The People You Need Don’t Need You

COVID changed how people look at jobs, work, and potential employers.

Most are still recovering from instability, remote work disruption, unclear leadership decisions, and for some, blindsided by unexpected job loss. Trusting an employer to provide stability is no longer a given after seeing employer promises collapse under external pressures employees can’t control.

The rise of AI added another layer of complexity. It’s changing how people think about the future of their work, the stability of their roles, and whether any opportunity will matter tomorrow.

That is the environment in which businesses are recruiting now.

 The result? Open roles sit longer. Candidates hesitate, disappear, or accept and keep looking. New hires are hesitant, unwilling to fully commit. Managers and staff feel the pressure, customers feel the inconsistency, and leadership feels the drag.

The pain is real. The mistake is treating it as a labor-market problem.

When businesses see staffing as a labor-market problem, they respond with labor-market tools: better pay, stronger benefits, and louder claims about culture. Some rewrite job postings. Some lean on AI to make them sound better.

The problem is not polish. The problem is the approach.

Responsding with 'labor-market tools' appeals to the lowest rung of the decision tree: income, security, convenience, and risk reduction. They matter. They may get attention. They rarely reach what people care about deeply enough to create commitment.

And when your offers live in the world of commodities, recruiting becomes a transaction.

Unfortunately, when transactional recruiting works–which it rarely does with the best candidates–it creates transactional commitment.

That is the danger. You may still fill the role. You may still get a qualified person to accept. You may even get someone who performs well for a while.

 And if recruits came in because the offer was better, easier, safer, more flexible, or more convenient, they will leave for the same reasons. The connection was transactional from the beginning.

Transactional is not a durable commitment. It is conditional participation with one eye on the exit. You cannot build sustainable success on transactional commitment.

The solution is not in better selling of commodities. It’s in creating a clear connection to something people care about: purpose.

People want to be valued. They want to do work that feels valuable. They want to see how their efforts matter to a purpose beyond the tasks in front of them.

That does not mean every job has to feel noble, inspirational, or life-changing. It means the organization must be clear about what it is trying to accomplish, whom it serves, and the value it delivers.

When purpose is clear, the right people will recognize something they already care about. The work becomes more than a paycheck, and the organization starts to feel less like an employer and more like a professional home.

They can see themselves living there.

They can imagine working with others who care about the same things.

That is when recruiting stops being a transaction and becomes the start of a relationship.

A workplace does not become a professional home because recruiting says the right things. It becomes one when purpose stops being a message and starts becoming the lived experience.

That means purpose must shape how decisions are made, how people are managed, what gets praised, what gets corrected, who gets hired, who gets promoted, and what behavior is tolerated.

The only way to make purpose that powerful is to put it in writing. If it is not written, it cannot be consistently communicated or understood the same way by everyone over time. People fill in blanks, managers improvise, and the meaning devolves into individual interpretation.

Written purpose gives the organization something stable to communicate, demonstrate, reinforce, and use. Without it, the promises candidates hear and the reality employees experience will not match.

Over the next three issues, I’ll break this staffing problem into three distinct challenges: attracting, converting, and keeping the right people.

First, attracting — how to make the right people notice you and feel enough pull to engage.

Then, converting — how to move them from interest to commitment without reducing the opportunity to a transaction.

Finally, keeping — how to make sure the purpose that attracted them becomes the experience that keeps them.

For now, start with the uncomfortable question:

If the people you need do not need you, what are you giving them that makes them want to care?

You don’t create commitment overnight. You build it one decision at a time. If you’re ready to find out where your staffing problem really starts—and how to fix it—schedule your 20-minute discovery session with me. You’ll leave with a clearer view of where attraction begins, where commitment breaks, and what to do next before the people you need decide they do not need you.

Questions? Email larry@mandelberg.biz. Want a copy of my book/framework? Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide — how to survive success and thrive in good times and bad

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