They worked it out 2,400 years ago.
By Mitch Sullivan,
In 350 BC, a Greek philosopher wrote what is still, arguably, the most complete guide to persuasion ever produced.
Aristotle's Rhetoric identified three modes: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion) and logos (reason). His central argument was that persuasion is not about what the speaker wants to say. It's about what the audience needs to hear.
Since then, the study of persuasion has attracted some of the sharpest minds in history.
Cicero refined it for the Roman courts. He added delivery and memory to Aristotle's framework because he understood that constructing a good argument wasn't enough. You also had to perform it convincingly. He was very good at both, which is probably why a particular style of speaking became known as Ciceronian rhetoric.
In 1923, Claude Hopkins published Scientific Advertising. Hopkins was the first person to apply measurability to persuasion. He believed every advertisement should be judged the way a salesman is judged - does it convert? He invented the split test, pioneered the money-off coupon and made persuasion a science before anyone thought to call it that.
A few years later, Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew, which tells you something) decided that the psychological principles Freud could be applied to the masses. He got American women smoking by calling cigarettes "Torches of Freedom." He made bacon and eggs the default American breakfast on behalf of a pork producer. And he wrote a book called Propaganda of which teh core message is that people are sheep (my words, not his).
By 1984, Robert Cialdini had codified the whole thing into six principles: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. Influence became one of the best-selling business books ever written. apparently, you can buy it in airports.
The study of persuasion had travelled from ancient Athens to every business school on earth. The principles were understood, tested, refined, digitised and eventually handed to algorithms that could apply them at scale.
And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, recruitment happened.
The same industry that had spent decades perfecting its infrastructure for processing candidates, decided that the way to attract them was to write things like: "We are seeking a passionate self-starter to join our dynamic team in an exciting role."
No ethos, no pathos, no logos.
What recruitment did with 2,400 years of accumulated persuasion science is roughly what a teenager does with a Delia Smith cookbook. They opened it, decided it looked a bit complicated and made beans on toast.
The closest the industry came to Bernays was employer branding, which borrowed his core logic - that perception shapes behaviour - then handed it to a graphic designer and called it a careers page.
The closest it came to Hopkins was the click-through rate, which measures whether someone clicked, not whether anyone was persuaded of anything.
The closest it came to Cialdini was social proof, which became "Join 10,000 recruiters who have discovered the power of our platform" on every piece of HR tech marketing in the sector. It also tapped into Bernays ‘people are sheep’ theory.
Aristotle's argument, boiled down, was this:
If you want to move someone to action, understand what they might want and speak to that. Not what you want, dressed up as a reason they should care.
He worked that out in 350 BC.