The Proof Employer Branding Works.

First-hand Accounts of Employer Branding's Impact on Business

Employer brand has become the modern business equivalent of pixie dust: the thing you sprinkle on the company to make things better even when you don’t quite understand how it is supposed to help.

While that perception doesn’t diminish the real value and power of a strong employer brand, it can obfuscate the what and the how. To that end, I asked more than 50 employer brand professionals to show the change that their employer brand has made at their company by completing the statement, “I know our employer branding is working because once we started taking it seriously…”

The depth and breadth of real-world and visible impact may surprise you. Employer branding isn’t pixie dust, but it does create meaningful and valuable change within organizations that embrace it.

We see the value through our candidates’ eyes

• Candidates mention that our employer brand content is why they chose us over a competitor.
• Candidates regularly point to our employer brand-driven videos as the reason they apply to our roles.
• Candidates talked about refreshed automatic disposition emails on social media and how the emails sparked joy and got them excited about the hiring process.
• I know it is working because I have measured that I am one of the proffered employers by my key target groups (meaning, I am on their shortlist).
• In our trainee programs focused on young talent attraction, we have really improved their overall experience, with better messaging, better SEO, and better candidate evaluation, with the most significant outcome being that candidate satisfaction has also improved.
• When a candidate mentioned a specific employee story in the interview as the main reason they applied. 

Employer branding has many outputs and outcomes as anything else in business, but its first user is the candidate. 

The brand can be used purely to attract attention, the equivalent of wearing a chicken costume and waving a sign. But strong branding starts by defining the core differentiated value that working there offers and then communicating it to targeted audiences. 

If the brand doesn’t speak to the candidate, if it doesn’t stir something inside them, it fails. But if it does spark something, it shifts the recruiting process away from something purely transactional to the beginnings of a relationship with the company.

The value is usually seen in emotional terms (sparking joy, being desirable enough to be on the shortlist), but as we will see, it is measured in speed of hire, cost of hire, and connection to the company mission.

We hear about the value from recruiters

• InMail response rate to cold outreach is steady at more than 30%.
• When recruiters shared how much time it's saving them to send employer brand content as resources to candidates. 
• Our recruiters are actively more engaged with sharing social content and better messaging to candidates which has seen an improvement in quality for some of their areas. 
• Our recruiting and sourcing teams started reaching out with ideas once we invited them to discussions and asked for their input and data.
• Our candidate engagement rate is now above 5%.
• We were able to be more strategic overall, moving hiring managers away from a “post and pray” mentality.
• A recruiter told me that a candidate he’s been trying to talk to for more than a year finally started engaging once the employer brand started writing the outreach content.

If the candidate is the employer brand’s primary user, the recruiter is the brand’s primary customer. It must draw in more candidates who are qualified and want to work there, making the recruiter’s job easier by not having to chase down candidates.

In a way, employer brand creates the most change among recruiters. It turns independently-oriented autonomous agents who are often accused of spamming talent indiscriminately into a more targeted, and strategic relationship-building team.

The result is that candidates aren’t choosing a job (commoditized and lacking in differentiation, where tenure is short) to choosing an employer (a partnership based on mutual understanding leading to longer tenures).

We see it in the form of increased brand awareness

• We hear "I'd love to work for you" instead of just "Who are you guys?" at career fairs.
• A 68% increase in apply clicks on our career site as a result of two, very targeted career-related LinkedIn posts over the course of two weeks.
• 44% increase in job applications.
• 66% increase in job applications.
• Our employer brand content has resulted in earned media.
• Our applications have grown 287% since Q4 in 2022.
• Grew our careers-focused social followers by 2500% last year on LinkedIn.
• Since implementing employer brand content on LinkedIn, our company Followers on LinkedIn have increased by 60%.
• We’ve increased traffic to our careers site and applications by 50%.
• Our culture-related content on social is the most popular and has the highest engagement of all content.
• Leadership social focus – articles, blogs, etc, and leaders advocating about our learning or culture have made a huge difference in the audience reach.
• Employer branding content increased IG following by 175%.
• Career page visits as a percentage of overall company website visits have increased
• I have measured that my key target groups are aware I am an active employer and hiring in their field.
• Our brand new “people” site for 100,000 visits in the first year completely organically.
• I saw our Poland following on LinkedIn more than double in six months after we had a series of recruiting/branding events, our recruiters/team in Poland started sharing more organic content on their LinkedIn and we had a few PR placements in prominent business/tech journals.
• In the first year of our YouTube channel, we saw 10.7k views and 220+ hours of viewership, all for free.

In a way, this is the easiest value to measure. Did we get more people to see our message?

Without an employer brand, the only thing anyone learns about a company is that it is hiring. At best, this leads them to read poorly written (and often stolen) bullets about the demands the company has on the applicant. Surprisingly, this isn’t the kind of content that gets people excited or interested in sharing.

