Sang-Kyun ("Sanny") Park, Global Expert for Employer Branding and Talent Attraction at KWS, is one of them. He's spent the past 18 months building a voice on LinkedIn, and it’s more than just sharing a post or two on LinkedIn.

This conversation is about what it takes for employer branding to be recognised as central to how organisations attract and retain talent — not a side function.

Sanny didn't wait for a strategy before he started posting; he picked topics he had an opinion on and worked out what resonated by watching the numbers. That habit of sharing expertise, done consistently, is what raises the profile of employer branding as an industry and gives individuals more of a voice inside their own organisations.

About Sanny: Sanny moved into employer branding after a career in classic FMCG brand marketing, and now leads employer brand and talent attraction globally at KWS, one of the world's leading plant breeding companies. His weekly LinkedIn videos have grown into a company-wide social media advocates programme.

What you'll hear:
- Why raising individual profiles on LinkedIn also raises the profile of employer branding as an industry
- Why Sanny started posting before he had a content strategy — and why that wasn't a mistake
- The personal reason he pushed himself in front of the camera after years working behind it
- How one post about "job hugging" hit 3 million impressions, and what he learned from it
- Why leading by example is the fastest way to get employees creating content
- How KWS built a social media advocates pilot from Sanny's own experiment

Find Sanny: www.linkedin.com/in/sang-kyun-park-kws
Find Chris: www.linkedin.com/in/chrislch

“Employer Brand in the age of infinite content” stood out on the event circuit, so I had to come along and see what the discussion was about.

As well as the topic, what stood out was the panel. Joining Nick Homer, Managing Partner - Employer Brand at Chapter 2, were two guests from well outside employer branding and talent acquisition circles, which is exactly what we need.

Jordan Schwarzemberger is CEO and Co-Founder of Arcade, the management company for Europe’s biggest creators - Sidemen (244m+ cross channel followers). And Amelia Miller: Co-founder of ivee, ex-international athlete and published psychologist.

That mix is brilliant. The more we listen to people outside our own industry, the more we learn and the more innovation happens. In that spirit, it’s great to hear Chapter 2 has launched Signal, their employer branding agency. Looking forward to seeing more about that in the coming weeks.

Now on to what I took away from the evening, along with my own takes.

Content saturation and sameness - supercharged by AI

It’s never been easier or cheaper to create content, which sounds like good news until you notice what it’s actually produced: a mountain of sameness, AI slop, as some call it. There’s a real danger that the industry leans on AI to do more with less, but isn’t that just going to magnify the criticism employer branding often gets? The vanilla messaging, the corporate speak, the lack of distinctiveness. A good friend of mine, Chris Murdoch, has a podcast with a name that sticks it to the sameness: Employer Bland - it sums up the challenge really well.

This is a real issue in my opinion. When you’re busy as a solo artist or small team, it’s tempting to get enticed by the efficiency of AI. Writing that would take hours now takes a few minutes. But buyer beware.

People can tell when AI is being relied on for speed more than quality. There are clear tells in AI-written content, and increasingly they’re liabilities. Watch for the tells, heavy em dashes, familiar cliches. Don’t use AI as a crutch, use it to support the work, not do it for you.

What actually helps you stand out in the sea of AI slop? The answer from the panel was to get in front of a camera, it’s still distinctive in a way AI isn’t. Focus on being genuinely unique, doing something only you can do. A great hook matters more than people think, particularly on LinkedIn, close to both science and art, usually built on a story, a pain point, and a resolution.

The other answer from the panel? Find the employees who naturally stand out, not because they’re polished, but because they have real character, real insight, and their own opinions and expertise to share. That’s where employer brand content actually competes against a sea of AI slop. And where AI does the heavy lifting behind the scenes, it frees up time for the more human part, which was never going to be replaceable anyway.

Polished isn’t the issue, corporate blandness is

TikTok has taught everyone that rough, ready and natural is what a lot of people crave. Too polished starts to feel too corporate, and trust drops when this happens. But I’d push back slightly on treating this way. You need employee-generated, rough-and-real content that’s going to really help communicate your employer brand. But high-production content can still be true and trusted if it’s built around something real, a podcast episode built on someone’s genuinely difficult experience at work, a workplace documentary shot with employees. Production values aren’t the problem. Corporate blandness is. And mixing up the formats matters if you’re going to stand out and sustain your content operations.

Content-first thinking - a mindset that changes your employer branding

SULT, a UK hydration/electrolyte brand, came up as a good example of what the panel was talking about. Their Instagram is worth scrolling through. They are great at content and understand social 100%. When they had a role open, they didn’t post a job ad in the traditional sense. They did a video of the co-founders in the pub talking about their crazy busy week and the role they’re hiring for - they wanted videos not CVs.

This is content-first thinking. But not every leadership team does, this thinking has to be strategic, not just something that happens long after of a strategy that never mentions it.

M&S got a specific mention too, and an employee in particular: Kathryn Turner, their Director of Product Development, has built a viral TikTok presence sharing behind-the-scenes work, taste sessions and product explainers, the actual process of getting a product to shelf. Here’s her TikTok account, her enthusiasm is contagious and she’s clearly passionate about what she does.

She’s only posted 16 videos but already has over 100,000 followers and over a million views and likes. It’s an amazing example of expertise as content, and of a large, established brand letting an individual represent it in their own way.

Trust is the key to your organisation’s success

How do you build trust in your brand? A big message was that if you don’t build trust through your employees, your brand will die. Strong words, but entirely understandable given that the generations now in the workforce, and driving buying decisions and influence, just see transparency as a given, because that’s what social media gave them.

That means releasing some control, trust doesn’t survive otherwise. My own take on this: we already trust employees enough to hire them. We spend real time, effort and money finding the right people. If they’re right for the job, why wouldn’t we trust them with content too?

