---
title: "Talent Attraction Starts With Belief | Findem"
description: "Lessons from the RoleCall Talent Attraction Summit on regional storytelling, creator partnerships, and turning career opportunities into lasting community ties."
url: "https://www.findem.ai/blog/talent-attraction-storytelling-career-opportunity"
---

# Talent attraction is a belief problem before it's a jobs problem

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Elan Keshen

Director of Product Marketing, Funds and Networks

June 19, 2026

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> Lessons from the RoleCall Talent Attraction Summit in Buffalo, where economic developers, university leaders, place marketers, and a few recovering journalists compared notes on getting people to show up and stay.

Spend three days with the people who attract talent to a region and you stop hearing about tax incentives and start hearing about belief.

That was the throughline at the [RoleCall Talent Attraction Summit](https://www.rolecall.pro/summit) in Buffalo in June 2026. Over three days, economic developers, university leaders, place marketers, and a few recovering journalists worked through a deceptively hard job: convincing people to move somewhere specific, and to stay once they arrive. RoleCall's Tim Carty and Ian Gannon kept the sessions moving, TechBuffalo's Jeffrey Botteron and Greg Pokriki hosted the group at the M&T Tech Hub in Seneca One, and the agenda ran from an opening Newcomers to Buffalo panel and a placemaking keynote to hands-on workshops like Placemaking Mad Libs and Fix My Flop.

Getro sponsored the summit and shared its work during the Lunch and Ignite session, and the point of view it brought is the one this recap keeps returning to: a community can earn attention with a great story, but talent converts on career opportunity. The regions making real progress lead with that, and they were not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. What separated them was a clearer view of what they are actually selling. Three ideas kept surfacing.

Getro customers at RoleCall Talent Attraction Summit

## Storytelling is infrastructure, not a campaign

Dan Miner runs [Series B(uffalo)](https://www.seriesbuffalo.com/), a storytelling platform built by the 43North Foundation. His starting observation is worth sitting with. Most thriving innovation economies have a central narrative engine, one place where a region's progress gets collected, told, and amplified. Most regions do not. They have dozens of organizations each telling their own story in its own silo, which keeps every story small no matter how good the individual pieces are.

Series B is the attempt to fix that for Buffalo: an omnichannel platform that blends journalism and marketing, publishing near-daily stories about local founders and companies. It is not a logo or a slogan. It is a conduit.

Miner frames the work as a funnel any marketer would recognize. Create awareness first, because a good story nobody sees does nothing. Then shift perception. Then drive behavior, the actual relocation or investment. The discipline is in not skipping steps.

He was also honest about where that funnel breaks. Series B can get people to click, but a large share bounce within seconds, because a feature story about a local founder is not what someone weighing a move actually needs in that moment. Attention is no longer the hard part. Connecting that attention to a concrete reason to act, usually a job, is. A beautiful story with no opportunity attached is a leak.

The same instinct showed up in the media panel with April Mason of Violet PR and Whitney Martin of [Made for Rockford,](https://www.gorockford.com/plan-your-trip/madeforrockford/) moderated by Tim Carty. Both have spent careers on the storytelling side, Mason marketing places from Newark to Pittsburgh to Buffalo, Martin as an Emmy-nominated journalist now running talent attraction for Rockford. Their argument was that earned media is still one of the most credible talent tools a region has, but only if you pitch stories reporters actually want and then turn that coverage into lasting momentum instead of a one-day hit. Storytelling, again, as a system rather than a splash.

Regional talent attraction leaders at the RoleCall Summit in June 2026

## The messenger matters more than the message

The session I keep coming back to was Maria Satira from [Invest Greenville](https://www.investgreenvillenc.com/) on influencer partnerships. Greenville, North Carolina partnered with Salary Transparent Street, a creator channel with more than three million followers, and the campaign pulled over 17 million views in three months.

The content skipped the polished "come live here" spot entirely. Instead, more than 30 real professionals in Greenville-Pitt County talked openly about what they earn, what their careers actually look like, and what life there costs.

That last part is the point, and it reinforces the same lesson. Even the most viral version of this work led with opportunity, not scenery. Younger talent has learned to scroll past institutional marketing. What stops them is a real person being specific, especially about money, which most places are still too nervous to put on camera. Greenville let the career and salary conversation be the hook, and it outperformed channels with far bigger budgets.

The lesson for [regional teams](https://www.findem.ai/solutions/regional-talent) is not "go hire an influencer." It is that credibility has moved from logos to people, and that the most effective version still anchors on a tangible career path. A resident telling the truth about their work and pay will move more talent than a brochure saying the same thing in safer language.

