Craft a compelling story that attracts exactly the right people
Edition 2 (Attract) of the TA Unboxed Framework
Edition 2 of 9 — The TA Unboxed Framework, sponsored by Metaview.
Last edition, we sat in the highest-leverage hour in recruitment: Define.
This week, we move to the stage most TA teams quietly fudge: Attract — the moment you turn everything you defined into a story that pulls the right people in, and politely pushes the wrong ones away.
A quick word from this edition’s sponsor — Metaview
Metaview turns the Define conversation into the artefacts your Attract layer actually depends on: the job ad, the outreach email, the candidate playbook, and the EVP angle, all anchored to the same brief.
With their autonomous AI sourcing agent, the same intent that came out of the kick-off pulls the right candidates toward you, instead of you chasing the market.
So what is “Attract”?
Attract is the stage where you take everything you’ve defined and turn it into a story that draws in the right people and gently pushes the wrong ones away.
That’s the whole job.
It’s not a job ad, a careers page, or a LinkedIn campaign. Those are the channels.
Attract is the story that runs through them consistently, honestly, and specifically enough that the right person reads it and thinks: “This is me.”
One line. Keep it on your desk:
Attract = craft a compelling story that attracts exactly the right people.
Compelling, because attention is the scarcest thing in hiring. Exactly the right people, because hiring isn’t a popularity contest; it’s a fit problem.
Borrowing from Donald Miller (Building a StoryBrand): candidates care about their story, not yours. Make them the hero. Make your company the guide.
Everything else in Attract is just keeping that one rule honest.
Why do we need it
Most TA teams skip Attract.
They jump straight from Define (”we agreed on the role”) to Source (”post the ad, ping LinkedIn, brief an agency”).
They treat Attract as a publishing step rather than a strategy step. So they end up publishing:
A job ad that opens with three paragraphs about the company.
A careers page that says “we’re growing fast and people-first.”
An outreach email that reads like a mail merge.
A LinkedIn post written by someone in marketing who’s never met the hiring manager.
Then they wonder why inbound is bad, response rates are low, and the shortlist won’t convert. Even worse, I spoke about TA departments stopping posting job ads altogether because they’re worried about the volume of AI applications.
However, the reason is simple:
You wrote it for everyone, so it landed for nobody.
If Define is the highest-leverage hour, Attract is the highest-leverage narrative.
Get it wrong, and every channel below it amplifies the wrong story.
Stop putting “what your company does” at the top
Here’s the test you should run on every job ad and outreach email that lands in your inbox:
Read the first 50 words. Do they describe what the candidate would actually do, feel, build or own or do they describe what your company does?
Nine times out of ten, it’s the company.
“Founded in 2014, we are a global leader in cloud-enabled enterprise solutions, headquartered in London with offices in…”
No candidate ever read that and leaned in.
Flip it. Open from the candidate’s seat:
You’ll own how 200 engineers ship product every quarter. In your first 90 days, you’ll rebuild the release process the team has been complaining about for two years. In year one, you’ll be the person every PM goes to before they commit to a date.
You’re creating the ‘Define’ period, what the candidates want.
The opening line of your job ad is the most expensive real estate in your hiring funnel. Don’t waste it on boilerplate.
Attract starts with what you already defined
Edition 1 ended with seven artefacts. Three of them are the Attract layer:
The Job Ad — the public version of the role.
The Outreach Email — the one-to-one version of the role.
The Candidate Playbook — who they are, what they care about, what makes them move.
Plus two supporting outputs:
The EVP angle — written in the hiring manager’s own words, not corporate-speak.
The ICP document — the single source of truth for who you’re hiring.
The mistake most teams make is writing a generic EVP at the company level and trying to stretch it across every role. The strongest Attract work goes the other way: the role and the manager are the EVP, and the company is the backdrop.
Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Repel on purpose.
This is the part most TA leaders agree with privately and panic about publicly.
The strongest Attract strategy filters people out as deliberately as it pulls people in.
If your job ad doesn’t make at least one type of candidate close the tab, it isn’t a job ad — it’s a brochure.
Specificity is the strategy. Specific 90-day outcomes. Specific working styles. Specific deal-breakers. Specifically, why now? Each of those is a magnet for the right person and a polite door-close for the wrong one.
Generic EVPs attract generic candidates. Honest, specific ones attract the people you actually want — and save you weeks of screening you’d otherwise burn.
Read this twice repelling is the right strategy for the short term and the long term:
Short term: fewer wrong applicants. Higher quality shortlists. Faster time-to-hire.
Long term: the people you hire stay, because the story you told them was real.
A brand that promises everything attracts everyone. A brand that means something attracts the right ones.
