When people think about the jobs market, most assume the onus is on the applicant to prove themselves to a prospective employer. With so much competition for jobs, applicants need to stand out among potentially thousands of others to get work.
However, what about the employers themselves? It can be just as hard to find the right applicant and attract people to work for you.
The jobs market works both ways. Employees need to effectively brand themselves as employable. Employers, meanwhile, need to brand themselves as a place worthy of working.
This guide looks at ways businesses can create an employer branding strategy to catch the best prospective employees from the market. Developing a positive employer brand is more crucial than ever in 2025, as people look at more than just the job.
From work-life balance to employee perks, an employer often needs to provide some extra on top of the paycheck. An effective employer branding strategy today can make a significant difference in attracting and retaining top talent.
In This Guide:
What Is Employer Branding?
Why Is Employer Branding Important?
Building a Strong Employer Brand
Developing an Employer Branding Strategy
Measuring and Optimizing Your Employer Brand
Best Practices for a Strong Employer Brand
Frequently Asked Questions
This guide is designed to help businesses develop an employer branding strategy, so they stand out in the jobs market and retain their existing employees.
We'll look at employer branding in detail and show how you can measure the effectiveness of your new branding strategy.
What Is Employer Branding?
Let’s kick off this guide by understanding what an employer brand is. We’ll dig deeper into the employer branding process later, but for now it’s important to understand the concept.
Employer branding is about creating a positive image of your company’s reputation, so people see it as a great place to work.
In effect, it’s the image you project to current and potential employees about your workplace culture, values, and opportunities, aligning recruitment efforts with your company's culture.
Businesses can become famous for how they treat their employees and that, in turn, helps their marketing efforts, which can boost sales, audience growth, etc.
Examples of what you might incorporate into your employer branding initiatives include:
Your company’s mission statement and values: This is often the first thing prospective employees will know about your brand.
Work environment and culture: This is what you might need to “sell” in order to attract employees.
Career growth opportunities: This is a big part of your strategy and helps retain existing employees.
Employee benefits and perks: Employees want more than just a salary these days.
What current and former employees say about you: Employee advocacy can play a huge role in developing your overall image.
Understanding Employer Value Proposition
It’s important to define your employer value proposition (EVP) as you develop your branding strategy. This is the unique set of benefits you offer workers in exchange for their skills and efforts, such as the ones detailed in the section above.
Your EVP should highlight what makes your company special as an employer and align with your company's culture. So, it might be that you’re an eco-conscious company that offers more holidays and above-average parental leave.
Whatever it is, your EVP is what you’ll need to come back to again and again when you’re advertising for jobs. Because of this, you’ll need to weave your EVP into your marketing material, job descriptions, and employee testimonials, so that people see it and associate it with your brand.
Example of EVP in Action
UK department store John Lewis has perhaps the most famous EVP out there. Workers aren't just employees, they're owners of the company via a trust. This means employees receive annual bonuses based on the performance of the company.
People want to work for John Lewis because of this EVP, plus a few other benefits. The business has the perfect employer brand.
Employee Value Proposition Vs. Employer Value Proposition
People sometimes get mixed up between employee value proposition and employer value proposition. Well, there isn't really a difference. Both mean the same thing and focus on what employers offer employees as a value incentive to work for them, beyond the paycheck.
Why Is Employer Branding Important?
Employer branding is crucial in today’s competitive job market. People want more than just a salary. If they’re going to spend most of the day at your office, what do they get in return?
Businesses need to develop an effective employer branding strategy today to stand out and attract top talent, while also retaining their best workers.
When you have a strong employer brand, you’re more likely to catch the eye of potential candidates. Job seekers often research companies before applying, and a positive brand image can make you their top choice.
But it’s not just about the quality of all your employees. Having a strong employer branding strategy means you can:
Dramatically reduce your hiring costs and staff turnover costs
Greatly improve employee retention and retain knowledge more easily
Steadily enhance company culture and get your employees to work on improvements collaboratively
Systematically build trust with customers and clients thanks to your strong brand
By focusing on your employer brand, you’re effectively investing in your company’s future. You’ll create a workplace that people want to be part of, making it easier to find and keep the best employees.
Remember, your employer brand is more than just a logo or slogan. All marketing campaigns need substance behind the style – and employer branding is exactly the same.
This is about providing an overall impression to both job seekers and current staff. Therefore, be sure to take time to develop a strong brand that reflects your company’s values and culture.
Building a Strong Employer Brand
Now that we know more about employer branding, it's time to focus on developing your strategy. It's quite possible that you'll be starting from scratch here – but that doesn't mean your company doesn't already have a reputation.
Here's how you can start to build that branding strategy.
Know Your Employer Value Proposition
Start by outlining what your company actually offers its employees beyond a paycheck. Interview your existing employees to see what they like and don't like about their work. Then, assess your marketing material and branding, to understand the perception people have of your brand. After that, you should look at how you present your perks to prospective employees.