Employer brand strategy defines a company’s differentiated value to prospects and candidates and then tells compelling stories aligned with that differentiated value. The result is content worth reading, worth sharing, and worth being moved to action by.

We see how other teams are taking advantage of it

• The employer brand has been critical for both sales and hiring: gaining the trust of the community, more five-star reviews, and a 70% increase in sales due to referrals.
• Working directly with our marketing team to build a holistic brand. It’s a seat at the table that I will never take for granted.
• Our employee-focused LinkedIn posts had the highest engagement out of all our content which sparked more collaboration with our marketing team.
• When the organization talks about employer brand and recruitment, we link it to commercial value and expenditure. It’s becoming something that the business wants, not just HR.
• When hiring managers start proactively asking for help and letting you know of upcoming changes or openings, instead of after the fact.
• Marketing comes to us proactively to scope a campaign’s priorities/KPIs.
• Hiring managers are prioritizing their interview experience and their net promotor score (HM NPS) improved significantly
• When we published the video of a hiring manager working from home, he got more than 100 LinkedIn connection requests from people in his industry looking to learn more about the company. This was a 3,600% increase in traffic to his profile.
• Team leads have become more proactive about partnering with employer branding about content, events, etc.
• Last year, when we worked through some disagreement related to a marketing leader’s philosophy about social media content – he wanted to limit how much people and culture-related content we could share on our corporate social channels in favor of content related to our products’ performance, our scientific expertise and other concepts that would prod customers to make a rational decision to buy from us. His fear was that our “soft” content would “dilute the brand.” We disagreed, knowing in our bones that emotion is a part of business whether you admit it or not. Instead, we showed all the ways that our content was performing well, providing proof points of how our employees live our core values, and helping us stand out among much larger competitors. It helped that our leadership team agreed with us, but the happy ending is that the marketing leader moved on, and we redefined our brand essence to include our people as one of our differentiating factors. Our new global marketing campaign stands as a reminder to me, at least, that our employer branding is not only working but influencing in ways I hadn’t previously imagined.

One of employer branding’s biggest problems is that it is an accelerator of other programs. On its own, it doesn’t appear to drive its own value. 

Some people look at employer branding as the connective tissue connecting disparate teams like TA and Engineering together. Some see it as the salt that makes every meal more delicious. From marketing and sales to social media and hiring managers, good branding work seeps through the cracks and finds all sorts of new ways to add value.

We create more and better advocacy

• Our employee referrals went up by over 400%.
• Our advocacy program increased views of content (not 100% corporate content. anymore) by almost double QoQ once we dedicated time to adding non-corporate content and educating users.
• Employees became more active and willing to share their experiences on social, use the life hashtag, and share company content in general.
• When employees come to our employer brand team to proactively ask how they can share their stories to help with recruiting. 
• Once our onboarding process was set up around a framework and we made all the company's stakeholders accountable for that, we started seeing our numbers in net promotor score rise by 15% with higher levels of engagement on social media along with full house participation at team/company interactions.
• We’ve increased our social advocates, giving employees quality content that has a real range – culture, leadership, tech trends, business-related, etc. This led to a 30% increase in employee sharing.
• The number of employee referrals has increased.

The most valuable proponents for any company are the people with intimate knowledge of the company, the reality of working there, including what the culture feels like, how well its espoused values are adhered to, and if the mission is something real or just a line in the annual report.

Employee advocates do more than generate employee referrals (though, referrals are a company’s best source of quality hires and often at its lower cost). They are the human face of the company and the product or service, providing an emotional connection between a faceless consumer or B2B offering and the people who might buy it. Advocacy makes recruiting claims more credible and sticky. 

Advocacy is the gold standard of messaging for one simple reason: it cannot be manufactured. No amount of rewards or toolsets will make an employee who hates working somewhere willing to say it is amazing. To consumers and candidates alike, it is the proof that makes your company attractive.

It saves money

• We cut our monthly advertising spend in half twice in two years because we’re attracting instead of begging for job candidates.
• 85% increase in direct sourcing, as opposed to the use of agencies.
• 90% reduction in fees paid to external agencies.
• 55% decrease in the cost per hire.
• Our web traffic has changed from paid resources to direct traffic. This is a huge shift, as candidates are visiting us based on the employer brand work that they're seeing, and visiting our site on their own.
• Media channels are converting into hires, driving ROI, and reducing our reliance on agencies.
• We are able to start showing how we can positively influence operating costs to the business to enable investment in other areas. We have already seen the power of even modest changes to our recruitment marketing - the business was losing money when we couldn’t recruit certain types of roles. By implementing small measures we demonstrated a positive impact which led to buy-in from stakeholders.
• We saw a 17% increase in the offer acceptance rate amongst engineering teams.
• Our offer acceptance rate has increased.
• The number of subscribers to our job alerts increased.
• People are signing up for job alerts.

When you say something interesting, you don’t have to spend money to promote what you said. Look at Apple’s 1984 commercial (aired once and watched millions of times since) or the hundreds of unauthorized Tik Tok-based “a day in my life” videos that aren’t paid for by are seen by millions of people.