The job advert could be a whole newsletter (and one day, will be)
I’ll write a deep dive on the job advert on its own, because it deserves it. For now, the short version pulled from the small handful of people who’ve been right about this for years: Mitch Sullivan, Katrina Kibben, Jim Miller, Adam Nichols, and Lou Adler. They don’t agree on everything. That’s the point. The consensus is at the edges, and that’s what we’re pulling out.
A good job ad is built around five things. In this order.
1) An opening that’s specific, not corporate
The first paragraph is the only one most candidates actually read. As I said above, don’t waste it on “We are a fast-paced, global leader in…”. Tell the right person something specific about this role they couldn’t get from a generic JD, the problem they’ll own, the team they’ll join, the reason the role exists now.
This is where the 50-word test earns its keep: read the first 50 words of any ad. If they describe the company and not the candidate, the opener is filler.
Adam Nichols puts it cleanly: a job advert earns its place when it sells the benefits of the role and draws the attention of the target audience. It is not a job description with the recruiter’s contact details added.
2) “What you’d be doing” — in plain English
Katrina Kibben has been making this point for years: write job postings for humans, in human language, at a reading level a tired person on their phone at 9pm can actually scan. No buzzwords. No “ninjas.” No “passionate about excellence.” Plain words, in the order a person would actually use them.
Sub-headed clearly. Concrete verbs. The three or four things that actually define the job day-to-day and in the first six months. Not a brain-dump of twelve bullet points written as a list because no one stopped to ask what the important ones were.
Give the job its right name. Jim Miller‘s rule, which shouldn’t need saying but does: “Call the job the right job title. If it’s a software engineer, call them a software engineer.” No “Code Ninja.” No “Engineering Wizard.” Standard titles are how the right candidates find the ad in the first place. I can’t say this enough.
Read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like how you’d describe the job to someone over a coffee, rewrite it.
3) “What you’ll need” — three or four non-negotiables. That’s it.
This is where most job ads collapse. Mitch Sullivan‘s rule, and it’s the cleanest one I’ve seen: only the 3 or 4 must-have, non-negotiable pieces of knowledge or experience the candidate would actually need to do the job.
Cut:
Soft skills everyone claims they have: strong communicator, team player, self-starter.
Things that are obvious to anyone qualified for the role.
Nice-to-haves dressed up as requirements.
A short, sharp “What you’ll need” section does more to filter your inbound than any screening question ever will.
4) The honest close — map out what happens next
Most job ads end with “We look forward to your application.” That isn’t a close. That’s a placeholder.
If you’ve been specific about the role and honest about what’s needed, you’ve earned the right to walk the candidate through what actually happens next. Lay the process out. Plainly. Numbered. Named where possible.
Something like:
*Here’s what to expect if you apply:
We’ll review your application within 5 working days.
If there’s a fit, we'll schedule a 30-minute screen with our recruiter to talk through the role, the team, and what’s motivating you.
First interview with the hiring manager, 45 minutes on the work itself and the outcomes in your first 90 days.
Craft / technical round, a structured assessment with two people from the team.
Final round — two future stakeholders, a conversation on ways of working and what success looks like in year one.
Offer within a week of the final stage. Total process: 4-6 weeks from application.*
What this does:
It filters. Anyone who can’t or won’t commit to that process self-selects out now, not in week three.
It respects their time. They know exactly what they’re signing up for and roughly how long it will take.
It signals seriousness. A clearly mapped process tells the right candidate this isn’t a company making it up as it goes along.
Then keep the promise. “You’ll hear back within 5 working days.” The fastest way to undo your Attract work is to ghost the people you just convinced to apply.
5) Tone and outcomes — what your ad sounds like, and what it promises
Two things sit here, from two different camps. Both matter.
On tone, Mitch’s “two messages”: every job ad sends out two signals: what you say, and what you sound like. Most recruiters only think about the first.
“We’re a fast-paced company seeking a highly motivated self-starter” → sounds like pressure.
“You’ll join a small team that actually finishes on time and still likes each other on Fridays” → sounds like a place a human works.
Same intent. Completely different signal. If you wouldn’t say it to a candidate’s face, take it out.
On outcomes, Lou Adler’s frame: Performance-Based Hiring. Define the role as 5–8 measurable outcomes — what good looks like at 90 days, 6 months, 1 year — and let those replace the adjective soup. Candidates self-select on outcomes far more honestly than they self-select on “must be a strong communicator.” Outcomes are also what your hiring manager will assess. Write the ad to those.
What a job ad should not open with
Company history. Founding story. Mission statement. List of values. “We’re hiring!”. Those are downstream. They earn attention. They don’t start with it.
