Dear Founder,
Somewhere tonight, a person you would very much like to hire is reading about you. Not your careers page; they skimmed that. They are three pages deep in the search results, reading a two-star review your former operations lead wrote at one in the morning, and deciding whether you are worth an application.
I am writing because someone has told you that employer branding is a recruitment-marketing job: a careers page, a video of the team at bouldering, a post about the snacks. It is not. Employer branding is the deliberate management of an organisation’s reputation as a place to work: what candidates, employees and former staff believe it is like to work there, and the real employment deal that belief rests on.
Most companies work hard on the first half of that sentence and skip the second. So let me be candid, as a friend should be, about where your employer brand actually lives.
What they found before they met you
Your candidates did their homework. They checked LinkedIn to see how long people stay. They messaged a friend of a friend who left last year.
They read your reviews, which have been a normal part of job-hunting since Glassdoor opened its ratings site in 2008. Nobody believes a careers page any more than you believe a property brochure.
Here is the part that may sting. They read those reviews more carefully than you do.
Ask people who job-hunt seriously and they describe the same method. Ignore the lone rant and the lone rave. Look for one complaint repeated by different people, in different years, about the same team.
Trust the long, specific, oddly calm review over the furious one. And distrust any sudden cluster of five-star reviews that all praise the “amazing culture” in identical breathless terms, because everyone now knows what a review written at HR’s request sounds like.
The sharper ones go further and ask, in the interview, what happened to the last person in the role. Have an honest answer ready.
You already have an employer brand. The question is who writes it.
The phrase has been in management vocabulary since the 1990s, when marketers began arguing that the disciplines used to win customer loyalty could earn the loyalty of staff. The idea that stuck is simple. A job is a bundle of rewards, some practical, some financial, some emotional, and people attach that bundle to the company’s name whether or not the company is paying attention.
That last clause is the uncomfortable one. You cannot opt out. Every hiring manager who ghosts a candidate, every late payslip, every promotion that goes to someone’s old schoolmate is a brand communication. You simply did not write it.
Picture a 40-person logistics firm in Ubi that has never posted a job advert with any personality in it. It still has an employer brand. Its three most recent leavers are writing it, and one of them is very good with words.
What is an employer value proposition, and do you need one?
Yes. An employer value proposition, or EVP, is the deal itself: what you offer people in return for their time and talent, and what you honestly expect of them in exchange. The employer brand is the reputation; the EVP is the substance that reputation ought to rest on.
Most EVPs fail because they contain only the first half of the deal. Competitive pay, growth, a supportive culture, work-life balance.
Every company on earth claims these. They tell a candidate nothing.
The most famous EVP of recent times was never called one, and it did the opposite. Netflix’s culture deck, written in 2009 by Reed Hastings and Patty McCord, then the company’s chief talent officer, was posted publicly and viewed millions of times. Its successor still says Netflix models itself on a professional sports team rather than a family, and describes a “keeper test” in which managers ask whether they would fight to keep someone who wanted to leave.
Netflix explains its keeper test, an EVP that some candidates will rightly reject.
Plenty of people read that and think: absolutely not. Good. That reaction is the document doing its job. An EVP nobody could object to is a poster.
Specific also beats generous. When Zomato’s chief executive, Deepinder Goyal, announced in August 2020 that women and transgender employees could take up to ten days of period leave a year, that single policy said more about the company than any values statement could, and it made news far beyond India. One concrete promise, easy to check and easy to repeat.
Show the job, don’t describe it
The strongest employer brands are demonstrated, and the best stage for that is the hiring process itself.
DBS is the example I would put in front of any Singapore founder. In 2013 its chief executive, Piyush Gupta, told senior leaders to stop measuring themselves against other banks and start measuring themselves against technology companies. Inside the bank, the ambition was given a name, GANDALF: Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook, with DBS supplying the D.
Ambition alone does not persuade an engineer to choose a bank over a start-up. So in 2017 DBS launched Hack2Hire, an online coding test followed by a live hackathon, with full-time offers for those who shone. The target was 100 roles at its technology hub in Hyderabad, and the challenge drew more than 3,000 applications. By the second edition, in 2018, successful candidates were being offered jobs on the day.
Notice what the format says without a word of copy. We build things here. We will judge your work, not your CV.
Google pulled the same trick in 2004, with a billboard beside Highway 101 in Silicon Valley and another at Harvard Square that carried nothing but a maths puzzle: the first ten-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e, followed by “.com”. No logo. Solvers reached a second puzzle and, eventually, a page that revealed who was asking and invited a CV. The filter was the message.
