Why employer brand?

Your employer brand is how current and prospective employees perceive what it is like to work for you. It is shaped by everything from your careers site and hiring process to reviews, employee stories and day-to-day culture. You have one whether you manage it or not — the choice is whether it is accurate and deliberate, or accidental.

It is distinct from three things it is often confused with:

• Employer brand vs consumer brand — the consumer brand is how customers experience you; the employer brand is how employees and candidates do. They should feel connected but speak to different needs.
• Employer brand vs employer reputation — reputation is what the market already believes; the brand is the promise and identity you actively shape to influence it.
• Employer brand vs EVP — the EVP is the promise; the employer brand is how that promise is perceived and lived.

Beyond fair pay, decades of research — and the approach set out in Give & Get Employer Branding by Bryan Adams, founder of this Atlas — point to three questions candidates are really trying to answer:

• Purpose — will my work matter, and connect to something I care about?
• Impact — will I be able to make a real difference here?
• Belonging — will I fit, be accepted, and be valued for who I am?

Answering these honestly is far more compelling than a list of perks. The most attractive employers help candidates picture the answer to one more question: “do I have what it takes to succeed here?”

Most employer branding leads with strengths — and floods the funnel with poor-fit applicants. The Give & Get Employer Branding approach flips this: the goal is not more candidates, but more of the right ones. Two ideas do the heavy lifting:

• Repel the many, compel the few — by being honest about who thrives with you (and who will not), you deter poor-fit candidates and attract the people who will succeed and stay.
• Give and get — for every demand a role makes (the get), name the genuine reward it offers (the give). Pairing the two, including the harsh realities, builds trust and lets candidates self-select.

The approach is credited to Bryan Adams. Read the full method in Give & Get Employer Branding.

1. Research the truth — employee listening, interviews, reviews and data to find what is genuinely true, distinctive and motivating (an EVP audit).
2. Segment your talent — focus on the audiences that are hardest to hire and most valuable.
3. Find the themes — the handful of pillars that are true, differentiating and matter to those audiences.
4. Make the promise, with proof — express each pillar as a claim backed by real reasons to believe.
5. Activate consistently — bring it to life across every touchpoint (below).

An EVP is only worth as much as its expression. Activate it everywhere talent meets you: a careers site that tells the truth, honest job adverts, employee-generated stories, a respectful candidate experience, onboarding that delivers the promise, and internal communications that keep it alive. Explore the tech and tools that power this, and ready-made templates.

Track a baseline, then movement over time, across three lenses:

• Perception — awareness, consideration, review scores, sentiment, share of voice.
• Hiring — quality of hire, offer-acceptance rate, cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, source and application conversion.
• Retention — early attrition, regretted loss, referral and rehire (boomerang) rates.