The fourth Talking Point: sell the truth, all the way to the careers site

Four episodes in and I can finally count them. Progress. And this one had a special guest in more ways than one, because it was our first Talking Point in partnership with Happydance. More on that in a minute.

The subject was storytelling, and specifically the bit that so often goes missing: carrying a brilliant employer brand story all the way from the social post that catches someone's eye to the careers site where they decide whether to apply. Lots of us are great at the first half. Far fewer of us finish the job.

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A massive thank you to Bryan

Bryan Adams. Not the Canadian rock star, as he's very quick to tell you. The lesser known one, but the one you want for this conversation. (Though feel free to ask me my 'other Bryan Adams' anecdote, anytime). Bryan is CEO and founder of Happydance, the careers site people, and author of Sell the Truth, a five-step storytelling framework for leadership and culture. Before that he ran PH Creative for 20 years, building employer brands for Apple, American Airlines and Nike. He's also the man behind Give and Get, which plenty of you will have on your shelves.

He called talking employer branding his happy place, and it showed. Generous, sharp, and full of things you can use tomorrow morning. Thank you, Bryan. And a huge thank you to the whole Happydance team for backing The Talking Point. Having partners who care about this stuff as much as we do is what lets us keep doing it.

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People believe people, not brands

Bryan opened with a stat that tells its own story: four years ago there were around 12,000 LinkedIn job titles with "storyteller" in them. Now there are over 98,000. Storytelling is in vogue. But his point was that most of us think we understand it, but there's actually a structure to the ideal art. The good news is it can be taught.

Why does it matter so much? Because when an employee tells a story about something that genuinely mattered in their career, you cross the line between something owned by a company and something lived by a human. A reminder, we all believe people more than we believe brands. It's the whole case for employee generated content, in one sentence.

I shared a moment from a shoot a few years ago. An employee's voice broke a little as she told her story, and the video team said, "Don't worry, we'll take that out." Absolutely not. That was the moment that held the whole film together. Bryan's word for it was vulnerability, and that's the point where the viewer goes, "I feel what she feels." Or even "I want to feel what she feels."

My personal methodology has always been ask for stories of pride, love and meaning/outcome.

Give people permission to tell the truth

We're living through what Bryan calls a trust recession. His 14-year-old son can spot an AI video in three tenths of a second, and we're all getting better at smelling nonsense. (He put it more bluntly. I'll let you hear it on the video.) We covered trust in detail back in episode two, and it came straight back.

The fix isn't shoving a camera in someone's face and asking them why the company is amazing. It's giving them licence to be honest. This place isn't perfect, the teams are lean, the standards are relentless, and here's why I love it anyway. Bryan's five points of truth are five questions that lead anyone, natural storyteller or not, through a story that lands. Then add my favourite word for this subject: specificity. "We're very inclusive" means nothing. "I'm part of this group, and last month we did this" means everything. There's more on that in our practical guide to content candidates trust.

My favourite line of the hour: the brand has to be vulnerable first. If you want candidates to tell you about the wiggly line that got them here, you go first. "We're not the finished article. Here's where we are, here's where we're going, and it won't all be rainbows and sunshine. Fancy coming with us?"

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Your job description is your Amazon product page

This is where it got properly practical. So many organisations build a beautiful, branded careers site, with video and FAQs and lovely content, and then the job description page is whatever got squirted out of the ATS. Bryan's analogy has stuck with me ever since: if your careers site were Amazon, the job description page would be the product page. It's where the money is made or lost.

Happydance's own tests found high-quality candidate engagement went up 26% with a video of the hiring manager talking honestly about the realities of the role, and up again with a carousel of the actual teammates you'd sit next to. As a dithering, read-every-review online shopper myself, that made total sense to me. You can't touch and feel the product online, and you can't touch and feel a job either.

And it has to be the right story on the right page. A sales candidate wants to know about career progression and whether it's a meritocracy. A different role, a different worry. Bryan boiled it down to the three things we're all looking for: purpose, impact and belonging. Meet people where they are.

GEO, and be careful what you wish for

On GEO, Bryan pointed to Rand Fishkin's recent roundup of what actually moves the needle for AI search versus SEO. The overwhelming conclusion? Do what's best for your audience. Get the hygiene right (concise answers, FAQs, schema, alt text, and pages that load in under three seconds, not sixteen), then answer the questions your candidates actually ask. It's exactly what Martin Lehnert found in our very first episode: he just did brilliant employer branding, and the LLMs followed. Our guide to GEO for employer branding goes deeper.

But here's Bryan's twist, and I loved it. Plenty of employer brand strategy forensically reflects today's culture, and then the CEO says, "That's not the culture I need to win." Authentic employer branding is where you are today and where you need to go tomorrow. So be sure you're telling the right story before the LLMs start quoting it, because nobody knows how long it takes to get it back out. It's the argument behind AI synthesis is deciding your employer brand.

Friction by design

For ten years we've got caught chasing and offering the easiest possible apply. And now there are AI agents that will rewrite your CV and apply to 200 jobs while you sleep. Bryan told us Uber came to Happydance with millions of applicants for fewer than 1,000 roles, and a very clear ask: fewer applicants, better quality. A heat shield for their recruiters.

So Happydance now builds what Bryan calls friction by design. Qualifying questions, smarter matching, narrowing 1,200 jobs down to the seven you could actually do. And the most underrated filter of all? A truthful story that makes the wrong person think, "Actually, that's not for me." That's a win, not a loss. If you want to see how wild the application flood has become, read one hiring cell, 1,000 applications, nine jobs.

I asked for a crystal ball moment, and Bryan's vision is a careers site you can have a proper two-way conversation with, graded against Netflix and Amazon rather than your competitors. Attention grab that competes for browsing airspace, and by the time someone applies, they're confident it's a good move, and so is the recruiter. As he put it: "Telling the truth in a cynical world is still a point of differentiation." Simple. Just not easy. Which is exactly why he wrote the book.

Thank you, everyone in the room

Thank you to everyone who joined us live and to everyone catching up now. You were quiet in the questions again, which I'm choosing to take as proof that Bryan was crystal clear. If something sparks a question later, bring it into the EB Club community. Bryan's very happy to hear from you on LinkedIn too.

And Bryan, I still owe you an introduction to Jeremy Connell-Waite, the world's other great collector of story frameworks. You two are going to get on famously.

EB Club is flying

I keep having to pinch myself. EB Club is easily the fastest growing community of employer branding professionals in the world. We've got members from Azerbaijan, Australia and Albania, plus plenty of places that don't begin with A, and more joining every single week. Four Talking Points in the bag, a brilliant new partner for it, in Happydance, and events lined up across Europe, the USA and beyond. If you work in-house in employer branding, talent attraction, TA or HR and you're not in yet, you're missing the best conversations in the industry, in person and online.

It's free for in-house practitioners, and applications are reviewed within 48 hours, usually much quicker.

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Next time

We're back in two weeks with another hot topic - Chloe Burri (ex BT) joins me to talk about whether forgot about inclusion in EB, with another guest to join us. Later in November, Heather Walker from SAP joins me to talk about EB Leadership in an AI world. In the meantime, catch up on episode one on GEO, episode two on candidate trust and episode three on humour. And grab a copy of Sell the Truth. I promised Bryan a plug, and I'm a man of my word.

Thank you again, Bryan, and thank you, Happydance. See you in two weeks.

Steve

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