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7 External Traffic Strategies. One question finally answered.
What actually moved your BSR?
Most eCommerce brands running external traffic can't answer that. Wrong channels, no real attribution, and at the end of the month, a dashboard full of activity and no proof of what drove revenue.
The brands getting it right aren't spending more. They've just stopped guessing.
They know which channels pull weight on Amazon listings, which ones look good in a report but bleed budget, and why creator and affiliate traffic consistently outperform paid social when it's set up correctly.
Levanta's free playbook breaks down all 7 strategies. Where each one works, where it falls apart, and what it takes to scale without it becoming a second job. If you're serious about moving your BSR without living inside PPC, this is worth 5 minutes.
A Story Worth Telling
A founder called me not too long ago, frustrated after he just wrapped up a six week hiring process for a key sales role.
Three rounds of interviews. Strong candidates. They made an offer to their top choice.
The candidate accepted…
Then went quiet.
And days before the start date, the founder received a one line email…The candidate had taken another offer. 😧
The founder was convinced they had done everything right. But they hadn’t called me until after it fell apart.
When I dug into it here is what I found.
❌ The job description was AI generated.
❌ The process had no scorecard and no structured follow up.
❌ The candidate received one automated email and nothing else until the offer.
❌ No personal touch.
❌ No transparency about the timeline or next steps.
❌ And somewhere in that silence, another company made them feel wanted.
Trust was never built. And nobody noticed until it was too late.
What Is Actually Happening Out There
This same story is playing out everywhere right now.
A recent report from Lever called it ‘The Great Pause’. Candidates are quietly stepping back from the job market not because opportunities do not exist but because they have lost faith in the process. Scam postings. Roles that look nothing like what was advertised. Processes that feel like talking to a machine rather than a person.
And on the employer side the frustration is just as real!
Applications flooding in with no genuine connection to the role. Candidates who accepted offers and disappeared. Skill sets that look impressive on paper but are nothing more than just lies.
Both sides are tired. And both sides stopped showing up as real people somewhere along the way.
And the companies that figure out how to rebuild that trust right now, in this hiring landscape, are going to win the talent game.
Here’s how you can win too
How to Win Trust Back as an Employer
Be transparent about the process before it starts. Tell candidates upfront how many rounds, who they will meet, what the timeline looks like and how decisions get made.
Publish a real salary range on every posting. Candidates who discover compensation does not match expectations after three rounds do not just withdraw. They talk about it everywhere.
Write the job description in your actual voice. Talk about what the role is really like, what success looks like in 90 days and what the hard parts are. Honesty attracts the right people and filters out the wrong ones before they apply.
Give candidates a hiring media kit. A pre-built set of branded assets covering culture, mission, team and growth paths, shared after the first interview so candidates have real information to bring home.
Bring back the in-person interview. Nothing builds trust faster than being in the same room. Some of the most important signals in a hiring process only show up face to face.
Send a personal note after every interview. Not an automated email. A real message from the hiring manager that references something specific from the conversation.
Close the loop on every single candidate. Every person who applies deserves a response. Not silence. A real acknowledgment that a human saw their application and made a decision.
Be honest about what the role actually is. If it is hard, say so. If the salary is lower than market but the growth opportunity is real, say so. Candidates who know exactly what they are walking into stay longer and perform better.
How to Cut Through the Candidate Noise
Rebuilding trust also means creating a process that surfaces serious candidates and filters out the ones who are not genuinely invested.
Require video application submissions. Ask candidates to record short answers to three or four role-specific questions before anyone schedules a live call. Serious candidates engage. Mass applicants drop off.
Use role-specific written prompts. Ask candidates to answer one specific question about the role in their own words. Generic applications cannot answer it well. The ones that can are already showing you something real.
Set time-sensitive response windows. Require candidates to respond to next steps within a defined window. The window itself becomes a filter that saves everyone time.
Keep humans in every decision. Technology can surface and organize. But the moment someone joins your team should always involve a real person who has genuinely engaged with that candidate.
One Thing Before Next Tuesday
Start by identifying one company asset from this list that is missing from your hiring process right now.
Maybe it is the hiring media kit.
Maybe it is a real job description written in your own voice.
Maybe it is a candidate communication template that actually sounds human.
Pick that one asset and build it this week.
Then the next. Over the next couple of months you will have a complete folder of hiring assets that work for you every time you open a role and candidates will feel the difference from the very first touchpoint.
That is how trust gets built. Not all at once. One asset at a time.
The Hire-archy Trust Framework — Free Download
To make this easier I put together The Hire-archy Trust Framework, a practical one page guide you can use to identify exactly where trust is being built or lost in your hiring process.
It is free. Just for being a reader.
Download The Trust Framework here →
Key Takeaway
Trust in hiring did not disappear overnight. It eroded slowly as both sides stopped showing up as real people.
The companies rebuilding it now through transparency, communication and genuine human engagement are the ones that will attract and keep the best candidates in a market where everyone else is still talking to an algorithm.
See you next Tuesday.
Jared
Founder, The Hire-archy
P.S. Where does trust break down most in your own hiring process? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
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Stop Spending. Start Scaling.
Most brands running external traffic aren't scaling — they're just spending. Levanta's free playbook breaks down 7 proven strategies: what works, what bleeds budget, and how top brands drive millions in off-Amazon revenue.