Are You Marketing Jobs or Just Posting Them? The Critical Difference

0:00On today's episode of Right About Now, I talk to Nicole Feenstra. She is the CEO and founder of the DNA Agency, the DNA of hiring. Yeah, that's right. We got to market our positions better. Everybody wonders why you can't hire good people. You know why you don't hire good people? You don't market it the right way. We talk about why work shouldn't be called work. It should be called opportunity. And today is your opportunity right here, right now. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts.

0:40This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford.

0:51What's up, Nicole? Welcome to Right About Now. Thank you. Nice to see you. Good to see you. We have mutual friends. I like what I've read. I love storytelling, so I'm hoping we get into all that today. Okay, I'm ready. Let's do it. Where are we at today, Nicole? West Hollywood, California. There we go. Hollywood. Hollywood. What's happening in West Hollywood in 2026? Goodness me. I just moved here. I was affected by the Eaton Fire in January of 25, So I've been in Pasadena for a really long time and just thought, you know, I'm going to I'm going to go right into the belly of the beast. I'm going to go right in the center of the city and see how it is.

1:33It's good. The roads are not as good as Pasadena, I will say. But there's a lot more to do. Yeah. Yeah. So where do we grow up? Do we grow up in California? Mostly Houston, Texas. All right. Texas. There we go. Now you're getting towards our territory. We're in South Carolina. I saw that. I saw that. Yeah, my accent gives at least half of it away. You know these guys from the South, but you're not exactly sure. No, I like to say I had a, I had a, I had like Boston nuns that taught me in Houston and there was no fix in or any of that. So when I got to California, they didn't think I really sounded that Texas, except when I think all.

2:14Nicole, what are we up to? Talk to me about the DNA agency. Yeah, you know, we're a full-service agency, but we have been doing a lot of consulting around workforce development and sort of fixing large systemic problems like workforce development, a lot of the stuff around the recovery. So we've really been doing a lot with regards to uncomplicating, very complicated things. Workforce development can be very complicated. There's a lot of steps in it. Recovery when you're coming back out of a fire or disaster is really complicated. So we really have specialized in finding ways to simplify the messaging for the people who need to find the solutions around whatever the subject is, whether it's jobs or getting back into their home after a fire or any other disaster.

3:03We figure out sort of where they need to see things and simplify the messages and just make sure they see them. So I hear the DNA agency and I was like, this is a really creative like HR company. Like someone's finally figured out how to market HR, you know? Well, you know, and our website has, you know, all sorts of DNA kind of, you know, we definitely people are like, are you the science company? We are a little like I like to say we're a little science, a little art, you know, I think, you know, you've been in marketing a long time. Any anybody that's been in digital advertising for any amount of time, it's you know, there's a lot of there's a there's number crunching.

3:43But but my heart is always in story. So. Yeah, I spent the first half of my first half of my career on the brand and analog side in the second half. And it was more of the art for sure. And then it got into, you know, the storytelling was always there. But then with digital and digital marketing certainly became more data technical focused. But I feel like I've always believed, that's why I like what I was reading about what you guys are doing, Nicole. Like, you know, even with, you know, you have analysis paralysis from all the data. And at the end of the day, you still got to take an action.

4:20At the end of the day, people buy from people and you need to tell them stories and make them understand things. And sometimes the data can, it doesn't get in the way of that. But I think you can get lost in conversions and metrics that, and I'm not saying they don't matter, but it just, that's been a little bit of the maddening part of it from someone that came up in the branding and storytelling side. that, you know, we're so focused on an action today versus building something over time, which takes repetitive messages and storytelling to do. Where do you fall in that camp? You know, I found a data point that was from well before the internet that said it takes 21 times for somebody to see something before they'll do something.

5:03And that data came from before the 1900s. so well before we got you know inundated with all of uh you know the amount of dog videos that i see on my feed just that alone and so i think it is you know when you think about where people are seeing and what they're seeing i think you're right i think people really need to see something that means something to them and and sort of takes them through a journey because it is going to take them a lot of times, especially when they're not familiar with whatever the thing is. And when I talk about workforce development, I talk about the fact that we've had maybe a 70-year bad PR campaign around work.