Doing this research means you'll have a firm understanding of your EVP and also the wider perception of your brand.
You might find prospective employees aren't aware of your amazing workplace practices and perks, because your brand reputation has taken a nosedive.
Working Alongside Current Employees
Your existing employees are your best brand ambassadors, so it's important to ask them to share what they love about working for you. Collect positive stories and testimonials, and get them out into the open.
The London tube network TfL does this really well by championing its drivers, ticket staff, mechanics, and cleaners on posters across its tube network. By showing you're a welcoming place to work, you're able to increase your EVP.
Make sure you also listen to employee feedback. This is usually more important than external feedback, because you need to keep your employees on your side. Unhappy employees can become brand critics, which makes it harder to initiate your employer branding strategy effectively.
Cultivate a Strong Onboarding Process
Onboarding is the first point at which new hires start to truly understand your business. They might have a good idea of your brand, its workplace practices, and its ethics – but they won't yet know how you operate.
Onboarding needs to be seamless. Mistakes and errors here will create a sense of distrust from the beginning. You need to help people get up to speed. Assigning mentors can help, especially if you're employing someone straight from school, or who is inexperienced in your industry.
Check in often during the first few months. Ask for feedback on the onboarding process and use it to keep improving your program.
Developing an Employer Branding Strategy
If you’re planning to improve your employer branding and need to develop an effective employer branding strategy today, then this section is for you. Below are the three core areas you need to focus on in order to create a reliable strategy that can be used to support all your employer-related content.
Whether it be job ads, improving employee satisfaction, or making the onboarding process smoother, here’s how you develop that overarching strategy.
1. Set Goals and Objectives
Start by defining what you want to achieve with your employer branding. Do you need to hire more skilled workers? Are you struggling in a specific area of your business? Has your employee retention rate decreased? Does your company just need a reputational boost?
Set specific, measurable goals that align with your overall business objectives.
For example, you want to attract better applicants to a few new roles that are opening up in your marketing team. Your aim to increase job applications by 25% over the next three months, in the hope this leads to more highly-skilled workers applying for roles. This clear target will guide your efforts and help you measure success.
2. Create Relevant Marketing Materials
So, you have your objectives in mind. Now you need to meet them. To do this, you'll need to develop content that showcases your company culture and highlights what makes you a great place to work. This could include employee testimonials, day-in-the-life videos, or blog posts about your company values and initiatives.
Your wider branding strategy will play a part here, too. If you have an amazing product that customers love, then you can use this to signal to employees how amazing you are as a whole.
Make sure the careers page on your website is up-to-date and reflects your employer brand. There's nothing worse than a careers page with old job listings still visible.
Use your page to highlight the overall benefits and growth opportunities that come with working at your company. What sets you apart from competitors?
From there, you can create job descriptions that go beyond listing duties. Paint a picture of what it's like to work in the role and how it contributes to the company's mission. Use engaging language that speaks to your ideal candidates.
Finally, think about how you'll market these job roles. It's not enough to have a glossy website and PDFs attached to each job role. You need to get your message out there that you're looking for workers. This might mean creating specific content to run alongside your employment drive. You could use current employees in a poster campaign to show how great you are, or perhaps create visuals that highlight your EVP.
Remember, you need to sell your job openings to prospective employees, as much as they need to sell their skills to you.
3. Choose Your Distribution Channels
Once you have your branding material, it's time to distribute it. Use a communications and content management tool like CisionOne to determine your target audience. Find where your core demographics are and distribute your employer branding materials accordingly.
For example, you might be recruiting for a specialized tech engineer. Look for websites and publications that appeal to that demographic and place your ads, job postings, or other marketing materials there.
LinkedIn is, of course, great for professional networking. However, it might be that you find your ideal audience on a site like Instagram or TikTok.
Jobs boards are a great option. Just make sure you optimize your job descriptions and ensure you include your EVP high up, so people see you as a good employer.
Measuring and Optimizing Your Employer Brand
There are a handful of reliable metrics that you can use to track and understand your brand. This way you can visualize how potential candidates perceive your business and the products or services you provide.
Let's explore how to measure your efforts and make improvements.
Choose Relevant Metrics to Track
You can measure various metrics across your employer branding strategy by using a tool like CisionOne. However, you need to still choose the metrics you want to focus on, so it's worth doing some research into the important factors that can affect your brand.
Start by choosing metrics that align with your goals. Things like brand recognition and sentiment is a great place to start. Pay attention to your social media engagement and see what posts do well. Don't forget to measure brand equity and look at your overall image and reputation.
Once you have an idea of your brand reputation, you can look more closely at your reputation as an employer. Count the number of open applications you receive per post. Then assess your offer acceptance rate to see if candidates want to join your team, before looking at current employee satisfaction scores. You'll begin to see if there's a correlation between the amount of engagement in your jobs postings and the quantity and quality of applications you get.
