What Ramp, Apollo and PR figured out before we did

I spend a lot of my day on LinkedIn. It is still the best place I know to see what our industry is actually talking about, and I say that as someone in the jobs business who has plenty of complaints about the platform.

Because I came out of journalism, my feed is split down the middle. Half of it is recruiting and employer brand people. The other half is media and marketing people.

And lately those two halves have been telling the same story without noticing each other.

The Wall Street Journal ran an analysis showing the share of US LinkedIn job postings including the word "storyteller" doubled in a year, to roughly 50,000 listings in marketing and more than 20,000 in media and communications.

Executives said "storyteller" or "storytelling" on earnings calls 469 times last year, up from 147 times in 2015.

Ramp is hiring a Head of Content and the listing says outright that the company is building a media brand and not a content calendar. Apollo posted an Editorial Director role to run an operation at the pace of a newsroom and asked for fifteen years of business or financial journalism.

A survey of 367 editors by recruiter Chandra Turner found 66% have already left traditional media for content and communications and marketing roles inside companies.

The talent moved because the economics moved first. Earned media shrank, trade publications consolidated, and companies decided to publish for themselves.

Employer brand is being rethought right now and you can feel it. Career site content is back on the agenda, people are talking seriously about employees as creators and there is real conversation about how employers show up when a candidate asks AI about them.

So both halves of my feed have landed on the same idea, which is that you have to own your own channel.

Here is my frustration: Marketing and comms and PR are running this playbook now, and careers teams are watching it happen and then translating it into our world a year behind.

The lesson those teams learned first is that you use what you already own to build something nobody can take from you. Your data, your people, your audience.

We have all of that. We just spend the budget renting reach instead.

The highest leverage thing you can do this quarter is to market to the people who already know who you are.

They are sitting in your CRM and your ATS right now. Past applicants and silver medalists and alumni and people who opted in once and then went quiet, and you already paid to acquire every one of them.

Send them something. Just not a static job alert.

Send a newsletter with actual value in it. What is happening in their field, what changed in your organization, what a career path there looks like, and yes, the open roles.

This is the part and step I think gets missed.

Publish that issue on your career site as a living archive. Repost pieces of it on LinkedIn.

Now the thing you built to reactivate candidates is also indexable content on your own domain, and that content is what builds the authority that decides whether you get named when someone asks AI where to work in your industry.

One piece of work, three jobs. Most companies treat the talent community and the career site as two budgets owned by two different people.

Teams are being asked to do more with less, so I want to be clear that this does not require hiring a newsroom.

You can train on what you already have. Your EVP work, your employee spotlights, your blog posts, your video, your social, etc. It sounds like you because it was built from you.

We do this ourselves with Nurse Ascent, our nursing community, I do it with this newsletter, and we are doing it now for employers who know their database is their most underused asset.

Your company is already a media company. The only question is whether anyone is running it.

If you want to talk through what this would look like with the candidates already sitting in your ATS, reply to this and tell me what you are working with. Happy to think it through with you.

Best,
Summer Delaney
CollabWORK Founder and CEO

• The unwritten rules of AI visibility — Storyarb's Jen Levisen built this out of an interview with Noah Greenberg at Stacker, and it reduces the whole AI visibility question down to one line, which is whether the internet in aggregate treats your brand as an authority. The argument that you earn the right to talk about your product by not talking about your product is the same one I am making here, just aimed at marketers instead of TA. The four-step test at the end takes a weekend and does not require a budget, and Noah's framing of his own LinkedIn presence as the cheap version of buying The Hustle is the best articulation I have seen of why individual voices carry the weight they do right now.

• How Slack Is Helping Marketers And Creators Land Deals — Forbes looks at how marketers and creators are landing clients, campaigns and partnership deals inside free Slack communities. This is the Hidden Job Market, described from the other side of the table. Every time I post about this on TikTok it outperforms everything else I make, because most people still have no idea these rooms exist or that most of them are free to join. If your candidates are finding work this way, that is where your roles should be.

• Peak Workforce — John Sumser makes the case that the American workforce peaked in November 2025 at 171.5 million and started shrinking, which he says has not happened outside a recession in the modern record. Net immigration collapsed to 410,000 in 2025 from more than three million at the peak two years earlier, and deaths pass births around 2030. His conclusion for anyone who staffs something is that supply is now the constraint rather than demand, and that the next decade looks less like a war for talent and more like violent weather, with scarcity in care work and the trades sitting right next to surplus in routine cognitive work.

CollabWORK is hiring visibility infrastructure. We help employers get found, distributed, and re-engaged across the channels that now define how candidates actually discover jobs: AI search, professional communities and their own talent networks.

Three products, one thesis.

• Employer AI Discoverability monitors how you show up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs, and optimizes your job descriptions and XML feeds so you can actually be surfaced by the models candidates are searching.

• Community Distribution places roles inside 500+ vetted newsletters and communities including Morning Brew and 6AM City, reaching over 14 million professionals.

• Talent Community Activation turns the dormant ATS and CRM data you've already paid for into a living pipeline.

The companies winning at hiring right now aren't the ones with the biggest job boards budget. They're the ones showing up where great candidates actually are.

Find time to learn more. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X.