5:44You know, it's always been how quickly can you retire? How quickly can you not work? You know, how quickly can you get rich and be done with work? And I think we've lost the idea of the value of work, the joy that can come from doing something you're really good at, doing something that gives you a sense of accomplishment. I saw a TED Talk. It was, gosh, I think like mid-2000s, Mike Rowe about work. And, you know, he was talking about like a trash collector can sometimes be happier than the guy in the corner office. And it's an interesting conundrum. You know, he was doing these shows with people doing these really dirty jobs.

6:26And so we had these data points from having worked with people. And so I'm really interested from a story standpoint in like the value of work. It's something that's gotten me very like jazzed as of late. Like, how do you make job sexy is really the conversation I have with my team. How do you make welding sexy? How do you make engineering sexy? How do you make IT sexy? How do you make construction sexy? You know, my team will be like, oh, right, we want to make it sexy. I'm like, just make it fun, make it cool, you know, make it something that somebody would want to do. This episode of Right About Now is brought to you by Shopify.

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9:16You said something really interesting, Nicole, that I want to kind of shine a light on. And I'd never, I guess, you know, we all think about the things that we think about because they're in our lane. And, you know, I like to think I'm introspective or even like, you know, trying to decipher what different things are. But we have always sort of put work in this place where it had to, it had to earn its way out of being negative from the very beginning. And that is, that is a terrible thing. Like, because think about how much purpose we get from the work that we do. Think about all the good things that come from work.

9:52It provides our livelihoods. It provides for us. It does. And we set it up from the beginning. And even the word work has become synonymous with something bad in a way. Oh, that's work. Oh, that sounds like work to me. I mean, wow. I know it's simple. But like, it's so true. It's so fundamentally true for how the historical marketing of work in general has been so flawed and so negative that it's always, you know, people with jobs like yours and people, anyone that owns a business is trying to hire. You have to work against it because like you're saying literally, hey, I need you to come do something when you're not just, you know, doing your free time.

10:35And here's why it's great, but it's not having fun. What? No. Like, it can be all of those things, right? Well, and I think, you know, I think we, when we, like you talk about HR, you know, jobs and all of that ends up in the lane of HR, right? And they just put a long description that is what you and I like to probably call from marketing word salad. You know, it's just a big old plate of word salad that is really, you know, as uninteresting as reading the phone book that we don't have anymore. But, you know, the days of having the Rolodex. We could we could say these things, Nicole. We're old.

11:19So, yeah, I mean, they you know, they put these job descriptions out and then they're really boring and then they are surprised that people, you know, are not interested. And then you have the converse where people are putting their information in, then they're not hearing anything from the companies or they're saying, oh, these people are just putting out because they they have to, but they're not really hiring. So there's this there's this sort of latent battle that's happening in the workforce around there's people saying there's not there's not any jobs. And then the company saying, I can't find any workers.

11:52And the reality is, is both are wrong. And what I would say is that part of the problem is the story in the middle. A big piece of the problem is a story in the middle. How often people see opportunities on the side of the worker and how and how well people are talking about those jobs to the people who need to see it. And so that communication gap is where the opportunity lies as a marketer, as a storyteller, as somebody who figures out kind of journeys online, journeys in person. How do you clean up a customer journey for somebody who's looking at a career, a job or whatever? And how is an employer or a company or an industry, how easy are you making it for somebody to go through that funnel?

12:36How exciting are you making that funnel? My friend, she's like, oh, God, don't get Nicole started on the funnels. I'm like, but they're real. Like funnels are real. They're paths with which things happen. Right. And nobody gets out of the funnel. Like nobody gets to be like, I want to cheat the funnel. Like when people tell me I need more people in this class, I'm like, well, you need more people to see the class. Yeah. So, you know. I love job marketing as a lane. You know, like it's so over needed. because again, we've already established that it starts from this negative place, but people suck at it.

13:16I think I've caught myself. Literally, I've condensed my team, the stage of my career. I manage 100 people indirectly or directly in New York in another lifetime ago. And I've scaled my agency and things back to where I'm comfortable. But like, Even I find myself, I've done these things. I know exactly and agree with everything that we're saying. But as a, I think, a professional world-class marketer, I have sucked at this. I've been like, what is, if I read that, I wouldn't want to do that. Like, we didn't make it interesting. We didn't tell the story of really what they get the opportunity to do.

