Talk the Walk. Innovation from Iteration, pt 2

Greg Wyatt • March 5, 2026

A new challenge in any sort of recruitment is that you must now assume your candidates will think:


is this fake

is this a scam

are there any humans at the other end?


Whether you promote your recruitment publicly on a job board or contact someone by phone, email, voice note, DM, you need to consider this.


Okay, semaphore and carrier pigeons remain safe.


While this challenge is new, the answers are not, and often cater to candidate resentment through candour, respect and appropriate transparency - better messaging that's unrelated to automation.


You can find out exactly what works best for your audience, by going to Gemba.


Talk the walk

February 2023


Gemba is Japanese for ‘the actual place’.


Coined by Toyota and closely linked to ‘Genchi Genbutsu’, a phrase I regularly throw at my children – ‘see for yourself!’


Clearly, Toyota doesn’t like arguing with people whose strong views are based on assumptions, although my issues relate mainly to a lack of chocolate in the snack cupboard.


Gemba is a powerful concept because it gives managers access to the actual work and challenges that are inherent to their projects, and therefore where they can find efficiency and improve productivity. While linking the coal face to leadership in a way that influences strategy.


Although Toyota’s Gemba is a car factory floor, it’s been commonly adopted across industries and relates to anywhere where the work is done and value created.


The University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre applied Gemba to reduce Hospital Acquired Infections, applying root cause analysis to patient rooms to identify the cause of these infections. It turned out to be poorly cleaned medical equipment.


Better cleaning meant fewer infections to treat.


Would the alternative have been to accept the infections and invest in better treatment?


Retail stores, construction sites, and even prisons – Gemba is applicable in any working environment.


I’ve applied Genchi Genbutsu and Gemba throughout my recruitment career, learning through the experiences of candidates and hiring processes.


In recruitment, there are many types of Gemba.


The one that springs to mind is your hiring team – whether you are an agency, TA, HR or hiring lead.


This type of Gemba is individualistic, and you can go have a chat with your team right now, listen to them, and find pragmatic areas for improvement.


However, I’m more interested in systemic improvement, for the purpose of this email, and there are a few types of Gemba that we can all benefit from, two of which I’ve already mentioned.


Any aspect of a hiring system that creates an experience has a Gemba.


By working with candidates and employers (hiring managers and in partnership with HR / TA), I’ve learnt many strategic, tactical and execution improvements from finding solutions to common problems.


The most helpful Gemba in recent memory is my work with executive job seekers since the pandemic. Around 800 conversations with people I will rarely be able to help directly, but who have given me much insight into the common issues job seekers face outside of my hiring process.


It’s startling how much you can learn by talking to people in the ‘ecosystem’ who aren’t customers. It’s something I’d recommend any recruiter do and has the added benefit of helping others.


You may think out-of-sight, out-of-mind, job seekers aren’t at your coal face; however, they regularly interact with the coal face of the recruitment industry in unsuccessfully looking for work.


Their pain points are valuable areas of insight we can take advantage of, to create better experiences all around.


Go to your Gemba and you will find areas you can improve.


(Note, March 2026: if you've followed this newsletter through the AiDE framework, you'll already have seen some of these improvements in practice. Such as Warts and All, Walk a Mile, and Trust Me. All of the series is in some way are built on lessons from the Gemba)


What can you learn about the experiences your customers have of your hiring process?


For an employer, this will be every touchpoint in your recruitment process – from your adverts and ATS, to your interviews and interview confirmations, to your offer and rejection process, and everything else.


You may think you have an excellent process, but what do your customers think?


Have you tried applying through your own ATS as a dummy candidate? What did that feel like?


How about your own experiences with your recruitment process?


If you’re having a poor experience with your agency suppliers, what root cause analysis have you done to find out the real reasons?


Or are you stuck in a Region Beta paradox, where things aren’t quite bad enough to make a change, even though your experience is shoddy enough to complain about?


There’s a simple way to find out about which experiences can lead to improvement – talk to the people that have them.


And not just new starters delighted to be in a new role. What about those you rejected?


Or those that never applied… what if you could find out why, and apply that learning to make your process more attractive? (Answers to which I found in my exec job seeker calls)


I’d argue if you build your recruitment process from your Gemba it will allow you a uniquely fit-for-purpose approach for your hiring process.


Invest in systems, technology, tools and processes based on the Gemba, rather than what others may tell you that you need.


This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to good consultants who can help you overcome the problems you don’t know you don’t know.


Just that you should expect their consultation to be built on your Gemba, rather than the sale of a solution for the solution’s sake.


Not so easy if you aren’t an employer that has the agency to make change.


