Early findings from a survey of 47 employer brand and talent acquisition professionals suggest the profession has outgrown the jobs we're being asked to do.
"I spend most of my time trying to get things from other people, being the in-between person, following up, some project management work..."
That's how one employer brand professional described their typical workday.
Another talked about spending much of their time in meetings, responding to emails, following up with agencies, helping recruiters with social media, and reviewing content. Another described creating PowerPoint presentations to explain employer branding to people inside their own organization.
If you work in employer branding, none of this is likely to surprise you. Depending on your company, your job might involve a little bit of marketing, a little bit of communications, a little bit of HR, a little bit of research, and a whole lot of convincing people to give you what you need to get something done.
Some days, it feels like your real job is chasing people who haven't answered your emails.
But here's where things get interesting.
When I asked these same professionals what capabilities create the most value in employer branding, the answers changed.
They talked about understanding the business. Knowing the talent market. Diagnosing problems before proposing solutions. Building strategies that help companies compete for talent. Finding ways to connect their work to business outcomes.
One respondent described the most valuable skill as "business translation," the ability to understand what's happening inside the organization and turn that understanding into a talent strategy.
Another said the most important capability was understanding diagnosis before strategy, and strategy before tactics.
These people have a pretty good idea of what valuable employer branding looks like.
So why are they spending so much time doing something else?
The job and the work are drifting apart
I've been conducting a survey of people working in and around employer branding. The goal is to collect 1,000 responses and build a clearer picture of how the profession works, what practitioners believe, and where things might be heading.
We're only at 47 responses so far. It's early, and I'm not going to pretend this is a statistically representative picture of the industry.
But there are some interesting patterns worth discussing.
Eighteen respondents answered both what they spend their days doing and what capabilities they believe create the most value in employer branding.
Their answers suggest a gap between the work that fills the calendar and the work that could make the biggest difference.
Now, I'm not suggesting that creating content, managing campaigns, or working with stakeholders is unimportant. Somebody needs to write the job posts, update the careers site, produce the videos, and make sure the recruiters have something useful to send candidates.
But those things should be happening for a reason.
A campaign should exist because we've identified a specific talent problem that a campaign can help solve. A careers site should help people understand whether the company is worth choosing. An EVP should explain something meaningful about the experience of working there.
Yet it's remarkably easy for the production of these things to become the job itself.
We become the people responsible for the employer brand calendar, the employer brand assets, the employer brand budget, and the employer brand metrics.
And when someone asks what value employer branding creates, we point to all the employer branding we've been doing.
We're hiring people with strategic brains and giving them production jobs
The contradiction gets more interesting when you look at what managers say they want from employer brand specialists.
They talk about curiosity, resourcefulness, research, business understanding, and the ability to work across functions.
One respondent wanted someone willing to challenge conventional thinking and support unpopular ideas with evidence. Another emphasized the ability to listen to business leaders, understand their problems, and translate those problems into talent strategies.
These are not simply the skills of someone who can produce a good LinkedIn post.
But consider how many employer brand functions are organized around producing and distributing things. The content calendar needs filling. The careers site needs updating. Someone needs to manage the agency. Someone needs to get Legal to approve the new campaign.
And all of that work comes with deadlines.
Researching why candidates consistently reject your offers? Understanding how your competitors are positioning themselves to attract the engineers your company needs? Working out whether the problem is awareness, compensation, or the actual work experience?
Important, certainly. But there's another hiring event coming up, and somebody still needs to order the banners.
We shouldn't be surprised when a function organized around producing marketing materials becomes very good at producing marketing materials.
The system is working exactly as designed.
The question is whether we've designed it to accomplish the right things.
We've become experts at answering briefs we never helped write
I think this might be the biggest problem.
Consider how employer branding work often begins.
A hiring manager says they aren't getting enough qualified applicants. TA decides they need to generate more interest. Someone asks employer branding to create a campaign.
So we do.
We identify audiences, develop messaging, create assets, select channels, and start measuring performance.
But who decided that awareness was the problem?
What if plenty of qualified people already know the company exists? What if they know exactly what the company does and have decided they'd rather work somewhere else?
