The tale of three teams (and one giant missed opportunity)
How a Stakeholder Alignment Framework breaks down silos between Comms, HR, and Marketing
🙋 Raise your hand if you’ve been here before.
Your company’s talent acquisition team needs to fill specialized engineering roles—yesterday—but they’re struggling. The market for these skills is brutal and your competitors are dangling everything from on-site kombucha bars to free puppies after three months in role 🐶.
“We need better content to attract these candidates,” moans your head of recruiting while you two scoot between meetings. “Something that shows what it’s actually like to work here.”
You know very well that tucked away on your intranet sits a goldmine: a series of employee spotlights featuring your engineering team talking about solving fascinating technical problems, their flexible work schedules, and that time the CTO personally jumped in to help debug a critical issue at 2:00 a.m.
🤖 There's even video footage from your hackathon where engineers built a custom popping-and-locking robot for the holiday party.
Pure recruitment gold.
🙅 Except...”That’s internal content,” says your old school CCO. “We can’t put intranet stories on LinkedIn.”
Meanwhile, over in another corner of your company’s digital kingdom, the marketing team (with a shockingly large budget) controls the blog and social channels where potential candidates could see these stories.
“Sorry. Our content calendar is set through Q3, 2027” says the social media manager, who reports to the CMO. “Plus we need to keep our feed consistent with our new brand campaign, mmkay.” (Did you detect … smugness?)
Three teams. Three agendas.
Three separate workflows—all supposedly working toward the same company goals.
But your ideal engineering candidates will never see the stories that might convince them to apply.
🤬 Just another day to rage against the machine. (Lights out! Guerilla radio!)
When Silos Work Against Business Goals
Maintaining artificial barriers between internal and external comms wastes resources, dilutes messaging, and misses opportunities. This recruiting pickle is a prime example.
Marketing operates in the realm of brand polish, customer acquisition metrics, and campaigns with names like “2H Engagement Acceleration Initiative.”
Their presentations have more gradient backgrounds than a sunset Pinterest board and their video production budget is big enough to make Tyler Perry envious. (Seriously, how do they get so. much. money??)
Communications prides itself on substance over style, relationship-building, and what many comms-rades call “authentic messaging” (which is our Latin for “we tell it like it is...sort of”).
They’re (we’re!) the ones who know what’s happening inside the company because we talk to employees instead of customer personas.
The social media team is caught in the middle.
These on-trend gurus typically report to Marketing. But Comms is constantly pestering the social media team with requests to share the CEO’s latest exec insight, which, to be fair, is often about as exciting as IKEA assembly instructions.
🥊 This frustrating standoff actively sabotages business goals. Take the recruiting challenge above: the exact content that would attract those hard-to-find engineers exists within your company. It’s just trapped in the wrong silo.
The missed opportunity is inefficient and ineffective.
Stories from within your company are exactly what external stakeholders crave.
But organizational structures built for a pre-digital, pre-social media world prevent these stories from reaching the people who need to hear them.
Tighter coordination isn’t the complete answer.
Mixternal communications, which presents a fundamentally different approach to orchestrating stakeholder engagement across the entire storytelling ecosystem, can smash the artificial barriers that stymie success in recruiting (and other externally focused campaigning).
This article is broken down into the following sections:
Describing the stakeholder engagement ecosystem
Introducing the Stakeholder Alignment Framework
The five parts of the framework with examples and key insights for each component
Stakeholder Engagement Happens in an Ecosystem
The traditional approach to stakeholder engagement treats each audience as if they exist in separate universes.
Internal comms crafts messages for employees.
External comms develops content for media and industry.
Marketing speaks to customers and prospects.
And HR talks to job candidates.
😵💫 Reality check: stakeholders don’t experience your company based on your org chart.
Your employees read your press releases.
Your customers follow your execs on LinkedIn.
Your job candidates talk to current employees.
And your board members probably saw that TikTok the comms intern made (you know the one 😬)
The mixternal opportunity is recognizing that stakeholder engagement is an ecosystem, not a collection of walled gardens. This approach creates a coherent experience throughout the stakeholder journey by nurturing consistent themes across all channels:
Those engineering stories move from the intranet to the blog to LinkedIn.
Recruiting materials draw from the same narrative that current employees experience.
Marketing campaigns reflect workplace reality instead of aspirational fiction.
For recruiting, the potential ROI is clear: faster hiring, better culture fit, and lower turnover. All because you stopped pretending that internal and external content should remain forever separate.
📢 Tearing down the artificial barriers is increasingly a competitive necessity in a world where stakeholders have more access to information about your company than ever before—from Glassdoor reviews to social media to press coverage to the overheard conversation at the coffee shop next to HQ.
The Stakeholder Alignment Framework
The Stakeholder Alignment Framework below is a practical, five-part approach to harmonize discordant stakeholder comms:
Stakeholder Mapping
Content Audit
Content Planning
Distribution Planning
Amplification
For each of the framework’s components I provide a (fake but plausible) example of a (fake) tech company (Initech) facing a recruiting challenge.
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