The next edition is on how Stockholm Syndrome and Region Beta paradox intersect to explain candidate behaviour.


Thanks for reading.

Greg

Introduction to personal branding

By Greg Wyatt • March 30, 2026
What follows is Chapter 39 of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . It's 10 months old, so surely the algorithm has moved on right? Indeed, my own content performance has tanked if you compare 2026 to 2025. Around 12 million views of my content last year, while if I extrapolate my year to date performance, it looks like a little shy of 640,000 views. My LinkedIn feed is quieter, yet real life relevant conversations go from strength to strength, many of which stem from my content. Look, I don't love the term, but I am a fan of putting your message out there, across multiple means, so that your most relevant audience might become aware of you. And perhaps your relevant audience is an audience of one, a person who can put you nearer that job. Which is the only algorithm you need. This is a three part series, with part 2 on " Content strategy and philosophy " and part 3 on " A flair post ". Click on the links for the unedited versions on Substack. 39 - Introduction to personal branding Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a free marketing platform, where you can build a reputation through the words of your posts, comments and messages. Personal branding is a viable tactic as part of a multi-channel approach to your job search and it can bring opportunities to you. I'll start off by saying I'm not a fan of the term personal branding. It can lead to make-work which can even get in the way of what you should be doing. Writing and using content to create experiences that support a job search is a great idea and calling it personal branding - as a discrete activity - isn’t a bad thing. I expect there are many mediums through which you can build a personal brand. I'll focus on LinkedIn because of how entrenched it is in other job search activities. What a personal brand is For businesspeople the idea is that by building awareness of your personality, lifestyle and what you're promoting, you also build trust. So that when people are ready to buy, they'll buy your products. The brand might be personal. The goal is sales. When you see personal branding on LinkedIn it’s often a business that promotes their services through the account of the author. ‘Here’s my puppy, buy my stuff.’ Take note that the target audience for these advice posts is the businesspeople above. And these posts often seek to part them from their money. Your goals are similar. If there’s a commercial outcome you want, it’s likely a single job, not a throughput of leads. You’ll also see that controversial content gets huge engagement and can also repel readers. If you need a job, what’s the danger of writing overly spicy content? Could a reader make a decision against you based on your words? How much you need any job should inform the experience you want to create for your readers. How it sits in your wider job search Publishing content is about raising awareness and starting conversations with the right people. This can be your profile, written posts, newsletters, (bestselling) career breakdown kits, videos, you name it - anything you can become known for. In many ways the hierarchy of relationships your content appeals to is the same as with networking. Content can be publishing posts, commenting on the posts of others, sending direct messages. I’d argue even your applications and interviews are part of your personal brand. I think of LinkedIn posts like a plumber’s van driving around town. Most of the time you’ll disregard the van unless it cuts you up with noxious fumes. When you have a leaky pipe, you’ll surely take note of their number. It can support an application if a hiring manager decides to surreptitiously stalk your profile. And it can work against you if it suggests problem behaviour. A good balance for content is the poster in my daughters’ primary school from a few years back: THINK. Is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind? Achieve those five points and content will rarely work against your job search. Content should be consistent with your wider activity. Which means that everything people (potential employers) experience of you is a complementary and non-contradictory message. Content that contradicts your CV or cover letter may lead to red flags, whether that’s fair or not. Content should be intentional. HOW TO GO viral, and why you shouldn’t Anyone who writes content will enjoy the sweet, sweet flow of dopamine when you see reactions and comments trickle in. Such as that first flair post announcing you are available to help your next employer with examples of your achievements and what you are looking for. Do that and you’ll get loads of engagement. Why haven’t you done it yet? Tag me in and I’ll support you. Or you can do what most people do and say, ‘I’m sorry to announce I’ve lost my job, please help’ and that will get loads too. Because it is relevant and relatable to fellow job seekers, recruiters and sympathisers. Then you feel the soul-crushing defeat of a well-thought-out post, highlighting a problem in your industry, with tumbleweed to follow. Both types of content have a place. That tumbleweed post is relevant and relatable to a niche audience. I try to take a land and expand approach to content - job seeker advice, recruitment advice and stories, ponderings and satire, which I use to tackle topics from different directions. Over the past three years I’ve had between 3m to 11m views of my posts and I’ve gained a bit of business through them too. What I don’t do is try to go viral anymore. Because when I have gone viral with a few 1m impression posts, it’s taken weeks to extricate myself from them and there hasn’t been real benefit. I find my tumbleweed posts start better conversations from lurkers - those that never engage publicly. I promised you I’d show you how to go viral. Here you go. Relevance + relatability + readability + entitlement. Maybe add a selfie. If that seems too simple, search for this sentence on LinkedIn: “An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently.” You’ll need to use the double speech mark to search on the phrase, and rank by Posts. ‘Does it really work?’ asked Charles. I told him to try it as an experiment. He rarely got more than a few hundred impressions per post. 170,000 impressions, 2,000 reactions. Pretty viral for a first timer. It is the wrong path. What do these posts actually say? Who are they aimed at? And if they don’t appeal to people who can help you reach your objective, what’s the point? 

