1 Million Worker Shortage: How Bad Job Marketing Is Killing the Trades

Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice

In this episode of Right About Now, Nicole Feenstra, CEO and founder of the DNA Agency, discusses how poor job marketing is exacerbating the

Key takeaways

• Employers must reframe job opportunities as meaningful narratives instead of generic postings.
• It takes an average of 21 exposures for someone to act on a message, emphasizing the need for consistent storytelling.

Main topics

• Workforce shortage in skilled trades
• Employer branding and storytelling

Notable quotes

"You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it."

"How do you make welding sexy? How do you make engineering sexy?"

Conclusion

The solution to the worker shortage lies not in more jobs but in better

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) On today's episode of Right About Now, I talk to Nicole Feenstra. She is the CEO and founder of the DNA Agency, the DNA of hiring. Yeah, that's right. We got to market our positions better. Everybody wonders why you can't hire good people. You know why you don't hire good people? You don't market it the right way. We talk about why work shouldn't be called work. It should be called opportunity. And today is your opportunity right Speaker 2 (0:22) here, right now. Speaker 2 (0:25) You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Speaker 3 (0:52) What's up, Nicole? Welcome to Right About Now. Speaker 1 (0:55) Thank you. Nice to see you. Good Speaker 3 (0:57) to see you. We have mutual friends. I like what I've read. I love storytelling. So I'm hoping we get into all that today. Speaker 1 (1:05) Okay, I'm ready. Let's do it. Speaker 3 (1:08) Where are we at today, Nicole? Speaker 1 (1:10) West Hollywood, California. There Speaker 3 (1:12) we go. Hollywood. Speaker 1 (1:14) Hollywood. What's Speaker 3 (1:15) happening in West Hollywood in 2026? Speaker 1 (1:18) Goodness me. You know, I just moved here. I was in the I was affected by the Eaton fire in January of 25. So I've been in Pasadena for a really long time and just thought, you know, I'm going to I'm going to go right into the belly of the beast. I'm going to go right in the center of the city and see how it is. It's good. The roads are not as good as Pasadena, I will say. But there's a lot more to do. Speaker 3 (1:38) Yeah. Yeah. So where do we grow up? Do we grow up in California? Speaker 1 (1:42) Mostly Houston. OK. Texas. All Speaker 3 (1:45) right. Texas. There we go. Now you're getting towards our territory. We're in South Carolina. Speaker 1 (1:49) I saw that. I saw that. Speaker 3 (1:52) Yeah. My accent gives at least half of it away. You know, this guy's from the South, but you're not exactly sure. Speaker 1 (1:58) No, I Speaker 3 (1:59) like Speaker 1 (2:00) to say I had a I had a I had like Boston nuns that that taught me in Houston and there was no fix in or. any of that. So when I got to California, they didn't think I really sounded that Texas, except when I think all. Speaker 3 (2:14) Nicole, what are we up to? Talk to me about the DNA agency. Speaker 1 (2:18) Yeah, you know, we're sort of, we're a full service agency, but we have been doing a lot of consulting around workforce development and sort of fixing large systemic problems like workforce development, a lot of the stuff around the recovery. So we've really been doing a lot. with regards to uncomplicating very complicated things. Workforce development can be very complicated. There's a lot of steps in it. Recovery when you're coming back out of a fire or disaster is really complicated. So we really have specialized in finding ways to simplify the messaging for the people who need to find the solutions around whatever the subject is, whether it's jobs or getting back into their home after a fire or any other disaster. We figure out sort of where they... need to see things and simplify the messages and just make sure they see them. Speaker 3 (3:09) So I hear the DNA agency and I was like, this is a really creative like HR company. Like someone's finally figured out how to market HR, you know? Speaker 1 (3:19) Well, you know, and our website has, you know, all sorts of DNA kind of, you know, we definitely people are like, are you the science company? We are a little like I like to say we're a little science, a little art, you know? I think, you know, you've been in marketing a long time. Anybody that's been in digital advertising for any amount of time, it's, you know, there's a lot of, there's number crunching, but my heart is always in story. Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:46) I spent the first half, first half of my first half of my career on the brand and analog side. And then the second half, and it's, you know, it was more of the art for sure. And then it got into, you know, the storytelling was always there. But then with digital and digital marketing certainly became more. data technical focused but I feel like I always I've always believed this why I like what I was reading about what you guys are doing Nicole like you know even with you know they have analysis paralysis from all the data and at the end of the day you still got to take an action at the end of the day people buy from people and you need to tell them stories and make them understand things and sometimes the data can it doesn't get in the way of that but I think You can get lost in conversions and metrics that, and I'm not saying they don't matter, but it just, that's been a little bit of the maddening part of it from someone that came up in the branding and storytelling side that, you know, we're so focused on an action today versus building something over time, which takes repetitive messages and storytelling to do. Where do you fall in that camp? Speaker 1 (4:54) You know, I found a data point that