Should you reply to bad reviews?
Yes. Faced with an unfair review, your instinct will be to correct it or ignore it. Both are mistakes. Silence is the bigger one.
An unanswered complaint reads as indifference or agreement. A defensive reply reads as a preview of what disagreeing with you will be like.
What works is warmth, sincerity and, wherever possible, evidence of change. Something like: “You’re right that our on-call rota was brutal last year. Every weekend shift now has a second engineer.”
Experienced candidates are reading to see whether you behave decently when criticised. Polish matters far less than you think.
Prioritise replies to the reviews that are well argued, and to those from people who stayed for years even if the writing is rough. Seasoned candidates give tenure a lot of weight. And never ask your team to post glowing reviews to drown out the bad ones. Candidates spot it, and once they have, they discount everything else on the page.
How do you hire when your reviews are genuinely bad?
Founders ask this more often than they admit, and the honest answer is blunt: fix the thing first. If reviews keep mentioning low pay or a manager who shouts, no copywriter can hold that line for you.
Then tell candidates the truth in interviews about what is broken, and hire some of them specifically to fix it. Good people are often drawn to a candid account of a problem they can solve. What repels them is discovering it in week three.
Measure progress the way candidates will: by whether the same complaint stops appearing.
Every leaver writes a review
You will judge your employer brand by how you hire. Everyone else will judge it by how you let people go.
In May 2020, with travel collapsing, Airbnb cut nearly 1,900 jobs, about a quarter of the company. Brian Chesky’s letter to staff offered US employees 14 weeks’ base pay plus a week for every year served, let leavers keep their laptops, set up a public alumni talent directory and reassigned much of the recruiting team, for the rest of the year, to finding departing colleagues new jobs.
Six weeks later Grab cut about 360 roles across the region and offered something similar: enhanced severance, medical cover until the end of the year, laptops kept and a talent directory open to recruiters. Anthony Tan promised staff it would be the last organisation-wide layoff of 2020.
Now the counterexample. In late August 2022, Shopee withdrew a number of job offers for roles in Singapore. At least one candidate was told by phone after he had already landed in the country with his wife and his dog.
Those affected formed chat groups with almost 260 members, and their accounts circulated on WeChat and Maimai. Few remember the compensation offered. Everyone remembers the phone call.
Redundancies are sometimes unavoidable. Doing them badly never is.
When your two brands disagree
The final trap is a gap between what your company tells customers and what it does to staff.
Basecamp’s founders had written several books about how work ought to be organised, and outsiders tended to count it among the good employers. In April 2021 they banned societal and political discussion on the company’s internal account and disbanded an employee-led diversity initiative. Within days, roughly a third of their staff of about 60 had taken buyouts.
Whatever you make of the policy, the lesson is plain. People hold you to your own published story more strictly than to anyone else’s.
The reverse works just as hard. Safaricom, the Kenyan company behind M-Pesa, has been certified a Top Employer in Kenya every year since 2022, and its chief executive, Peter Ndegwa, has described that recognition as an endorsement of an employer brand built over years.
The two brands feed each other. A customer brand people respect makes hiring easier, and the people you hire then make that brand stronger, or weaker.
What I would do on Monday
If I were in your chair, I would start here.
- Read every review you have, on every site, and list the themes that repeat. Those themes are your employer brand today.
- Talk to your last five joiners and last five leavers. Ask the joiners why they said yes, and the leavers when they started looking.
- Write your EVP as a trade: what you give, what you ask, and who would be unhappy here. If the answer to that last one is nobody, start again.
- Fix one repeated complaint before you spend a dollar on recruitment advertising.
- Redesign one hiring step so that it shows the work rather than describing it.
- Decide how people will leave, before you need to.
None of this needs a big budget. It needs you, personally, to care what is true.
Yours, with respect and a little impatience.
P.S. The questions founders ask next
What is the difference between employer branding and recruitment marketing?
Employer branding is the overall reputation and employment deal that make people want to work for an organisation. Recruitment marketing is the set of campaigns and channels used to promote particular vacancies, and it performs far better when the employer brand behind it is sound.
How long does it take to improve an employer brand?
Usually a year or more, because reputation follows experience. Better policies and replies to reviews can shift perceptions within months, but reviews improve only once enough employees have lived through the changes.
Do small companies need an employer brand?
Every organisation that hires already has one. In a small company fewer voices shape it, so each review, referral and departure carries more weight.
If you would like help finding out what your candidates already know about you, Firefish’s employer branding team is a good place to start.
