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Recruiters, What do Your Shoe Styles Say About Your Recruiting Style

They say clothes make the man, and shoes make the woman, but what do shoes say about your recruiting or marketing style? To me, marketing and recruiting are synonymous. I also add marketing as Susan Strayer, Employment Brand marketer extraordinaire, is the conference chair for this week’s Recruiting Innovations Summit. And a self confessed shoe fanatic.

What do we look for in shoes? Shoes serve multiple purposes and are needed for several roles in our life – work, dress-up, fun, relaxing. They are needed for support, promotion and stability. Shoes are part of our uniform and a conveyance of what we are willing to invest our resources in.

How do you find your shoes? Word of mouth, research in magazines, what the cool trends are or what works for you and will always work for you. Where do you buy your shoes? Online, retail, or catalog? And do you change your shoes every year, or do you keep some year in and year out?

For many, shoe investments can be sizeable. Almost as sizeable in proportion to how much we are willing to invest in our recruitment marketing. When making sizeable investments, we tend to take the same approach in one area of our life as we do in others. What research do you do for your employment brand marketing? Are you using the tools that are the most recent trend or utilizing the tried and true models that have served you? Or do you have those special shoes for promotion and your comfort shoes for nurturing the talent relationship?

Shoes are universal. What do your shoes say about your marketing style? From past conferences, here are some great shoes. What do these shoes say about the person and can you guess whose shoes these are?