Fine-Tune Your Strategy
Use all this data to improve your employer brand. If you see low satisfaction scores from your current employees, dig deeper with employee feedback surveys. Find out what's causing issues and take action to fix them.
If you're struggling to attract applicants of sufficient quality and notice your jobs posts on social media channels aren't gaining much attention, then you need to adjust your distribution strategy.
Compare your metrics to industry averages and where you're succeeding. Look at where you can improve. Perhaps people don't know your company culture and employee perks.
Remember, building a strong employer brand takes time. You can't change the image of a business overnight, even if it already has a positive reputation. Keep measuring, learning, and adjusting your approach, using a tool like CisionOne to guide you along.
Your goal is to create a workplace where current and potential employees want to be.
Best Practices for a Strong Employer Brand
Your employer brand is what sets you apart from other businesses within the jobs market. It takes a lot of time and effort to get right – but the results can be hugely rewarding. Being smart with your strategy will help, and below we've collected a few best practices to make it even easier.
Focus on Retention and Engagement
Make sure you don't forget about the current employees when developing and implementing a branding strategy. After all, you can improve your employee experience if you listen to those that currently work for you.
Happy employees are your best brand ambassadors, so speak to them and see what they like and dislike about working for you. Create an open, honest environment where they can speak their minds.
If you do this, then you can more easily ask for employee testimonials to showcase your culture. Now you have some marketing material to share.
You can also further incentivize those who work for you to advocate for you by creating an employee referrals program. This way your satisfied employees will be more likely to find others to work for you, which improves your recruitment efforts.
Involve Multiple Teams
Employer branding requires a lot of people to get right. Your human resources team will know how people feel about your company, but it's the marketing team that needs to get the positive messages out there.
By integrating multiple teams into the same strategy, you can create a cycle of improvement that helps attract new employees, potentially from a more diverse workforce.
So, your human resources team explains what existing employees think, your marketing team develops a strategy to highlight the positives, your management team addresses any problems, and the company culture steadily improves.
Prioritize Transparency
A good company culture needs transparency. You can shout about your values, your ethical suppliers, your cool workplace practices, and your great bonus plan – but you actually have to deliver on this.
Being transparent is important for building trust among current employees and potential applicants. Businesses can develop a reputation for treating their employees badly if they're not transparent.
If you want to highlight your stance on important issues like diversity and sustainability, then make sure you actually deliver! Today's job seekers often want to work for companies that take a stand. Transparency in your employer brand helps attract candidates who share your values.
Frequently Asked Questions
Employer branding strategies are crucial for attracting and keeping top talent. Maybe your employer brand is what makes the difference when people are selecting which business to work for. Below are answers to questions that cover key aspects of developing and implementing effective approaches.
How can companies craft an employer branding strategy that enhances their attractiveness to top talent?
To boost your appeal to top talent, companies need to be transparent and look at themselves. Assess what they're doing right and wrong, and work on defining a unique value proposition as an employer. Highlight what sets you apart from others and why you're a great place to work. It might be your company culture, growth opportunities, or innovative projects.
Showcase employee interviews, stories, and experiences on social media, your marketing material, and your careers page. This gives candidates a real look at what it's like to work for you.
In what ways does employer branding contribute to a company's overall human resources goals?
There are some significant ways a positive employer brand contributes to human resources. For a start, it's easier to attract top talent from a pool of job seekers when you have a great employer brand. This significantly rescues costs around the hiring process.
It also helps with retention, as employees who connect with your brand are more likely to stay long-term. There will be fewer internal complaints and discipline issues to deal with, too.
A strong employer brand can boost employee engagement. This means workers who believe in your mission tend to be more productive and satisfied in their roles. They might even recommend potential candidates to you, as they have faith in your brand.
How is an employer branding strategy developed and what are the critical steps involved?
You should start an employer brand strategy by assessing your current brand perception. Survey employees and candidates to understand how they view your company. Use social media listening tools to see what audiences think about you. Are people even aware of how you treat your employees?
Next, define your ideal brand image. What do you want to be known for as an employer? Do you pay better than others? Do your employees have a great work-life balance? Are there additional perks to the job?
Create messaging that bridges the gap between current and ideal perceptions. This forms the basis of your branding efforts.
Then, develop a plan to share your brand message across various channels. This might include your website, social media, and job postings.
What five dimensions should be considered essential when assessing an employer's brand?
The five essential areas to focus on when assessing an employer's brand are:
Reputation – How do others view your company as a place to work?
Work-life balance – This matters to many job seekers in 2025. Highlight your policies that support this.
Career growth opportunities – This can really set you apart. Showcase how employees can advance within your organization, or use their position to find a better job elsewhere in years to come.
Company values – Social responsibility is increasingly important, so it's crucial you show how your business makes a positive impact.
Compensation and benefits – While not the only factor, fair pay and perks are still crucial to attracting talent.
