What 47 employer brand and talent acquisition professionals are telling us about the work that really matters.
In the first article in this series, we looked at a frustrating contradiction in employer branding.
People working in the profession have a pretty sophisticated understanding of what great employer branding looks like. They talk about understanding the business, creating competitive advantages, helping candidates make decisions, and improving hiring outcomes.
But their days are often consumed by content calendars, approvals, campaigns, and keeping the careers site updated.
We know what valuable work looks like. We just don't seem to have much time to do it.
Which raises an interesting question.
What would employer branding look like if we could design the job from scratch?
I've been thinking about this while reviewing the first 47 responses to my Employer Branding Profession Survey. It's a small sample, and we're still collecting responses, but several answers suggest a different way of approaching the work.
And I think it starts much earlier than most employer branding does today.
By the time you get the brief, the biggest decisions have already been made
Imagine your company is planning to open a new office, expand into a new market, or launch a new product.
To make that happen, the company needs people with specific skills and experience. Some of those people are going to be difficult to find. Almost all of them already have jobs. Many are working for companies they'd be perfectly happy to stay with.
At some point, those business plans turn into hiring plans. Then the hiring plans turn into requisitions.
And eventually, someone contacts employer branding.
"We need to attract more engineers."
"Can you help us generate interest in these positions?"
"We need a campaign."
That's usually where our work begins.
But consider everything that's happened before we received that request.
The company decided what it wanted to accomplish. Someone identified the people required to make it happen. TA developed a hiring strategy. Recruiters started looking for candidates.
And somewhere along the way, somebody assumed those candidates would be interested in working here.
Who checked?
Who looked at the companies those engineers currently work for and asked why they might leave? Who examined what competitors offer? Who identified what makes our company appealing to the particular people we're trying to hire?
Those sound like employer branding questions to me.
Yet we're often brought into the process after the company has decided what the hiring problem is and what kind of help it needs.
We're asked to create demand without being involved in understanding what might create it.
The people in TA may want something more from us
Seven TA leaders participated in the first round of the survey. That's hardly enough to claim we're hearing the voice of the entire profession, but their responses were interesting.
When asked where employer branding could become more valuable, they talked about understanding hiring-manager problems, using recruiting data more effectively, anticipating talent market challenges, and working more closely with recruiters.
One wanted employer branders to identify problems TA hadn't even recognized yet.
That's a much bigger job than making recruitment campaigns.
It suggests that at least some TA leaders want employer branders who can help them understand where hiring will be difficult, why candidates might prefer competitors, and what they can do about it.
Consider what that would mean for the way we work.
Instead of waiting for a request to promote a difficult role, we could identify the roles likely to become difficult before recruiters begin working on them.
Instead of being handed a target audience, we could help determine which talent audiences matter most and what might motivate them to move.
Instead of assuming an awareness problem, we could investigate whether candidates know us, understand us, or simply don't find us particularly appealing.
That's the kind of work I'd expect from a talent strategy function that uses marketing to help the business hire.
And we don't necessarily need to wait for someone to redesign the department to begin asking those questions.
Try this: Look at the three most important or difficult roles your company expects to hire over the next six months. Ask the hiring managers why someone who's already successful in one of those roles would leave their current employer to work for you.
Then ask your recruiters whether that's what candidates actually care about.
You might discover you've been promoting the wrong things.
Being a great place to work isn't enough
Another interesting theme in the survey was authenticity.
When people described excellent employer branding, they talked about honesty, transparency, real employee experiences, and showing candidates what working at the company is actually like.
I agree with all of that.
But there's something missing.
Imagine you're choosing between three restaurants. All three describe themselves as places that serve great food, have friendly staff, and care passionately about their customers.
All three might be telling the truth.
You still don't know which one to choose.
Employer branding has a similar problem.
Your company might genuinely offer a collaborative culture, opportunities for growth, meaningful work, and supportive leadership.
Unfortunately, so might everyone else.
One survey respondent suggested a useful test: Take your employer brand messaging and replace your company's name with a competitor's. If it still makes sense, how different is your story?
I'd add another question.
Even if your story is different, does that difference matter to the people you're trying to hire?
A consulting engineer might value the chance to take ownership of significant projects earlier in their career. Another might prefer the structure and resources of a much larger organization. Neither is wrong.
An honest employer brand should help both people understand what they're choosing, including the things they might be giving up.
This is what I mean by choosability. Your company needs to give the particular people it wants to hire a credible reason to choose it over the alternatives available to them.
Getting noticed helps. Being liked helps. Neither guarantees that someone will want to work for you.
And that leads to one of my favorite responses in the survey.
One practitioner suggested that successful employer branding might result in fewer applications, but better-matched candidates.
