A strong employer brand can make a huge difference in a hiring company’s ability to attract the best people. According to a LinkedIn’s Employer Branding report (2024) 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying.
It can reduce costs and speed up the hiring process, save valuable time and effort and help the company achieve their goals faster.
On top of that, the people a business hires are far more likely to stick around with a stellar employer brand. And with better staff retention, the reputation of the business rises.
But there’s a problem with employer branding.
The limitation for hiring companies
Most hiring managers have absolutely no idea how strong their employer brand is. Or how well it works in attracting job-seekers or passive talent. They don’t know if it’s positive, negative, or somewhere in between.
And mainly because they very rarely do initial discovery calls. They conduct interviews of course, but in doing so, only ever speak to people who are already interested.
This initial attraction part of the recruitment process is done for them, via other means and other people. They may have internal recruiters, contingent recruiters working on their behalf, or occasionally, retained or exclusive recruiters.
Thus, real, genuine feedback unearthing the strength (or weakness) of their hiring brand is out of reach.
If a potential candidate sighs and laments “oh, I wouldn’t work there, I’ve heard some bad things” it’s highly likely this never reaches the hiring manager.
After all, your recruiters have a job to do. Placements to make. Why would they give negative feedback from an uninterested candidate, when they’re prioritising positivity to get a deal done?
Should your recruiters really give negative brand feedback?
How would that work? And would it really benefit both the client and the recruiter?
It’s an inescapable truth that the more contingent recruiters work on one job, the more dissipated and negative the hiring brand of the client can become. Knowledge of the client will be limited. Buy-in too. Hiring managers can’t brief 5 individual recruiters effectively for just one role. And so they don’t.
And because of that, the candidate experience suffers, and brand too.
The feedback loop in giving useful feedback to a hiring business is so often missed when contingent recruitment’s split between multiple agencies. It’s a downward spiral which is unlikely to magically become positive without action.
Is it time for your recruiters to take on this mantle?
Home truths about employer brands
When you’re running a business, home truths are important to hear.
People who surround themselves with “yes men” are rarely as successful as those who give reverence to difficult truths. That’s because hard-to-hear facts are opportunities for improvement.
Small failures which, when rectified, create marginal improvements.
This manifests in a number of ways.
It could be a client realising they’re not “the fastest growing company in the UK.” But also realising that’s only important as a marketing slogan and holds little value for new hires.
It might be in realising senior candidates don’t pay as much attention to their “best place to work” award as they’d hoped, after they’ve seen behind the curtain of the voting system. But also that there are far more valuable ways to market their business.
Or it might be the fact the company's core values written on the wall are similar to their competitor’s over the road and do little to diversify their employer brand. But also that, as standalone words, do little to diversify the company.
These are all difficult-to-hear home truths, but can radically alter how a business markets themselves to new hires.
Brand goes a long way in 2025.
The cultivation, amplification and reverence of clients’ brands should be activities your recruiters tackle to take their business development up a notch. To not only win clients, but retain them. To raise their offering beyond their competitors’.
To become consultants, and not just recruiters.
Feedback is just the start of the process
Some brands are so revered they raise happy eyebrows from candidates when their name’s mentioned. Some have the opposite effect. And some are total unknowns.
Giving a hiring business the feedback of where they sit might seem like a daunting thing to suggest to your recruiters. But if it’s managed in a way that doesn’t offend and is delivered as constructive feedback, it will improve the chances of the company to hire top talent.
Of course, feedback’s just the start. An employer brand is impacted by a myriad of factors which are sometimes hard to control.
Individual managers, diversity and equity, gender pay gaps, commercial success, sustainability, salary and benefits, learning and development, career opportunities. It’s a massive puzzle, with a thousand pieces.
And yet, the concurrent theme running through the middle is how current staff rate their employer.
The degree to which a recruiter can impact a client’s employer brand is hard to judge. It’ll depend on the client, as much as the recruiter. But in the same way salary surveys have been a mainstay of the recruitment industry for years, and merely scratch the surface of parity, employer brand feedback can work even harder to improve the fortunes of the hiring company.
And your recruiters too.
Making time for consultation
Giving constructive feedback about employer brands isn’t something you should labour your recruiters with immediately, if they’ve not learnt to have difficult conversations before.
It might have the opposite effect for business development and put off clients.
Rather, broadening your training and development to include handling this process will mean your recruiters are well-versed and set aside time for the consultation as part of their screening process.
It’s highly unlikely a recruiter will improve the brand of a client they don’t have a good relationship with. If their interaction is limited to a 5 minute job-brief call and email inbox they send CVs to, no amount of feedback will be deemed constructive.
The process should be handled with care and consideration. Even for brands where the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. And so how your recruiters handle it will determine its success.
Practical steps to build an employer brand consulting process
It’s fair to say, properly assessing the strength of an employer brand can’t be done unless you’re allowed free access to question their current employees. Which is a step many clients may feel goes too far. At least initially.
Equally, Brand Strategists go to extreme lengths for their work. And charge a lot. This article isn’t intended to make you feel the burden of adding another task to your recruiters’ workload.
Rather, starting with an outward approach, questioning potential new hires as a way to prove the worth of your feedback. And work towards the improved hiring success of clients.
Designing a regimented structure for your recruiters to follow is a logical first step.
Could you use a 1-5 rating, filled out on candidates’ behalf, during exploratory calls? Thus giving you a feedback loop to present to hiring managers after the shortlist.
Here are some basic sample questions to think about in designing your own approach.
- What’s your opinion of this company, based on what you know?
- What do you believe they could improve on?
- What do you believe they do well?
- How has your opinion been formed?
- Of course, many potential candidates may not have an opinion. In which case they’re not relevant to this process.
But for those who do, the strength or weakness of that opinion could help the hiring business look inward to improve their standing in the market.
