Podcasting for Recruitment
About Author Graham Brown
Graham Brown is the founder of Pikkal & Co – performance communication agency responsible for producing Award Winning Podcasts for business brands. Clients including McKinsey, Julius Baer, IBM and the Singapore Government. Investors and Advisors from Netflix, Intel, Apple and iQiYi. He is a published Amazon author covering human communication technologies, marketing and branding. He has produced over 1,000 podcast episodes and webinar shows with notable shows including the Tony Fernandes Podcast. Graham is a graduate in Artificial Intelligence and is currently leading Pikkal & Co to use Machine Learning and Conversation Analytics to automate the heavy lifting of communication to elevate the human touch.Table of Contents
The Problem with Recruitment Today
There’s a lot of money out there seeking innovative teams to invest in.
Their biggest challenge is finding good people.
Every startup is competing in a global market place where Google, Facebook, Grab and Alibaba are after your best people.
It’s a talent war that’s eating away at even the wealthiest of organizations.
Banks are struggling too. Sure, Banks aren’t going anywhere soon. They’ve been around for more than 1000 years and despite their predicted demise from all corners of the tech and financial world, they’ll probably be around for a long time yet.
But, who wants to work for a bank anymore? Or any other sector where the incumbents operate massive barriers to entry (e.g. regulation, control of assets etc)?
The challenge is attracting and retaining the best people.
What Potential Employees Really Want
In previous generations they could do this because previous generations were still haunted by the threat of poverty or starvation. These spectres were reinforced in parental choices when kids were pushed through education to become MBAs and accountants. The goal was not meaning but comfort.
Comfort:
* A fixed salary
* A job description
* A multinational corporation
* A career
* A retirement fund
Sure poverty and starvation are still real, but the number of people who will feel it in their lifetime is decreasing rapidly.
Today, we are more motivated by meaning than by stable paychecks.
Many people are waking up to the realization that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Increasingly, career success is defined not just by performance or financial metrics but by engaging work and the opportunity to grow as an individual.
Podcasting to Humanize the Brand
Podcasts are an opportunity for brands to attract the right talent.
The right talent chooses where they want to work based on the story and the mission told by the brand. In many cases, this is the story told by the leadership. Podcasts provide an authentic and unedited conduit of communication to potential hires, that’s why I consider them human communication interfaces for brands.
Define: Human Communication Interface

Recommended Related Articles
Talent wants to work in teams that have a purpose.
And they also want their CEOs to speak out.
Data: Authentic Leadership

Consider the Linkedin CEO Reid Hoffman’s “Masters of Scale” podcast.
How many times do you think this podcast comes up in conversation during a potential hiring interview?
Case Study: Masters of Scale - Reid Hoffman Linkedin
I hear it all the time. The best candidates do their research. At our Podcast Agency, the best candidates will research the company and probably come across the Tony Fernandes podcast (see below). Consider what that 40 minute conversation does for hiring:
Watch the Tony Fernandes Podcast
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- How Good Storytelling beats Good Ideas
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- Podcasting for Recruitment
- Start with Your Minimum Viable Podcast (MVP)
- Stop Thinking about Personal Branding, Start Thinking About Leadership
- The Impostor Syndrome: Meeting Tony Fernandes
- What is Storytelling in Business?
- Why I Started Asia Tech Podcast and Published 500 Episodes
– Podcasts align potential hires with the company story and vice versa
– Podcasts humanize the leadership of the company, making it more attractive for a potential hire
– Podcasts create familiarity for the potential hire, allowing them to shortcut the small talk and discuss the important issues and challenges facing the company