What question do you present to candidates? What, how or why?

A story both heart-warming and heart breaking surfaced earlier this week.

The Irish and British Lions brings together the leading players from each of the four home rugby playing nations. Every four years, they tour either Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. This year, they will take on the team that sits, by some distance, at the summit of world rugby, the New Zealand All Blacks. For anyone with an interest in the game, it is a mouth-watering prospect. For anyone playing the game at that level in Britain, getting on the plane to Auckland is exactly why they do play the game.

One of those selected was England’s Ben Youngs, a scrum half with an outside shot at making the Test team.

But not any more. This week saw Youngs announce his withdrawal from the Lions’ squad in order to be with his family. His sister-in-law – the wife of his brother and sometime team mate, Tom – was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His announcement has been greeted with sympathy, love and complete understanding.

Not a rugby player myself, I have, however, had the pleasure of coaching the sport for more than a decade. I’ve been involved personally with a number of different sports – football, cricket, tennis, table tennis – yet none of them manage to create the sense of togetherness, of purpose and of belonging that rugby achieves.

Youngs’ decision – a massive one for him personally and his age suggests this is his last crack at the Lions – touches then on two families. The Youngs themselves and the rugby family.

However, whatever relationship we have with the sport, rugby exudes the sense of, to mangle Simon Sinek, the why. The fast, the slow, the tall, the thin, the not so thin are drawn together through the physicality and the kinship the game is about. It is why people play the game, why they come back time and time again, battered, bruised, bloodied and smiling.

Sinek’s ‘start with the why’ is beautifully simple and beautifully powerful. The likes of Apple do not start with what their product is or how it has been created. Instead they focus on why people should buy it. What difference it will make to those who buy it. What people can experience through the purchase. They appeal emotionally rather than logically. We could buy other products – and few would suggest that Apple has a monopoly on excellence – but largely we don’t because we embrace the why of Apple.

Heineken too has been reaching out with their why recently.

They have constructed a thought provoking ad around difference. Bringing three sets of individuals with wholly different mindsets together, they only announce such differences of opinion and perspective mid-way through the conversation. A feminist sits down with a self-professed ‘new right’. A transgender individual within someone with staunchly conservative views on gender. A climate change denier with an environmentalist. The conclusion is about whether these individuals can sit down and share a beer knowing they are diametrically opposed. The look and feel of the commercial – which couldn’t contrast more with Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner – is down to earth and unvarnished.

The why plays to Heineken’s tagline, Open your World. That sitting down, engaging and sharing a beer can be one step to addressing differences. To opening up your world, not closing it down surrounded by your own preconceptions and prejudices. It’s not about how Heineken makes its beer or what goes into it, it’s an emotional, experiential reach out.

What can employer branding learn from such examples? I’m going to return to the extent to which customer based propositions should share more common ground and more DNA with their employee value propositions shortly.

But it’s hard to think of a time when reaching out with employer brand-based whys has been more important.

The REC points just days ago to the sharpest decline in candidate availability for the last 16 months.

Such candidates are becoming increasingly unavailable because of existing employee caution and a growing disinclination of EU nationals to seek employment in the UK – partly to do with a weaker pound, partly to do with resurgent European economies and partly because they seek greater reassurance about what British policy will ultimately be to overseas workers.

In fewer and fewer numbers, then, does such talent associate a compelling why with the UK.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation again suggested that more than two in five employers who had difficulty recruiting candidates had admitted to increasing the salary on offer. Consistent then with LinkedIn which reports that poor employer branding adds 10% to the cost of hiring. (And these are external attraction costs which do not touch on the internal morale and engagement costs of working for an organisation with a non-stellar employer brand).

Trawling through the employment notifications within the likes of LinkedIn over the last week or so, there is a marked absence of whys.

Hiring organisations are very keen to stress the what – that they are recruiting and for what sorts of roles and individuals – and the how. But the direction of travel is one-way. Such employers seek to broadcast not engage.

Above all, there is very little in the way of organisations constructing a why.

Producing a compelling reason as to why happily employed individuals should leave their current organisation and change careers. Reaching out to them emotionally and experientially.

In the absence of a compelling why, there seems little reason for talent, particularly faced with the uncertainties of Brexit and yet another election, to move.

Although I hesitate for obvious reasons to make the comparison, Ben Youngs made a massive decision faced with a why he couldn’t ignore. Apple ships millions of iPhones that are no better than the competition’s and Heineken, operating in a world where less beer is being consumed each year, saw operating profits up 9.9% earlier this year.

Does your organisation currently present a why to candidates (and one that’s authentic and differentiated) or are they being bombarded with whats and hows?