You have probably accepted, by now, that winning the right clients takes work. That you cannot just be good and wait. That a stranger who has never met you needs a reason to choose you over the four firms who do the same thing and say it the same way. Fine. You have made your peace with that fight. Here is the part you have not noticed. You are having the identical fight at a second door, losing it just as often, and filing it under a completely different heading. You call it a sales problem when it costs you a client. You call it a staffing problem when it costs you a hire. It is one problem. A business a stranger can only compare on price attracts the clients who only care about price and the workers nobody better would take, and those are not two facts. They are the same fact, walking in through two doors.
The job ad is a mirror
Go and read the last job you posted. Not the role. The ad. Most of them are a list of duties, a list of requirements, and a rate. What's missing is the one thing that would make a good person stop scrolling: any reason this job, at this place, is different from the same job at the firm down the road. The ad cannot say it, because the business has never worked out how to say it to anyone. The silence you hand clients and the silence you hand candidates come from the same empty space.
And the effect is identical. When the only thing a reader can see is the number, the only people who apply are the people shopping the number. You wrote an ad that filters for exactly the person you complain about hiring, in the same way your website filters for exactly the client you complain about winning. The mirror is unkind but it is accurate. If your ad could have been posted by any of your competitors with the logo swapped, your business reads, to the best person who saw it, as interchangeable. They kept scrolling. They always will.
Two doors, one position
A security firm I work with carries both symptoms at once, which is why it is useful. On one side, it loses tenders to cheaper outfits whose guards are not accredited and, often enough, are asleep on the job. On the other, it could not fill ten shifts on a single Saturday. The founder treats these as two fires in two different rooms. Win more work. Find more guards. Two plans, two headaches, two things keeping him up.
They are the same fire. A firm that the market can only read as roughly-the-cheap-option gets applied to by the guards the accredited firms already passed on, for the same reason it gets enquiries from the clients the better firms already priced out. The position, broad and undefended, sorts everyone who arrives onto one axis. Clients arrive and sort on price. Workers arrive and sort on pay. The good ones on both sides, the client who will pay for a licensed guard and the guard who takes the licence seriously, have no way to tell this firm apart from the bargain one, so they go where the difference is legible. You are not short of guards. You are short of a reason for the right guard to pick you.
The client who only wants cheap and the worker nobody else would take arrive for the same reason. You gave neither of them anything else to go on. — on the two doors
This is what makes a weak position so expensive, and so hard to see. It does not send you one bill. It sends you two, from two departments, in two different currencies, and nothing on either invoice says the word positioning. So you solve them separately, forever, and they regrow every quarter.
Good people pick a story
The best person for any job you are hiring has options. That is what makes them the best person. They are not choosing you over unemployment. They are choosing you over two or three other places that would also pay them, and at that level pay is roughly a wash, so pay is not what decides it. What decides it is whether they can tell what they would be joining. Whether the place stands for something they want to be part of, or near, or known for. A position is the thing that lets a stranger believe in you before they have any proof, and a candidate is just a stranger you are trying to recruit instead of sell to. The mechanism does not change because the door has a different sign on it.
Give a good person a clear story and a fair number and you will beat a vague competitor offering slightly more money, because people do not actually want to be well-paid at a place that stands for nothing. They want to be able to say where they work and have it mean something. Hand them a duties list and a rate and you have told them, truthfully, that the job means nothing in particular, and the only ones who sign up for a job that means nothing in particular are the ones who could not get the job that did.
Shifts one firm could not fill on a single Saturday. Not a labour shortage in the city. A shortage of any reason for the better guard to choose this firm over the one paying the same.
Your version is quieter
For a security firm it shows up loudly, in empty shifts and lost bids. For most founders the same thing is quieter, and it hides for years, because it never looks like a crisis. You fill the role. Someone always needs a job. But the person you get is the person you then have to manage closely, the one who needs the thing spelled out, the one who leaves inside a year the moment a place with an actual identity makes an offer. The A-players you would have killed to hire never applied at all, and you never knew, because an application that does not arrive leaves no trace.
So you conclude, reasonably, that good people are just hard to find, the way you concluded that good clients are just hard to win. Both conclusions are wrong in the same specific way. The people are out there. They are choosing legible places over illegible ones, at both doors, every time. A business nobody can describe in a sentence is not unlucky with clients and unlucky with staff. It is illegible, and illegibility costs you the same thing twice.
One thing to do this week
Take your last job ad and read it as the best person who could possibly do that job. Someone with options, who is already employed, who does not need you. Ask one question of it: could they have told, from this, why here and not anywhere else? Not the salary. The reason. If the honest answer is no, you have not found a recruitment agency yet. You have found your positioning problem again, wearing a different coat, at the other door.
Then write the sentence you wish the ad had opened with: what this business actually is, who it is for, and what it refuses to be, said plainly enough that the right person would lean in and the wrong one would not bother. It is the same sentence your clients needed. That is the tell. One sentence, pulled out of what the business has genuinely proved, fixes both doors at once, which is exactly why it is so hard to write about yourself and worth so much when it is finally right.
Pulling that sentence out of your own business is the hard part, because the thing that makes you worth choosing, by a client or by a hire, is the thing you are too close to still see. That is the whole job of the Brand Clarity Workshop. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed. Book it at kevaltanna.com/brand-clarity-workshop.