Employer Branding

For a long time the only window a candidate had into a company was its job description — the document that lists the role and the qualifications for it. A well-known company could get by on that. A company nobody had heard of could post the same document and watch four weeks go by with nothing in the inbox.

Hiring meetings kept stalling at the same point. Six weeks after a posting went up, the report would be four applicants and nobody worth interviewing, and the only proposal on the table would be to rewrite the posting. The problem sat earlier than the posting. Before applying, a candidate searches the company name, and when the results are empty or amount to one article from two years ago, they close the tab halfway through the application form.

What made this worse is that people fill an information gap with the worst available guess. If the pay is not stated, they assume it is low. If nothing shows how the team works, they assume long hours. Employer branding is the attempt to fill that gap before someone else's guess does. Rather than buying more applicants through advertising, it makes the place legible enough that the people who would fit come looking on their own.

It cycles through five steps: find out how the company currently reads from outside, decide what to say, collect the facts that back it up, put it where people already are, and check it against hiring results.

1. Check the current perception. Pull applicants per posting, the share of offers that get accepted — the offer acceptance rate — whatever keeps coming up in exit interviews, and eNPS, the score you get by asking employees whether they would recommend the company to someone else. An acceptance rate that fell from 90 percent to 55 percent points at reputation rather than at anything happening inside the interview loop.
2. Decide what to say. What comes out of this step is the employer value proposition: one written statement of what a person gets by working here and what they have to accept in exchange. Drop the second half and you do not get more of the right applicants, you get more of the wrong ones.
3. Collect the facts that back it up. A claim on its own does not land, so each one gets attached to something that actually happened — three people moved to a different role inside the company last year, or a written record showing how a particular decision got made.
4. Put it where people already are. The careers page, an engineering blog written by the engineers themselves, employee interviews, the wording of postings, conference talks. Not all at once: start with the place the most candidates pass through.
5. Check it against hiring results. Watch the quality of applicants rather than the count, and watch the acceptance rate move. Employee referrals — hires that come from someone on the team introducing a person they know — are the clearest signal here, because nobody calls a friend about a job they cannot explain.

A recruiter or an HR lead keeps this running, but the raw material does not come from that desk, so several people in the company each own a different piece.

• Team leads supply the substance. What the team built last quarter, and why a decision went one way rather than the other, is known only to the people who were in the room.
• Current employees are the voice. The same sentence carries different weight coming from an HR page than from an engineer who has been there three years.
• Marketing handles how it is said, keeping the wording consistent with everything else the company publishes. That overlap is why this work sits next to brand.
• The founder sets direction and budget. The uncomfortable calls land here — whether to publish the part about what a candidate has to accept, for instance.

The timing is well before a posting goes up. For a candidate to find something worth reading when they search, the posts and the interviews have to exist first, and that accumulation usually takes half a year or more. Starting after the posting is live does nothing for the role you are hiring for now.

Three situations tend to force the pace. Money comes in and headcount has to grow in a single quarter. A reorganization or a run of departures gets people talking outside the company. Or the team starts sourcing — reaching out to candidates directly instead of waiting for applications — and the first thing anyone does after getting that message is search the company name.

"Applications are up but almost everyone fails the screen. I don't think the way we describe ourselves is reaching the people we want."

The message is aimed at the wrong audience and is pulling in people who don't fit.

"Could you write one post for the engineering blog? The roles we're hiring for this quarter are on your team."

A request to create something for candidates to find before they start searching.

"That isn't actually true of us. Write that and they'll be gone within three months."

Someone stopping a gap from opening between what goes out and what is the case inside.

Pagedeck has 45 people, so most candidates have never heard the name. Last quarter, instead of spending more on ads, Grace published the salary band for every job level directly on the careers page. Applicant volume barely moved, but the share reaching an interview went up and so did the acceptance rate, because people for whom the number was wrong now screened themselves out before applying.

In the same quarter Theo wrote for the engineering blog every other week. Not launch announcements — posts about a problem the team ran into and what they gave up to get past it. In the next hiring round, five applicants named one of those posts as the reason they applied.

The most common mistake is reading this as promotional work. It goes outward, so it looks like packaging. But a candidate verifies everything after joining, and when the job does not match what they were told they leave before the year is out. The money spent hiring them is gone, and the review they write gets read by the next candidate. This is not the work of inventing something to advertise. It is the work of picking, out of what is already true, the parts nobody outside can see.

The second mistake is treating it as something to do when a role gets urgent. The goal is hiring, so it feels like a hiring-season activity. The material, though, is things that actually happened, and those take time to accumulate. Start after a seat opens and the first post takes a month, and showing up in search results takes several more. The posting stays unfilled the whole time, and a company that runs out of patience ends up paying an agency fee or lowering the bar to fill the seat.