was from well before the Internet that said it takes 21 times for somebody to see something before they'll do something. And that data came from before the 1900s. Speaker 2 (5:08) So Speaker 1 (5:08) well before we got inundated with all of the amount of dog videos that I see on my feed, just that alone. And so I think it is, you know, when you think about where people are seeing and what they're seeing, I think you're right. I think people really need to see something that means something to them and sort of takes them through a journey because it is going to take them a lot of. times, especially when they're not familiar with whatever the thing is. And when I talk about workforce development, I talk about the fact that we've had maybe a 70-year bad PR campaign around work. You know, it's always been how quickly can you retire? How quickly can you not work? You know, how quickly can you get rich and be done with work? And I think we've lost the idea of the value of work. the joy that can come from doing something you're really good at, doing something that gives you a sense of accomplishment. I saw a TED Talk, it was, gosh, I think like mid-2000s, Mike Rowe about work. And, you know, he was talking about like a trash collector can sometimes be happier than the guy in the corner office. And it's an interesting conundrum. You know, he was doing these shows. with people doing these really dirty jobs. And so we had these data points from having worked with people. And so I'm really interested from a story standpoint in like the value of work. It's something that's gotten me very like jazzed as of late. Like, how do you make jobs sexy is really the conversation I have with my team. How do you make welding sexy? How do you make engineering sexy? How do you make IT sexy? How do you make construction sexy? you know, my team will be like, oh, right, we want to make it sexy. I'm like, just make it fun. Make it cool. You know, make it something that somebody would want to do. Speaker 3 (6:57) Today's episode is sponsored by Vinted. I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about my closet. Honestly, I rotate through the same five shirts, a couple pairs of jeans and maybe two jackets. But somehow my closet was still packed. So I finally went through everything and found a bunch of clothes I hadn't worn in forever. Instead of putting them back and telling myself I'd wear them someday, I listed a few on Vinted. the secondhand marketplace app. Vinted was actually really simple to use. Getting the items listed didn't take much time. And when something sold, Vinted created the prepaid shipping label for me. I just packed it up and sent it out. And Vinted has no seller fees. So I kept everything I earned. Once that first item sold, I went back through another drawer and found even more stuff to list. It changes how you look at the clothes sitting around your house. What used to feel like clutter was suddenly extra money I could put towards something I actually wanted. Now I have more closet space, a little extra money, and I'm not hanging on to clothes I know I'm never going to wear again. Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn. This episode of Right About Now is brought to you by Shopify. We talk a lot on this show about entrepreneurship and what it actually takes to turn an idea into a real business. In my experience, one of the hardest parts... is simply deciding to start when you know you don't have everything figured out yet. That was true when I was building my storefront. I knew what I wanted the business to become, but I didn't know how to handle every part of getting it online. Shopify gave me a place to start with everything I needed already there from day one. I was able to launch my store and start selling in a few simple steps. Shopify's design templates and AI site builder made setting up my storefront easy. While Sidekick AI helped me along the way, ShopPay also gives customers the easiest checkout on the market. Once the business is running, the challenge becomes keeping up with everything. Shopify helps me stay up to date with my business even when the rest of my schedule gets busy. That means my storefront can remain an active part of how I run the business instead of becoming one more thing I have to manage. If you've been sitting on a business idea because you don't know how to do every part of it yet, you don't need to have all the answers before you begin. You just need the right place to start. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash Ryan. That's shopify.com slash Ryan. You said something really interesting, Nicole, that I want to kind of shine a light on. And I'd never, I guess, you know, we all think about the things that we think about because they're in our lane. And, you know, I'd like to think I'm introspective or even like, you know, trying to decipher what different things are. We have always sort of put work in this place where it had to earn its way out of being negative from the very beginning. And that is a terrible thing. Because think about how much purpose we get from the work that we do. Think about all the good things that come from work. It provides our livelihoods. It provides for us. And we set it up from the beginning. And even the word work has become synonymous with something bad in a way. Oh, that's work. Oh, that sounds like work to me. I mean, wow. I know that's simple, but it's so true. It's so fundamentally true for how the historical marketing of work in general has been so flawed and so negative that it's always people with jobs like yours and anyone that owns a business is trying to hire, you have to work against it because you're saying literally, hey. I need you to come do something when you're not just, you know, doing your free time. And here's why it's great, but it's not having fun. What? No. Like, it can