What if the people we're trying to reach don't believe our claims about career growth? What if our competitors are offering something candidates value more? What if the role itself isn't particularly appealing?
A better campaign won't necessarily solve any of those problems.
And yet, we're now responsible for making that campaign successful.
This happens because employer branding is often brought into the process after somebody else has diagnosed the problem and selected the solution.
We receive the request, not the question.
Over time, we get very good at responding to requests. We learn to deliver campaigns more efficiently, manage stakeholders more effectively, and make our messaging more engaging.
We become experts at answering briefs we never helped write.
Which means we might be getting exceptionally good at solving the wrong problems.
Our dashboards are telling us something we don't want to hear
The survey also asked how practitioners make the value of employer branding visible internally.
The responses were revealing.
Some talked about impressions, reach, engagement, career site traffic, and applications. Others focused on hiring outcomes, retention, recruiting costs, or demonstrating that candidates were better informed.
One respondent reduced the whole thing to five words:
"talking about business outcomes, not branding activities"
I suspect most people in employer branding would agree with that sentiment.
But there's a reason we keep reporting on marketing activity. It's the work we've been asked to do, and it's the work we can measure.
If your company wants you to increase employer brand awareness, impressions and reach are entirely reasonable measures of success.
If your job is to manage social media, engagement matters.
If you're responsible for generating traffic to the careers site, you're going to report on traffic.
None of those metrics are inherently wrong.
But here's the uncomfortable question: If all your numbers are green, does that mean your company is getting better at hiring the people it needs?
Maybe your dashboard isn't failing to prove your value. Maybe it's accurately describing the job the business has given you.
And perhaps the reason employer branders struggle to demonstrate business impact is that we've been tasked with activities that sit several steps away from the business outcomes we want to influence.
We're trying to prove that we're doing a bigger job than the one we've actually been hired to do.
The profession has changed. The job hasn't caught up.
Here's what makes the survey so interesting to me.
When I asked people what great employer branding looks like, their answers went well beyond campaigns, EVPs, and career sites.
They described honest employee experiences. Competitive differentiation. Helping candidates understand whether a company is right for them. Attracting people who will thrive in the organization. Making hiring more effective.
One respondent suggested that great employer branding might actually result in fewer applications, because people who aren't a good fit would recognize that before applying.
Think about that for a moment.
We've spent years celebrating campaigns that generate more applications, while someone working in the profession is suggesting that success might mean getting fewer.
That's a pretty different understanding of the work.
And it raises a question about whether the structures we've built around employer branding are keeping pace with our ambitions for it.
We've developed a more sophisticated understanding of what candidates need, how employer reputation affects hiring, and how the business competes for talent.
But many of our jobs are still built around maintaining a brand and producing materials to promote it.
Maybe we've outgrown the job description.
So what are we supposed to do about it?
I don't think the answer is another article telling employer branders to become more strategic.
As if nobody has ever thought of that before.
And I don't think the answer is to tell people to demand a bigger budget, a better title, or a seat at the leadership table. Those things might help, but they're often outside an individual's control.
The people who responded to this survey don't appear to be short on ambition or ideas. Many seem to understand perfectly well what would make their work more valuable.
What's missing is the opportunity to do more of it.
That's a harder problem. It involves expectations, organizational structures, how we measure success, and who gets to define the problems we're asked to solve.
But there's something encouraging in these responses, too.
We don't have to invent an entirely new vision for employer branding. A version of it already exists in the way practitioners describe excellent work.
The profession seems ready to move beyond simply promoting companies and toward helping the business compete for the people it needs.
Some people are already working that way.
It's also part of the thinking behind The Better World of Talent Acquisition, a series I wrote about the habits and assumptions that make hiring harder than it needs to be, and what happens when we start challenging them.
Because I suspect employer branders and recruiters are running into different versions of the same problem: We've inherited a way of working that makes perfect sense if the goal is to produce activity. It makes a lot less sense when the goal is to help the right people choose us.
We don't need to throw away everything we've built. We do need to start questioning what all that work is supposed to accomplish.
And perhaps the first question is the simplest:
If you could stop producing employer branding for a month and spend that time solving one problem that makes your company difficult to hire for, what problem would you choose?
I'd be interested to hear your answer.
