I skipped Vegas this year. Here's what a journalism and nursing conference taught me about hiring

Hi everyone,

This year I made a deliberate call to skip UNLEASH and Transform and head to Chicago instead this week.

Not for an HR conference. For two that had nothing to do with recruiting: ONA, the Online News Association, and AONL, the American Association of Nurse Leaders. Both happened to be in the same city the same week, so I did both.

I came back with more useful signal on the future of talent acquisition than I usually bring home from the shows I'm supposed to be at. Below are some headlines and learnings.

A central tension at ONA: legacy news organizations are authoritative. They do the reporting, they get the facts right, they have editors and lawyers and standards. And audiences, especially younger ones, increasingly don't trust them.

These consumers trust people: individual creators who have a point of view, speak like humans, and actually engage with their communities. Next Gen News 2 found young audiences don't avoid news. They avoid institutions. When they want to go deeper on a story, they leave the homepage and go find a person explaining it on YouTube or Reddit or in a newsletter.

The panel wasn't really about journalism. It was about what happens when broadcast stops working and relationship becomes the only currency that converts.

Swap "news organization" for "employer brand" and you have the exact same problem. A polished career page, a well-produced culture video, a Glassdoor response strategy. That's broadcast. It's one way. And candidates, especially the ones you're actually trying to reach, are going somewhere else to form their opinion before they ever apply.

The employers winning on trust right now look less like media companies and more like creators: a consistent voice, a point of view, real people talking about what it's actually like to work there.

At AONL, CNOs and workforce leaders were working through the hardest staffing problems in any industry: rural hospitals, five generations in one workforce and 40% of nurses expected to leave the profession in the next few years.

What struck me wasn't the crisis. It was the infrastructure they've built in response.

One hospital system in North Carolina started embedding staff inside elementary schools in 2017. Their first graduating class of high school students last year came out with CNA certifications, dual enrollment college credits and in some cases EMT licenses before they walked across the stage. Those kids are now pipeline. A health system that started from kindergarten and created a direct path to employment before a job ever opened up.

On the retention side: a CNO at a small upstate New York system described building a tiered internal float pool that grew from 60 nurses to over 120 in its first year. They stopped paying 30-40% agency markups by creating a program nurses actually wanted to join. Flexible tiers, competitive pay and the option to work across multiple facilities or stay put. The float pool now covers over 5,500 hours a month that used to go to agency spend.

The through-line in both cases isn't the tactic. It's the orientation. These teams stopped waiting for candidates to find them and built infrastructure to own the relationship long before a job opened up.

That's the same conversation I've been having with TA leaders all year, just under different vocabulary. The database you already have. The candidates who opted in and went quiet. The communication strategy that never existed after the "we'll keep your resume on file" email.

I walked both conference floors talking to recruiters, CNOs, nursing school deans, journalists, and media executives.

Nobody was talking about job boards as a growth strategy. They were talking about relationships, trust and content that earns attention rather than buying it.

Audiences you build and own instead of rent.

The tools that dominated the last decade (sponsored listings, programmatic job ads, third-party job boards, etc.) are distribution plays. They can work, but they don't compound and they don't create loyalty. Every dollar you spend stops the moment you stop spending it.

The teams building something durable are doing it the same way those healthcare systems and innovative media companies are: showing up consistently, creating something worth paying attention to and treating their pipeline like a community instead of a database.

If you want to talk through what that looks like for your org, reply to this email. We're working with employers on three things right now: getting found in AI search through our Employer AI Discoverability monitoring, getting distributed across our 500+ community and newsletter network, and helping teams activate the candidates already in their ATS or CRM through content-first talent communities. Reply and I'll walk you through which piece makes the most sense to start with.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

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