Nothing but the truth. Innovation from Iteration, pt 4

By Greg Wyatt • March 26, 2026
I was tempted to use another Tom Cruise AI image for this article, but his hands ended up looking like feet, which wasn't a true representation of him. Probably not fair to use AI in this way either, stealing copyrighted material without permission. And so I use this AI 'stock image' instead, which is probably also highly unethical, but feels more suitable and sufficient . Anyway here's an article about why the same principles are crucial for good recruitment: ‘True and Fair’ is an accountancy concept that lies at the heart of reporting, and can be applied effectively in recruitment. Its meaning is that any financial statement made about a company should accurately and completely represent its financial position and performance. The role of auditing is to confirm that documentation meets this definition. Do so and everyone knows what they are dealing with. HMRC, shareholders, customers, suppliers, employees – useful, and in many cases necessary, to have access to a true and fair view of a company’s accounts. Can something be true and not fair? In 2001, Enron went bust, a huge scandal with real-life repercussions that led to new legislation in the US. Their accounts were true, in that they conformed with the required laws and standards. However they had an incredibly complex reporting structure which made it impossible to see the overwhelming debt they had. Poof! Bye-bye a $100bn company when this all came out in the wash. How about fair but not true? This can happen if a situation is described which gives a fair picture but lacks accuracy. An example here could be the UK politician who HMRC deemed behaved fairly but made errors in his tax reporting. Only a few million quid plus penalty. What types of recruitment documentation does this apply to? Three key ones that spring to mind (although there’s no reason it can’t be applied everywhere): The job description. The job advertisement. The CV. If these three documents were always a true and fair representation of either a job or a candidate, you’d interview and hire better candidates who stick around longer. With the caveat that these documents should also be ‘suitable and sufficient’, if you remember last week's edition. Documents are the first step in a recruitment process, relating to a decision to apply and the decision to interview. Is it not the case, that the second most common complaint in recruitment is “not what we expected”? Therefore, if we nipped this complaint in the bud, with true and fair documentation, wouldn’t life be better for everyone in the recruitment process? What does true and fair mean in recruitment documentation? I think it has to cover three points. 1/ factually correct 2/ shows context suitably 3/ describes sufficiently An immediate objection might be that job descriptions are always true and fair, but I’d argue this is actually rarely the case. If you recruit for a new role, do you audit your job description against the current context? If you have a generic job family description does it show the specific day-to-day duties of a role? Have things changed in the current role that makes it different to the last time you recruited? A common scenario in recruitment is that Greg resigns, and the hiring manager says “we’d love someone just like Greg”. Yet if Greg resigned, wouldn’t someone just like Greg be at risk of resigning for the same reasons in future? Would now-Greg have applied for the same role that then-Greg applied for? Which definition of Greg is the true and fair one you’d hire? It feels strange writing my name like this. There are lots of different situations in which a job description that was true and fair a few years ago is no longer so. The only way to ensure it is true and fair, is to audit documentation prior to going live. You may think a fully representative and accurate contextual analysis is too time-consuming for most vacancies, especially where it doesn’t actually matter if there is some inaccuracy. “Oh yeah, that’s not relevant anymore”. But if you have a key hire that can make a difference in your business, ‘true and fair’ should be the starting point, each and every time. If you have a systematic process that finds truth and fairness, you’ll see the benefit of applying the same across any vacancy – for the reason that the time invested at the outset is offset by interviewing fewer unsuitable candidates and wasting less time and resources overall. And what should be the more important reason of better recruitment outcomes. For any project I take on, this is the first step – getting the documentation in order. Get it right and everything flows from there. It’s a key reason behind my nearly 100% fill rate. It’s also one of the reasons my average tenure is over 4 years for key hires. These achievements don’t come down to chance. They come from my process. If you've forgotten why suitability and sufficiency is the other pillar, here's an example that isn't suitable: Nineteen experiential bullet points might be true and fair but will also encourage ideal candidates to run away screaming. See you next time. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: - commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment (available for no more than two vacancies) - manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client. This can be a large as end-to-end delivery of a programme of vacancies, or as small as writing one job advert for a key hire- recruitment strategy setting - outplacement support