Employer branding sounds like something that needs a budget, an agency and a video crew. For most companies it needs four pieces of honest writing and one operational habit.
The campaign version does not work particularly well anyway. Candidates have learned to discount produced content, and they check other sources.
What candidates actually look at
In roughly this order:
- The job posting. The first and often only artefact they read carefully.
- Your careers page, for about ninety seconds.
- Employee reviews on whatever site is dominant in their market.
- People they know who work there or used to.
- The people they meet in the process.
Only two of those are things you produce. The other three are reputation, and reputation is downstream of how you actually treat people — which is why candidate experience is the largest employer branding lever available to most companies, and it does not look like branding at all.
The four assets worth making
1. A real description of how you work
Not values. Specifics: how decisions get made, how much autonomy people have, what the meeting load is like, whether people work in the evenings. Two hundred words of concrete description does more than any values page, because it lets people select themselves out — which is the point.
The test: could a competitor publish the same text? If yes, it says nothing.
2. A description of the hiring process
The stages, the duration, what you assess, whether you respond to everyone. This is one of the few things candidates comparing employers can actually compare, and almost nobody publishes it.
3. Three or four honest role stories
Not testimonials. A short account from someone in the role: what they work on, what they found difficult in the first month, what surprised them. The difficult part is what makes it credible — a story with no friction reads as marketing and is discounted accordingly.
4. Salary ranges on postings
Increasingly required by law, and one of the strongest trust signals available. Publishing a range says you have thought about fairness and are not planning to price people by their negotiating confidence.
The habit that matters more than the assets
Respond to everyone, within the window you promised. This single practice does more for how you are talked about than any content programme, and it costs nothing but discipline.
The arithmetic is worth stating. If you hire twenty people a year and receive a thousand applications, you have a thousand experiences to manage, of which nine hundred and eighty end in rejection. Those nine hundred and eighty people are your employer brand in whatever market you hire in. Silence at that volume is the message.
What not to bother with
- Office photographs. Every company has the same ones, and remote candidates do not care.
- Values pages. Integrity, innovation, teamwork. Universal, unfalsifiable, ignored.
- Awards badges. Candidates know most of these are paid for.
- Recruitment videos, unless you have something genuinely specific to show. A generic one costs money and adds nothing.
Handling reviews
Some negative reviews are unavoidable and their absence is itself suspicious. Two rules: respond to specific criticism specifically, without defensiveness, and never ask for positive reviews in a way that looks organised, because candidates recognise the pattern immediately.
A pattern in negative reviews is information rather than a branding problem. If four people mention the same manager, that is not something to be managed publicly.
Measuring it
Employer brand is slow and mostly indirect, but three numbers move:
- Share of applications from direct traffic rather than aggregators. The clearest signal, and it lags investment by months — channel analysis.
- Referral rate. People refer to companies they are willing to vouch for; a falling rate is an internal signal before it is an external one.
- Offer acceptance rate. Partly brand, partly process, and the one with a direct commercial consequence.
Where the assets live is a separate question — see the careers page audit and careers pages.