14:00And that's a, there's a big gap. I think that this is like a, this is a blue ocean, I think, for opportunity for yourself with companies like you're hearing this. Go read your job descriptions. Go see how much friction there is for someone to try to come to work for you. Yeah. Go do that. Go eat your own dog food. And then we'll call Nicole together. But right, Nicole? I mean, it's not that free. Well, you know, and also you have AI coming into the mix, right? So everyone's like, oh, AI is going to take my jobs. AI is going to take repetitive jobs, but AI can't replace creativity. It can't replace human experience.

14:40It can't replace perspective. And those things are things that people really, really value is understanding awareness, story, being a human in the world, understanding things that a robot doesn't understand. And, you know, you look at when people are saying, oh, AI is going to take my job. And, you know, the trades are one industry that I work in a lot. They're not going to be fixing that anytime. The AI is not going to be taking construction, manufacturing, health care jobs in any, you know, reasonable amount of time. So the trades, physical work, the work that you do with your hands. So there's a really big opportunity for organizations.

15:22I mean, the building industry is at a labor shortage of about a million people around the country. So that's the trades. That's anybody. They call them the subs, right? So not the builders. The builders are they hire the subs. So they hire the plumber, the electrician, the drywaller, the roofer, the carpenter, the mason. Those are all trades that require your hands and for you to be there in person. And those jobs aren't going anywhere. and, you know, when you think about the building industry, you know, two things happened to create this labor shortage. One, people that had these companies knew that they thought that it was very hard work and they didn't want their kids to do it and they wanted them to go to college and they didn't want them to take over the family business.

16:02So that happened. And then in 2008, when the market crashed, a lot of the workers went overseas, went back to their countries and didn't come back. So you have this confluence where you've got these two situations and you have a massive gap and you've got this gray tsunami that's coming in where all of those people that have those skills are going to be retiring because physically they can't do it anymore. They just want to go hang out on a boat, which God bless. Yeah. Why not? Yeah. But I think what's interesting is those industries, how and if, how they are talking about that industry, those jobs, how they're talking about it.

16:41I think there's a really big gap. And I've watched it happen for the last six years. And, you know, I mean, oftentimes I'll say, how are you fixing this problem? And they'll go, oh, it's a really big problem. I would say, great. Naming it is not fixing it. How are you fixing it? I'll say, oh, we have career fairs. And I will say, how do you market the career fairs? And they will say, and I'm not even joking, paper flyers. I'm like, okay, let me just get this right. You want to fix A million person labor shortage with paper flyers that you cannot track. Cool. Awesome. Oh, yeah. Cargon, take me away.

17:18Right? Like, I don't know what they expect, but, you know, to their defense, you know, it's not what they do every day. Like, they're not marketing. They're not storytelling every day. They don't think they are. They probably are, but they don't. That's, I think, the biggest thing is people just translating, like, the things where they think they pull creativity from to do. like, okay, this is a creative activity. Well, this, you know, hiring someone and how you do it. The question I have for you, Nicole, is how do you work with companies in bringing to life the story that you weave? Like, let's say they're a good company and they're doing some things and it is a good job, but do you help them connect the dots with like maybe the things they should be doing to make that job truly great?

18:04Yeah. What we'll do is we will back up. I, you know, I'm a data nerd. I'm a storyteller with a data. My dad was an engineer, so I come by it genetically. But I always think about how we would know if we're winning, right? Because I like to win. I like to know when I'm winning. You say a lot of things that are simple, Nicole, that are actually deeper than surf's level because that's a deep statement. It's like, that's important. Yeah, it is. And so I will always track back to what can we track? What can we actually track with this thing you want? How do we track it? And so I was working with a group in Iowa, and they had this big, they call it Build My Future.

18:48It's a one-day event. They bused in 7 ,500 kids in Des Moines, all over Iowa, went to the Des Moines Area Fairgrounds. It's a one-day career fair. They had about 100 vendors. So ROTC was there, crane operators and electricians and health care and all these different places for these kids to come and see what jobs were out there, what kind of careers they could do. And I asked the group afterwards, I said, well, how are you marketing? I'm like, what are you doing with them afterwards? So they get excited. And now what? Yeah. And so they said, well, we're not doing anything. And I said, does that seem like a problem?

19:25And they were like, it does. I said, do you want to fix that problem? They said, yeah. I we took the event we geo fenced it for the following year and we because they as high schools they can't market to students because it's a very there's all these you know variables and I said well everybody has one of these and this is a big tracking device all the kids do I said so we're going to geo fence the event and then after that event we're going to market to them I said do you have summer jobs internships and apprenticeships for them to go do during the summer and they said yeah let's market to that that so we created a landing page and we created ads that spoke to that.