Think about how differently we'd approach the work if that were our goal.
We might be more specific about the kinds of people who thrive in the organization. We might be more honest about the challenges. We might spend less time trying to make everyone interested and more time helping the right people make informed decisions.
Some candidates would decide not to apply.
Good.
If someone discovers early that your company isn't right for them, you've saved them, your recruiters, and your hiring managers a great deal of time.
The job is to help people choose. Sometimes that means helping them choose somewhere else.
Try this: Pick one important hiring audience and compare your employer brand messaging with three companies competing for those same people.
Remove the company names. Can you tell which message belongs to which employer? More importantly, can a candidate identify a meaningful reason to prefer one?
If not, you've found something worth working on.
How do we know if we've changed anyone's mind?
Here's where employer branding gets difficult.
When I asked practitioners how they demonstrate the value of their work, the responses covered everything from impressions and engagement to application volume, retention, hiring costs, and hiring-manager satisfaction.
Some acknowledged that it's incredibly difficult to connect employer branding activity directly to hiring outcomes.
They're right.
Candidates rarely make career decisions because of one advertisement, one careers site visit, or one conversation with a recruiter.
But that doesn't mean we have to settle for measuring how many people saw our content.
Several respondents pointed toward more interesting evidence.
One talked about candidates arriving at interviews already understanding the company and the work. Another highlighted hiring-manager satisfaction. Others described applicants referring to specific stories or messages they'd encountered before applying.
Those are useful signals.
If your employer branding is supposed to help candidates understand why they should choose your company, shouldn't we be interested in what they actually understand?
If we're claiming that our messaging communicates a distinctive employee experience, shouldn't we find out whether candidates can repeat that distinction?
And if recruiters are supposed to use our employer brand to persuade people to consider opportunities, shouldn't we ask whether it's helping them have better conversations?
This is especially interesting because it doesn't require building some elaborate attribution model.
Try this: Ask recruiters to start recording how candidates answer one simple question:
"Why are you interested in working here?"
Look at the answers after a month.
Are candidates mentioning the things your employer branding emphasizes? Are they interested in something you never talk about? Are they repeating generic assumptions that could apply to any company?
That information could be more useful than another report showing how many people clicked on your latest campaign.
You can't redesign the function by yourself
There's an obvious problem with everything I've suggested.
Your calendar is already full.
You have campaigns to launch, recruiters to support, stakeholders to manage, and deadlines that aren't going anywhere.
You might not have access to the business plan. You might not be invited into hiring strategy meetings. You might be a team of one working for a leader who believes employer branding means posting employee stories on LinkedIn.
It's easy for someone like me to suggest that employer branding should start earlier and focus on more important problems.
It's considerably harder to make that happen when you're already doing three people's jobs.
And that's exactly what the first article in this series was about.
The way employer branding functions are organized often makes it difficult for practitioners to do the work they believe creates the most value.
You can't fix that alone.
But you can change some of the questions you bring into the conversations you're already having.
When someone requests a campaign, ask what hiring problem they're trying to solve.
When someone wants to increase applications, ask whether application volume is actually the constraint.
When someone asks for more employee stories, ask what those stories need to help candidates understand.
When someone celebrates a successful campaign, ask what candidates did differently because of it.
None of those questions requires a new budget or title.
They might, however, lead you into a different kind of conversation.
And once you have evidence that those conversations lead to better hiring decisions, you've got a much stronger argument for changing how the function works.
I've written more about making that shift in Let's Revisit Next Quarter, a field guide for people who are tired of making the same business case for employer branding and getting the same response.
One of its central arguments is that we spend too much time explaining why employer branding matters and not enough time understanding the problems the business is already trying to solve.
The survey responses suggest that many practitioners already recognize that distinction.
What they need is a way to act on it.
The job we should be trying to do
I don't want this to sound like an argument against campaigns, EVPs, careers sites, or employee storytelling.
All of those things can be tremendously useful.
But their value depends on the problem they're solving.
A careers site that helps the right candidates understand why your company is worth choosing is valuable. A careers site that simply looks impressive is expensive decoration.
An EVP that helps recruiters persuade hard-to-reach talent is useful. An EVP that could belong to any company isn't doing much work.
A campaign that changes someone's willingness to consider your company can make a real difference. A campaign that generates a million impressions without changing anyone's mind is just a very visible campaign.
The opportunity for employer branding is much bigger than maintaining the company's employment image.
We can help identify where the business is going to struggle to hire. We can understand the people it needs and what those people value. We can give them clear, credible reasons to choose us. And we can look for evidence that those reasons are influencing decisions.
That seems like a job worth doing.
Nobody needs you to make the company look great. They need the right people to choose it.
