Make your employer brand sing by building your brand from the inside out.
Most employer brands are a glossy, inauthentic representation that the employees of the business feel disconnected from.
They’re polished and overwritten. Often safe to the point of invisibility. And the people inside the business don’t recognise a word of it.
That’s a big problem for your target audience.
Employer brands are too often built in boardrooms, not in the business. Written for approval, rather than belief.
So you end up with the same value phrases. “Everyone is very “happy” and “proud” to work in our warehouse, we swear!”
The same naff stock imagery. The same promises every one of your competitors is making. And internally, employees switch off because it’s not their reality.
Externally, candidates ignore it because they can sniff out inauthenticity with breakneck speed.
It happens because businesses default to control and limitations. Legal sign off on every bloody word rendering the person delivering stiff and lifeless.
You layer all this falsity and forced delivery on top of each other, and what is left is something technically correct, but completely and utterly forgettable. And in your desperate bid to connect with everyone, you find yourself connecting with precisely nobody.
The brands that get it right do the opposite. They start with the truth. Proper conversations with the people who actually live the culture. They find what’s different. Then they have the confidence to show it. Flaws and all. Because that’s what people trust.
AND THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE WANT TO JOIN.
SD Worx turned “boring” into a strength and built a campaign people actually remembered.
Meridian Risk Solutions ripped up 21 years of invisibility and launched a brand the London Insurance Market couldn’t ignore.
Wells & Co. stopped hiding behind heritage and told real stories from real pub partners, driving a 96% increase in traffic and cutting hiring time by 13 weeks.
Totally different sectors. But the same approach. Start with your truth and build something distinctive. Say what others daren’t! That’s exactly what a strong employer brand should do. Not just attract attention, but attract the right people, faster, with the right mentality and keep the ones you’ve got engaged and bought in.
The Good Good Double Good
way of doing this:
- Start with insight from inside the business, not assumptions
- Build a clear, ownable proposition people can believe it
- Use real people and real stories, not corporate scripts
- Create content that runs continuously, not one-off campaigns
- Tie everything back to commercial outcomes like pipeline, hiring and growth
