Bob Dylan’s auto-biography self edited & Nobel prize winner is a master class in Story Telling. In this article I’m going to discuss how we can draw from his work on telling and positioning a company’s story, to attract the right audience (applicants)
There’s an anxiety that exists in job seekers. A fear that no matter where they go in a job change, it’s going to be the same thing they’re running away from. That stems a lot from all the companies they’re considering, sounding and looking just like the company they are miserable at right now.
The antidote isn’t great reach (more ads) with the same corporate jargon, it’s figuring out what strengths your company has, then making the story of it feel more like a conversation. That’s what Bob Dylan mastered in his autobiography (and music).
Minnesota’s Folk Hero
Growing up in Minnesota Bob Dylan was a folk hero, he was one of the biggest claims to fame our state had. Never mind that he fled at 19 to never spend much time here again, the fact was that his soulful writing had deep origins in being formed here.
He writes in detail about his youth, first love, mistakes made, discovering artists that changed his career trajectory. It was in a U of M frat house in Minneapolis, that he was crashing at, that he first discovered Woody Guthrie, his first musical inspiration that he attempted to personify. Eventually that love for all things Guthrie sent him hitchhiking all the way to NYC to try and meet the guy.
One of the things that amazes me is just how little he claimed to have invented, a lot of his writings early on were based on a combination of Woody Guthrie and Irish rebel music of all things. But that’s creativity, taking something old, combining it with something else, and making it authentically you along the way.
The book is referred to as a ferocious synthesis of tradition and individualism by Rolling Stone Magazine. This sounds like something missing from many companies’ approach to telling their own stories.
The story behind what makes them different, why people left their past jobs to join them. Those stories exist within an organization.
Word Salad
Employees have stories of what has made them stick around, what they were most excited about when taking this job. What they didn’t expect, but have grown to appreciate. What parts they find to be the most challenging.
And their answers are only part of the equation, the wording used to make it feel like an actual conversation, that’s where you’ll find authentic answers about what makes a company worth joining.
This is in-part what makes Dylan’s biography so engrossing, it’s not written like you’d expect. There are run-on sentences, em dashes (pre-ai’s use), parables and soliloquies that make you double back, but also create a feeling of someone who truly loves their craft.
Throughout his book he talked about his motivations, and it always came back to a love of music. It wasn’t to sell albums or build a massive following, it was because it was music he liked. There were songs people would beg him to play at concerts but if it wasn’t the music he was into at the moment, he wasn’t going to play.
I’ve worked with a ton of company founders over the years, and there’s a love of the craft in those organizations. A belief in their mission. Yet that feeling rarely shines through in the way they advertise their positions, or joining their org. It’s like some weird hr hat comes on, and word salads are used instead of authenticity.
Creativity You Ship
A practical takeaway is to resist the need to be cookie cutter, be for everyone. That is what dilutes companies to being as boring as the next.
Being different is scary, planting a flag is scary, what feels safe is doing what everyone else is doing. Letting GPT write your ads, inmails, or whatever outreach you choose, since it was recommended by LinkedIn and Indeed.
I mean…. it must be legit if it’s built right into the app? Then you’ve removed yourself from the blame equation. Never mind if the results are abysmal.
What takes courage is creativity that you ship. I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again.
Recruitment is Sales & Marketing when done right.
Marketing is a creative endeavor, it involves wrestling with abstract concepts. Like why would an engineer care about this job more than the next, and how do we get their attention for long enough to gain enough trust, that we’re worth the application.
Be Like Dave
There’s a two sentence hook that i can directly tie multiple six figures of revenue to. It’s this:
“Dave worked on reports while watching his kid at a soccer game.
Do you have that kind of flexibility? Most structural engineers don’t. But here, you will.”
Here’s what i’m not using in this opening.
- Company Jargon
- Superlatives that are vague and empty
- Demand/me centric language
Instead i’m telling a story in two sentences, it’s a story of autonomy, of presence, a job made for people whose values are about being with family over grinding it out in the office to hit utilization targets.
That’s what this job offered. It wasn’t the hottest job in the market working on exciting revolutionary projects. The company doesn’t even touch that kind of work. And it doesn’t need to in order to attract great candidates for their company.
The emphasis in that hook is great for THEIR company.
A structural engineer with a Ph.D. that’s done ground breaking work on earthquake-proofing skyscrapers would likely find this work boring, and while they might be an A player for their niche. Them being unfulfilled by this work means their values don’t align and they’re not an A-player for this org, as in someone who would crush it here.
But a midlevel Professional engineer who wants flexibility, likes being out in the field, knows how to stay organized remote. That is an A-player for them. What makes for a great candidate in any space is entirely subjective to the motivations that drive the candidate and puts them in an environment they enjoy/thrive in.
So how do you find your story?
Well Dylan found his by listening to folk heroes, hanging at Irish bars that jammed out to rebel music, going to plays.
I got the line on structural engineers on a debrief call with a candidate after they had met with the VP of their region.
It wasn’t the first or second answer the candidate gave me when I asked how the interview went, but it was the example I got when I asked what exactly the VP said, that made this opportunity jump from being in second place in his excitement ranking of new opportunities to being the clear top choice.
The through line between those two examples is curiosity, and combination of ideas.
There’s surface level responses that can easily be settled as good enough. “Interview went great, i’m more interested” is the start of the conversation, it’s our job to dive deeper into why something is interesting. That’s where the gold lies.
Pulling the story out of real conversations is tested and proven by folks of a far higher caliber than yours truly. In direct response marketing it’s how good copywriting is created (and what’s good copywriting if not a great story that creates trust and initiates action).
David Ogilvy & Claude Hopkins both took this approach when writing marketing for iconic brands. They didn’t sequester themselves with the product in the hopes that they’d be struck by genius.
They wrote from interactions with the engineers, interviews with execs, detailed company internal documents. This is the ammo used, that they then compiled and repurposed to fit the narrative they were crafting.
If it worked for the likes of Dylan and the marketing greats. Surely it can work for you too.
P.S. Dylan uses a ton of em dashes in his writing, and it’s beautiful. The point? Ai has ruined the use of em dashes - it’s a dang shame