Worth your time if you write job ads for a living: Mitch Sullivan at Copywriting for Recruiters and his latest product - mitchs.ai · Katrina Kibben on writing better job postings · Jim Miller (Ashby) on inbound and titles · Lou Adler‘s Hire With Your Head on Performance-Based Hiring.
Your supply chain for talent (the part you already own)
Here’s the bit most TA leaders underestimate: you already own a supply chain. You just aren’t treating it like one.
If the same story, the one you wrote out of Define, runs across every channel below, you stop competing on noise and start compounding.
📡 ATTRACT — Inbound supply channels
Job Advertising · Career Site & Talent Pages · Job Boards · Referrals · Talent Community
Inbound quality vs outbound quality: measured, not assumed.
1) Career site
Your career site is not a brochure. It’s a conversion surface.
The question candidates are answering is: “Do I want to spend a year of my life here?” — not “What does this company do?” Treat every page like a landing page for one specific kind of person.
2) Dedicated talent pages
One page per practice, per location, per function. Each one is written for the kind of person you actually hire there.
The engineer in Krakow doesn’t care about the same things the salesperson in New York cares about, so stop showing them the same page. This is the single highest-ROI move most TA teams haven’t made. It also gives your sourcers and recruiters something real to link to in outreach.
3) Job boards
LinkedIn, Indeed, and niche boards. Measure them. Inbound quality vs outbound quality measured, not assumed.
If a board is bringing you applicants but not hires, it’s not free traffic it’s expensive noise. Cut it.
4) Referrals
Your employees are the highest-trust channel you already own. Their LinkedIn network is bigger than your careers page’s traffic and more relevant.
Give them the story (the EVP, the role one-pager, the ad) and a simple way to share it. Don’t make them write their own.
5) Your managers and recruiters
The people who talk about the role are the brand.
Every hiring manager who shows up to a screen unprepared is undoing your Attract work. Every recruiter who can articulate the role in 30 seconds and the team in 60 is doing more for your brand than your last paid campaign.
Arm them. Brief them. Let them post in their voice, not the corporate one.
6) Talent community — the most underrated channel in TA
We’re not going deep on this one yet; it deserves its own series.
But know this: most TA teams have a CRM full of people who have already raised their hand. They opted in, applied, interviewed, and liked you, then… nothing. No newsletter. No update. No re-engagement.
A real talent community is the compound-interest channel of TA. We’ll come back to it.
What to do this week
Audit your top three job ads. Read the first 50 words. Are they about the candidate or about the company? Rewrite the openers.
Take one Define transcript (your last decent kick-off) and pull the job ad, the outreach email and the EVP angle directly from it. Don’t invent. Translate.
Pick one role and make the job ad more specific, not less. Add the 90-day outcomes, the honest deal-breakers, and the working-style notes. Watch what happens to applicant quality.
Pick one channel to measure honestly. Inbound quality vs outbound quality. Not volume. Quality.
Brief your hiring manager and one team member on the role story. Ask them to share it in their own voice. That’s your referral engine starting.
The bottom line
Attract isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s about clearly translating what you need to the people you want to reach.
You’re translating what you defined into a story that the right people recognise as theirs and that the wrong people respectfully scroll past.
Done well, Attract:
Filters before you have to.
Lifts the quality of every channel you own.
Earns the time of the people you actually want.
Makes the next stage — engaging them — about 10x easier.
Done badly, no amount of sourcing, screening or sponsorship can save you.
Compelling story. Right people. Honestly told. Consistently delivered.
That’s Attract.
Next edition — Source
Attract is your inbound pull. Source is your outbound push.
This Friday, we go deep on Source: sourcing as market intelligence — every outreach conversation is a data point.
The kickoff call is the system prompt. Everything else — Attract, Source, Screen — is execution against it.
📣 A closing word on this edition’s sponsor — Metaview is now an agentic recruiting platform.
Metaview captures your kick-off, screen, and interview conversations and turns them into scorecards, briefs, rubrics — and the job ad, outreach email, and EVP angle that your Attract layer depends on. The story isn’t invented. It’s translated from the Define transcript.
When I started writing TA Unboxed, Metaview was the AI notetaker and sourcing platform for recruiting, the thing that captured your kick-off, screens and interview conversations and turned them into structured notes. In May 2026, they crossed a real line. Metaview is now a platform: six connected agents — Notes, Sourcing, Outreach, Application Review, Reports, MCP — sitting on one shared context layer, each one getting sharper as the others learn.
Explore Metaview Sourcing | Watch the demo
Darren Bush - Founder of TA Unboxed