Most ABA careers pages are interchangeable. Swap the logo and nobody would notice, because they all lean on the same comfortable claims about caring and culture. The candidate deciding between you, the clinic down the street, and a front desk job at urgent care cannot tell you apart, and they will not work to figure it out. That is not a talent shortage. It is a differentiation problem, and it lives entirely upstream of your job posts.

My guest today is Tim Zercher, CEO of A-Train Marketing. Tim spent years building brands across healthcare and other industries before going deep on ABA and behavioral health, which means he brings something most of us inside the field do not have: an outside eye, backed by hard data on how candidates actually behave when they land on your site.

Here is what we get into:

• The exercise that turns "we don't have competitors" into a working list of the five you actually lose candidates to, starting with who your local referral sources would name instead of you.
• Why differentiation has to be built against what your competitors say, not what is true behind their doors, and what that changes about your messaging.
• The trap of marketing what you understand instead of what candidates value, and the reframe Tim uses with every client to sort one from the other.
• What a careers page can tell you that a job board never will, including the data his team collects on how applicants move through a site before they commit.
• The case for unpolished content, and why candidates trust imperfect over produced, especially as AI floods every feed with the slick version.
• Where HIPAA and the ethics code actually restrict your storytelling, where they only feel like they do, and how to work inside the lines.
• A lightweight approval process that catches the cringe-worthy post before it goes live, without burying your creative people in fifty rules.
• When doing your own marketing stops being scrappy and starts being the bottleneck, and the budgeting question that tells you what fixing it is worth.

A few resources from A-Train if you want to go deeper: Company page: https://atrainmarketing.com Tim Talks: Behavioral Health, Tim's podcast of fast, candid conversations with leaders across the field: https://www.timtalkspodcast.com

Tim and Matt Harrington, BCBA, are presenting the recruitment marketing workshop at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Tim will be around the whole Summit, so do not worry if the line is long after the session. His advice for getting the most out of a conversation with him: come knowing your basic recruiting numbers and a rough sense of what a solved problem would be worth to you. The advice gets sharper the more real your inputs are.

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.