So when you say something meaningful, you tend to save money on paid communication channels. But that’s only the beginning for employer brand, which can attract more people worth hiring and thus decimate agency and RPO spending. Or getting more people to accept job offers which net out to thousands of dollars saved per open role. Even getting people interested enough in your company when there isn’t a role to apply for results in a defacto pipeline of talent which lowers the costs related to recruitment marketing and open seats.

It attracts and closes a higher quality of talent

• Over 57% of our "qualified" candidates from 2022 (those who reached a “recruiter screen” and/or “hiring manager screen” stage) listed our employer brand-managed channel as what ultimately encouraged them to apply.
• Recruiters have noticed an increase in applications for their roles and/or quality.
• It has allowed us to increase the quality of applicants to the point where we average one job offer for every 50 applicants.
• We’re filling our higher turnover roles faster while still seeing the quality of candidates improving.
• We have doubled our number of qualified candidate leads (candidates who pass the recruiter screen) in one year.
• Our recruiters are actively more engaged with sharing social content and better messaging to candidates which have resulted in an improvement in quality for some of their areas. 

This is the pinnacle of an employer brand’s value, though it is impossible to quantify accurately. Imagine if every hire in every open role was a Nobel laureate, a Fields Medal winner, a MacArthur Fellow, a noted published expert on their subject, award-winning, or just “1% talent”? How much better would your business be? You’d work at a business perpetually inventing new things, innovating processes, unearthing deep insights, and connecting better with customers. In other words, your business would be exponentially more effective and valuable than it would be with the B and C-level players who apply for jobs now.

These amazing talents are not people who read job posts or respond to cold outreach from recruiters they don’t know. They are in demand. They have choices, and only make a move when they want to.

This is where employer brand shines. It defines that differentiated value and delivers it in an interesting, attractive, and perhaps intriguing package. Even if you aren’t hiring Pulitzer winners, employer branding gives you a chance to hire the best possible talent in any field. 

It supports internal alignment

• One of my clients improved engagement and sense of belonging scores significantly by identifying and building out their employer brand.
• Our results in internal surveys have improved significantly.
• We saw a 47% decrease in attrition of customer service employees.
• When an employee was asked what he was most proud of doing at the company, it was being a part of our Day in the Life video.

There are still those who equate culture with employer brand. In truth, they inform each other. The culture (i.e. the behaviors within a company based on its stated and unstated values) is how the employer brand often manifests itself in the day-to-day. The employer brand is the trellis around which culture tends to grow. 

Thus, a strong employer brand tends to bring all the people and teams into more alignment, resulting in less friction, less attrition, and an overall sense of connection to the company.

Leadership uses it

• Our employer brand work is being used in our town hall meetings.
• Our leadership team is commenting that the quality of candidates has improved even in a tough economic time.
• Our leaders are having more faith in the talent team’s ability to fill roles in-house over time.
• Our CEO helped us launch an employer brand campaign.

Leaders think strategically, looking for ways to better connect teams and people (sound familiar?) so it is always heartening when leaders see and take advantage of their company’s employer brand to achieve more.

Other assorted impacts

• Increasing the diversity of employee representation on social and recruitment marketing encouraging content creation and building momentum around DEI initiatives. This included employee photos and quotes from social media posts printed and displayed in corporate headquarters.
• Our review site data improved significantly once we initiated targeting outreach for reviews.
• Increased our Glassdoor rating from a 3.7 to a 4.2 in eight months without spending any money.

There were a few other impacts that I didn’t want to leave behind, so I’m putting them into a miscellaneous file. From elevating review site scores to supporting DEI initiatives, employer brand is a lever that can be used by a wide range of teams and functions to elevate themselves.

Employer branding isn’t pixie dust. Perhaps it might be more accurate to think of it as the crazy glue, with its 1,001 uses bringing things together.

Metaphors aside, employer branding can look and feel ephemeral. That perception isn’t helped by a lack of standardized metrics for our work because there are so many potential impacts to be measured. 

But in the aggregate, in companies of varying sizes, locations, and industries, it is clear that employer branding brings a great deal of value to the table. All that is left is for companies to choose to take advantage of it. 

Special thanks to the employer branders who were willing to share their first-hand experience of how their work has helped their company reach its goals.

Responses came from more than 50 individuals around the world from companies like 123JUNK, Affirm, Alaska Airlines, AVIV Group, Catalent, Conagra, Custom Commodities Transport, EasyJet, Etsy, GoDaddy, Golden Hippo, Groupon, Hipo, Hitachi Vantara, Kariera, Key Talent, Nestle Purina, Omnicell, Roku, ResMed, SC Johnson, That Little Agency, TIM Brasil, Water Corporation, Zinpro, and many others.

Want more employer brand resources? Check out Employer Brand Labs' free resource page. From tools that activate your employer brand for free to ways to get your TA and marketing team to care about employer branding, all a click away.