## Attraction without retention is a slow leak

The university panel reframed campuses as something most regions underuse: a talent pipeline, an innovation engine, and an anchor employer at once. Amy Monin of the University at Buffalo, Katie Shorey of Live + Work in Maine, and Shannon Allen of Innovate Alabama, in a session moderated by RoleCall's Ian Gannon, kept returning to timing. Retention work starts the day a student arrives, not senior year. By the time graduation is in view, the decision to stay or leave is mostly made.

The tactics were concrete. Live + Work in Maine convinced the state university system to let it send every accepted student a letter, signed by Maine employers, that essentially said: when you get here, we have internships and jobs waiting. Maine pairs that with a student loan tax credit worth up to $2,500 a year. UB's Sophomore Externship Experience connects second-year students with regional employers early and has grown from 47 students to 84 in three years, with the employer side, not the student side, being the hard part to scale.

The data underneath all of this was clarifying, and it points back to the same place. Innovate Alabama's Retain Alabama research surveyed thousands of students, and when asked why they would stay or leave, the answers clustered around career awareness and job opportunity. Not lifestyle, and not the social and political factors many people assume dominate, which ranked lower than expected. Career opportunity was the deciding factor, a useful corrective for any storytelling effort tempted to lead with scenery. Shannon Allen's takeaway for any team stretched thin: when your mission is clear, the no's get clearer. You can only commit to the right work once you have defined what it is.

Opportunity gets people to consider a place. Belonging is what makes them stay, which is where the rest of the summit kept pointing. The opening Newcomers to Buffalo panel, featuring people who relocated through Be in Buffalo, was a reminder that once the job is real, the deciding factor becomes whether someone finds a community fast enough to put down roots. Brandye Merriweather's keynote made the same case from the placemaking side. Placemaking and talent attraction are the same strategy. People stay for relationships and a sense of place, which means the work does not end at the hire or the move. It ends, if it ends at all, when someone decides they belong.

The teams doing this well also look wider for talent than the obvious pipeline. The veteran pipelines session with Sharri Justice of Fastport and Emmanuel Noel of STEAMe made the case that transitioning service members are one of the most overlooked workforce strategies a region has, arriving with skills, families, and spending power. Katie Shorey, who described herself as a proud boomerang after returning to Maine, is living proof of another underused source: people who already have roots in a place and a reason to come back. Most regions are not set up to find either group on purpose.

Elan Keshen (Product Marketing Director at Getro) presents the AI Job Board and Talent Recruiting Platform

## Where Findem fits: Turning the story into opportunity

Regional Job Board

This is the gap Findem works on. A story moves people toward a place. Opportunity is what they actually move for. The job of the infrastructure is to make sure that the moment a story lands, there is a real career path on the other side of the click, and a relationship that outlasts the campaign. That work sits across three connected layers.

A [branded job board](https://www.findem.ai/products/regional-job-boards) is where the story becomes something a person can act on. Instead of openings scattered across dozens of employer sites, a network surfaces roles from across its companies in one hub that carries the region's own brand. It is the difference between a campaign that says you could build a life here and a page that shows the specific role that proves it. This is the answer to the bounce problem the storytelling sessions kept naming: give the attention somewhere to go.

Talent Attraction Data & Trends

A talent network turns interest into a relationship you can keep warm. People who are curious about a place, alumni, returning residents, and candidates who are close but not yet ready can opt in and stay connected, so a region nurtures talent over time rather than starting cold every time a role opens. This is the retention insight made operational. The relationship starts before the move and continues well after it.

Workforce data helps a region see where its talent actually comes from, where it goes, and who has roots worth reactivating. With its underlying talent intelligence, Findem can map talent flows, surface people who fit a region's growing industries, and identify boomerangs, the people who left but still have a connection worth rekindling. It is the difference between hoping the right people find you and knowing where to look.

## What the room had in common

None of these teams were winning on budget. They were winning on clarity: about what they sell, which is belief, about who they need to reach, and about how that audience makes decisions. That is marketing, applied to the hardest product there is, a place and a future in it.

The tools only matter once the story, the messenger, and the relationships are right, and the summit was a good reminder of the order those come in. The strongest community stories do not stop at how it feels to live somewhere. They lead with the opportunity to build a life there, and they make that opportunity easy to act on. So the question worth carrying home from Buffalo is a simple one. Are you running a campaign, or building the infrastructure that turns the next story into a career?

Chat with us to explore automating your talent attraction programs with AI, job boards, and real-time/verified workforce data. [Book a time to chat, today.](https://www.findem.ai/request-a-demo-funds-networks)

Findem's talent marketing helps teams engage candidates with personalized nurture, using expert-labeled data and contextual signals.

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