece nobody wants to hear. Most local businesses lose good candidates not to a better offer but to silence. Someone applies on Tuesday, nobody calls until the following Monday, and by then they've taken something else.

Treat applicants exactly like inbound leads, because the psychology is identical:

Respond within 24 hours, ideally the same day. A text works.
Have a standing interview slot on the calendar so scheduling isn't a five-email negotiation.
Tell people what happens next and when. "You'll hear from me by Friday either way" builds more goodwill than you'd think.
Follow up with the near-misses. The person you didn't hire in March is often the person you desperately need in July.

Bottom line

If you can't find good people, stop treating it as a labor-market problem you can't influence and start treating it as a marketing problem you can. Rewrite the posting like an ad. Put it where your ideal person actually spends time. Make sure your public footprint looks like a place a competent adult would want to work. Then move fast when someone raises their hand.

The same channels that fill your schedule can fill your staff roster. Most owners are just never told that.

If you want help turning your hiring into an actual campaign — job ad copy, a simple landing page, paid social targeting your area — that's the kind of thing we do every week. Head to brummble.com or call us at 585-802-1377 and we'll take a look at what you're working with.