Why Strong Companies Still Struggle to Attract the Right Talent

Lessons from the Field | Case Insight

By Ani Matson, Lisa Bratkovich, and Jennifer Welch | Partners, The CMO Syndicate

If you are wondering whether you have the right talent, the instinct is to look at your recruiting process, your compensation, your job postings. Almost no one looks at what your leadership is actually signaling to the outside world.

We’ve found, that is usually where the real problem lives.

When the people you want to attract cannot tell what your organization stands for today, they do not take the risk. They go somewhere clearer. And you keep wondering why the pipeline is thin.

"You assume your reputation is based on your work. In reality, it is based on what your leadership makes visible. If you do not define it, the market will. And it will not do it in your favor."

The Stakes Are Higher Than a Hiring Gap

For organizations going through leadership transitions, this problem compounds fast. A new CEO stepping in inherits not just the business but the perception the market already has of it. That perception does not reset automatically. It has to be actively replaced.

For a 30-year-old entertainment company that had built a strong track record producing, managing, and booking Broadway experiences for audiences around the world, this was exactly the situation. From the outside, the organization looked established and successful. From the inside, the leadership knew something was not translating.

Diverse, next-generation talent was not coming in. The company's reputation in the industry had calcified around an image that no longer reflected where leadership wanted to take it. And a new CEO had just been promoted from within with a clear mandate to change that.

The clock was already running.

The Real Problem Was Not What Anyone Thought

The instinct in situations like this is to treat it as a marketing problem, and this is why they called us in. They thought: refresh the website, update the social presence, run some employer-brand campaigns.

But we knew that would have been the wrong move, and an expensive one.

When The CMO Syndicate came in to advise the new executive team, what we found, as suspected, was not a brand problem. It was a clarity problem. The organization had no clearly defined purpose, no articulated vision, and no stated values that the market could actually see and connect to. So the market filled in the gaps based on what it could observe: 30 years of history and a leadership profile that did not reflect where the company was heading.

You cannot fix a perception problem by pushing out more content. You fix it by first deciding, clearly and publicly, what you stand for now. Not what you have been. What you are choosing to become. That decision has to come from leadership before it can come from marketing.

"The shift did not start with marketing. It started with a leadership decision many organizations avoid: defining out loud what the organization stands for now."

What the Work Actually Looked Like

The CMO Syndicate worked with the executive team to do three things:

• Define organizational purpose in language that was honest about where the company was going, not just where it had been.
  
  
• Create a new vision, mission, and values framework that reflected the leadership's actual intent and gave the market something concrete to connect to.
  
  
• Rebuild the external presence, including a new website, to reflect that clarity visually and editorially.

The rebuilt website now leads with creativity and diversity as core signals, not as afterthoughts. The purpose, vision, and values are prominent and specific. The organization reads differently because it thinks about itself differently.

Importantly, sequence matters. The external work only holds if the internal clarity comes first. Reversing that order is what produces campaigns that feel hollow to everyone, including the people you are trying to recruit. We’ve seen this done wrong many times. Your people need to get it, live it, and believe it first.

What Changed

The organization came out of this work with something it did not have before: a clear, consistent signal it could control. Purpose-driven language that now drives both recruiting conversations and customer conversations. An external presence that reflects where the company is actually headed rather than where it has been.

The talent problem did not disappear overnight. But the underlying cause of it did. When the right candidates now look at the company, they see an organization with a defined point of view and leadership that has been willing to state it publicly. That is a different conversation than the one the company was having before.

The Questions Worth Sitting With:

• What does your organization clearly stand for today? Not historically. Right now, under current leadership.
  
  
• If the talent you most want to hire looked at your website and your leadership presence this week, would they recognize themselves in what they find?
  
  
• Who is currently filling in the gaps in your positioning? Your leadership, or the market?

In many cases, we believe you do not need a better employer brand. You need a clearer leadership signal. The organizations attracting the right people right now are not louder. They are clearer.

The CMO Syndicate partners with CEOs and PE-backed leadership teams on the commercial and organizational decisions that drive real growth. If your leadership signal is not working the way it should, we welcome the conversation.

The CMO Syndicate
Trusted by CEOs who understand that speed, insight, and execution, not certainty, define market leadership.

📩 Contact us here to learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: We have been in business for decades and have a strong reputation. Why would talent not already know what we stand for?

A long track record tells the market what you have done. It does not tell them what you are choosing to do next, or whether your current leadership reflects values they want to work inside of. For established organizations going through leadership transitions, the market defaults to what it already knows unless you actively replace that signal with something more current. Reputation built on history is real, but it can work against you when the next generation of talent is deciding whether your organization is a place they can see themselves growing. The question is not whether people know your name. It is whether what they know makes them want to be part of what comes next.

Q: We tried updating our website and employer branding before. It did not move the needle on recruiting. Why would this be different?

Because the sequence was probably reversed. External content only works if the internal clarity came first. If your leadership has not defined purpose, vision, and values in a way the organization genuinely lives by, a new website is just decoration. Candidates who are evaluating you closely will feel that gap immediately, especially diverse talent who are specifically looking for evidence that leadership's stated values actually show up in how the organization operates. The work we do starts with leadership alignment before anything is communicated externally. That is what makes the external changes hold.

Q: How do we know if our leadership signal is the problem versus something else in our recruiting process?

Ask the candidates who declined your offers. Not the ones who accepted. The ones who interviewed well, expressed genuine interest, and then went somewhere else. What they tell you will almost always point back to something they saw or did not see in your leadership presence, not your recruiting process. If your offer-to-acceptance rate is soft with the specific profile of candidate you are trying to attract, that is usually a signal problem, not a compensation problem or a job description problem. The recruiting process delivers people to the decision. The leadership signal is what closes it.

Q: Is this something our internal marketing or HR team can handle, or does it require outside perspective?

It almost always requires outside perspective, at least at the diagnostic stage. The people inside your organization have adapted to how things are communicated. They can no longer see the gap between what leadership intends to signal and what the market actually receives. That gap is invisible from the inside. An outside advisor can see it immediately because they are experiencing your organization the same way a candidate does: cold, with no insider context and no benefit of the doubt. That is the perspective that matters most, and it is the one you cannot generate internally.

About the Authors