20:01And we signed them. The signup was an info session to meet with these teachers and the people that were doing it. And we had in like three weeks, 90 kids sign up for a Zoom info session. That's awesome. That sounds like a success. It was, you know, I mean, there's the part of the journey, the part, the workforce journey is a complicated one because the reality was, is that they kind of had those programs ready to go, but they didn't totally. So it was a bit of amiss in that they weren't able to take them the next step of the way, right? Which is that full, I think they did take some of them and I'm not sure, you know, they were sort of, it sort of kind of ended there.

20:39So I think what happens with workforce development is this idea that you have to kind of, it's a long game. It's not the short game. And so being willing to kind of be in for the long game. What separates the companies that hire well and get the talent that they want versus those that don't? Obviously, we're talking about ways that no matter the company or, you know, whether they've been good or bad, if they can storytell and do things to improve that process. But, you know, maybe for someone listening that runs a company that always struggles, you know, with hiring talent in competitive fields, what does separate one from another?

21:21Well, acquisition is one thing, retention is another, right? Yeah, that's another very true. You can bring them in the front door as fast as you want, but if they're going out the back, it doesn't matter. Yeah. I mean, it's all the things that we know about any company that you've ever liked working for, you know, have it be a good place to work. Have you feeling like there's a learning, there's a, there's a, the next stage of where you can grow, what you can grow into, what you can learn, how you can expand, how you can be part of the success, how you can be part of a bigger, something bigger than you, how you can enjoy the details of that thing, how you've, you know, mentorship, extra training, skilling up for more money, knowing what kind of certificates or things that could come and bring you more money, more stature, a path where you can see yourself growing.

22:12I mean, all of the things that we've ever had is, you know, and what's interesting is kids, when they're coming out, they think they're supposed to know it all. I feel bad for the generations behind me because they were sort of, everything was sort of curated and there was this belief that you're supposed to know everything out of the gate. And the reality is, is anybody who's been in their business or career for any amount of time knows that it's, you know, it's sort of, it can be circuitous and it changes, you know? I think what's interesting is I actually researched you a little bit and I saw that you, I hope I'm not misstepping when I say you did not finish Clemson.

22:48And I did finish. I just had, I had a two point, I had probably the lowest, I had 2.01. You had to have a 2.0 to graduate. I had, I graduated the 0.01 high enough. So I did. Yeah, I did finish. Very good. Very good. But, but barely. But if somebody had looked at a certain perspective of just a GPA, they wouldn't have seen how all of your capacity and all of the things that have come to make you successful, if they had just judged you on a GPA, they wouldn't have seen the wholeness of you, right? For sure. I'd put my lifetime earnings versus GPA up against a lot of people. Yeah. And a lot of people.

23:37Correlation has been absolutely zero. Yeah. And I think so many people who, you know, that have created successful companies didn't graduate from college. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's so much about sort of real world practical understanding of like what you learn out in the world. But I think it goes to the idea of if you see somebody in one way, you're missing all of the opportunities of what they could provide. So I think it's that two-way dialogue if you're an employer is really looking at and understanding potential and also allowing people to move based on what they're good at. You know, I often, when I'm asking people when they're coming to work with me, I say, what would you do?

24:24If you could do anything in a day, what would you be doing? like magic wand. And I do it with my clients when they give me a North star. I'm like, paint me the picture of how it's done. Right. It's done. It's completed. You get to do it exactly the way you want it. It's like you're writing the script and it's really interesting because you get to hear what, and it's sometimes things you wouldn't have even imagined. So yeah, I think that's a long, maybe a long-winded answer to your question. No, it's good. We're getting into some good topics. I love it. Talking with Nicole Feenstra. She is the founder and CEO of the DNA Agency.

25:02Nicole, you know, we broached the AI topic and it's related, but it's somewhat related to what I'm going to ask. You know, with AI, with the proliferation of these tools and things that are going on, I'd love to know what you're seeing, you know, the impact is overall in the job market. I think more broadly and potentially more interesting than that would be, I think there's, we've been in this period where it's been real cool to become an entrepreneur or for yourself. And then now you've had the tools that actually enable it to be more accessible. How is that playing a role in hiring or is it, you know, being an entrepreneur and me seeing that I might be in my own little bubble thinking, well, I guess everybody's thinking about doing this now.