The newcomer gets the craft, everybody else gets the leftovers

Recruitment writing is the only communication most institutions resource properly, and it is not the communication most people receive.

Count the words. In a typical year an institution might publish a few thousand words of recruitment copy and send hundreds of thousands of words of operational communication: notices, reminders, confirmations, results, changes, invitations, corrections. The first set is drafted, reviewed, tested and photographed. The second set is written at speed by people with other jobs, pasted into a system and sent. Readers do not sort communication into those two buckets. They experience it all as one voice, and the voice they hear most often is the unedited one.

This is where reputations are actually made. Somebody who received four clear, timely, correctly addressed messages in a semester forms an impression of an organised place. Somebody who received one glossy prospectus and then three confusing emails about the same fee forms a different impression, and no amount of recruitment polish will overwrite it, because the operational messages arrived with their name on them and the prospectus did not. Personal always outranks published.

The practical fix is unglamorous: take the twenty highest volume messages the institution sends, print them, read them aloud and rewrite them once, properly. Twenty messages, done well, will reach more people more often than any campaign. It is the highest return editing work available in an education institution and it is almost never scheduled, because it has no launch date and nobody gets to present it.