By Sara Robinson, Accelerated Growth Programme PR and Communications Coach
Most growing businesses think about PR and profile as a sales tool. Press coverage can bring in customers, awards can help win contracts, while a strong LinkedIn presence builds trust with clients. All true. But there's a second audience reading everything you publish and it's the people you're trying to hire.
The scale of this is bigger than most business leaders realise. Research from LinkedIn and Indeed puts the share of candidates who research a company's reputation before applying at around 75%, rising to 92% before they'll accept an offer. A strong, well-managed reputation is also linked to materially lower hiring costs, with some studies putting the reduction in cost-per-hire as high as 43%. Most of your future hires have already formed a view of your business before you post a job advert, let alone meet them.
For high-growth businesses, recruitment is often the biggest bottleneck to scaling. You can have the funding, the product and the ambition and still stall because you can't find the right people fast enough. Comms won't fix that on its own, but it's a lever most businesses aren't pulling.
You're already being vetted before the interview starts
Before anyone applies for a role, they look you up. They check your website, your LinkedIn, any press coverage reviews from current or former staff. What they find shapes whether they apply at all and what they expect if they do.
If that search turns up nothing beyond a sparse website and a LinkedIn page that hasn't posted in six months, you've told them something, even if it wasn't your intention. Silence can read as stagnant. A business that's visibly growing, telling its story and showing up consistently in the press signals momentum.
Your growth story is your strongest hiring pitch.
The story you tell to win customers and investment is often the exact same story that makes someone want to work for you. Growth, ambition, traction and a clear sense of direction appeal to strong candidates just as much as they appeal to buyers.
Founders sometimes treat press coverage, award entries or case studies as separate from recruitment, as something the marketing or PR team handles. But when a journalist writes about your funding round, or you win an industry award, that coverage does double duty. It lands in front of people who might buy from you, and people who might want to join you.
The businesses that get the most value from this don't just let it happen passively. They actively share coverage and wins with a recruitment lens: reposting press mentions with a note about the team behind them, using award shortlistings as content that shows candidates what the business values and linking to case studies from job adverts so applicants can see real proof of impact before they even speak to you.
Making your comms work harder for hiring
A few practical ways to connect your profile-building work to recruitment:
- Show the people, not just the results. A case study about a client win is stronger with a line about the team that delivered it. Candidates want to see themselves in your business, not just your output.
- Use your leadership team's visibility deliberately. If one of your team speaks at an event or is quoted in the press, that's a signal to candidates about the calibre of people they'd be working alongside.
- Keep your channels alive between big announcements. You don't need news every week, but a LinkedIn page that only posts for a funding round or award looks inactive the rest of the time, exactly when a candidate might be checking.
- Ask new hires what they saw. When someone joins, ask what made them apply and what they noticed about your public profile beforehand. It's the fastest way to find out whether your comms is building your employer brand.
If you're already investing time in PR and profile-building, the marginal cost of pointing some of that towards recruitment is small. The return - a tighter, more engaged candidate pool who already want to be part of your story - can be significant.