The panel praised M&S for being one of the most trusted brands right now, partly because of its content, though it’s also decades of consistent brand investment behind that. You build trust culture by breaking the fear culture underneath most corporate content policies. Guardrails still matter, especially for leadership or older generations who need more reassurance. But psychological safety is really important, most employees hesitate not because they lack something to say, but because they’ve absorbed years of “don’t do this” policy thinking instead of a “here’s how” playbook.

How to get employees involved - find out what’s in it for them

Amelia gives every new starter LinkedIn guidance when they join. Nobody’s forced to post, though eventually they find ways to encourage people who’ve held back. The tactic of paying employees to get involved was brought up, and I think there’s real merit in that. But before you get to money, it’s worth asking honestly what’s in it for the employee. Raising their own profile. Raising their team’s profile. Visibility with leadership. Showing their expertise, internally and to current and future clients. That makes someone more valuable, wherever they end up next.

Yes, organisations worry about people leaving once they’ve built a profile. But that risk exists either way. The big question is what happens if they don’t leave, and they’re more engaged because they’re actually contributing something.

Content is a habit, not a campaign

I say this often because I really believe it: content is a habit. Be humble enough to go through a process about what works for you, and have the stamina to keep going once the first attempts don’t land. Jordan said don’t judge whether you’re any good at this until you’ve posted fifty times. Do the reps, learn as you go, and look at what other people do well and build your own version rather than starting from a blank page.

Fine advice. In my opinion, stamina is underrated in marketing, especially in employer branding, an industry that too often wants everything perfect before it starts. Most of the real learning happens through action, guided by strategy but not blocked by it. Fittingly, this event was held at Steven Bartlett’s offices, through his connection with Chapter 2, he’s an investor and partner. Amelia mentioned something Steven says: “Embarrassment is the cost of entry.” The only way past the fear of getting it wrong is doing it, and the only way it gets easier is doing it again.

The Diary of a CEO is one of the biggest podcasts on the planet, but it started with 22 episodes that nobody watched when Steven was producing them from his kitchen.

Amelia’s view was that you don’t need a big team or budget to start. She runs her company’s content with essentially one person supported by AI, and they’re building an AI agent to give employees content ideas. I’d add a caveat to that: a lot can be done by one person, but I’ve seen how much of a struggle it is where employer branding really is a team of one. AI helps for sure, but it doesn’t totally replace having the right people in place.

How much can, and should, AI take off your plate?

Jordan’s view was that the substance has to come from you, not AI, don’t outsource your thinking. Amelia challenged this, saying that if you build a sophisticated AI system that really knows your tone, organisation and context, it can support your thinking rather than replace it.

My own take is that both can be true at the same time, and I’ve learnt this a lot over the last 24 months. Give AI the right context, and don’t take its first answer as final. Great ideas usually come from bouncing things off someone else, and there’s no reason AI can’t be part of that useful friction. The point of failure isn’t AI itself, it’s opening a blank chat and typing “write a LinkedIn post about accountancy” or “write an employer content strategy for me” and hoping for the best.

So do employees need to be creators on top of everything else?

I think it’s great that employees becoming content creators is finally being taken seriously, but not everyone is ready, willing or has the time. So the scale question isn’t “get more employees creating content,” it’s finding the employees who are real gems, and building a system to draw content out of them without asking them to become creators themselves. Invite them to a meet up or a call and just talk to them, run it more like a media operation, use voice notes, run interviews.

One of my podcast guests this year was with Andy Lambert, who wrote Spheres of Influence, on how the most trusted brands win by getting employees involved. His point was spot on: ask someone to write something and they’ll struggle to find the time. Ask if they’ve got time to talk, and they usually say yes.

Rely on different content capture formats and you’ve got more chance of scaling your content operations.

AI, hiring, and the skills that sit behind an AI-supported workforce

There was a side conversation on AI and hiring, with the advice being to ask for AI fluency in candidates. I’d push that further. AI fluency isn’t just about knowing the tools, it’s the human skills behind it….the critical thinking, reasoning, knowing what to question, that determine whether someone gets anything useful out of AI at all. This makes hiring the right people even more important. AI magnifies whatever skills are already in an organisation, so you’d best be confident you’ve got the right people before you hand them the amplifier.

Standing out in the crowd - the shoe in the box

Amelia told a story about standing out from the crowd. They sent an actual shoe, in a box, to a handful of prospects, with a note: we’ve now got a foot in the door. It’s cheap, slightly ridiculous, but it’s just the kind of thing AI wouldn’t produce. In a world full of near-identical sales emails and LinkedIn posts, that’s a refreshing way of approaching it.

Events do a great job too: in-person time is inherently unique, a genuine source of content you can’t manufacture any other way. Use AI to help run the logistics if you like, but the event itself is high-touch, human stuff. It’s a bit strange we now have to actively argue for being human in our content, but given the alternative on offer, it makes sense the conversation has gone here.

The social media ban, and what fills the gap

The panel touched on the under-16s social media ban, already in place in Australia and now confirmed in the UK, announced in June. Nobody on stage was confident it’ll change much in practice, it won’t stop people using the platforms, but it might raise awareness of what social media actually does to people, particularly among parents.

An interesting question is what fills the gap once platforms are eventually forced to curb harmful content. Someone raised employer branding as part of the answer, and I think that’s right. People need content that actually helps and teaches them, and that doesn’t have to come from celebrities. Employees, sharing real knowledge and expertise, can do as similar job. We consume plenty of content from celebrities, podcasters, YouTubers, journalists. Why not employees who really know their stuff? Employer branding has a bigger job than the industry gives it credit for, in my opinion.

What would you do if you had a FTSE 100 employer branding budget tomorrow?

The advice was mainly around not defaulting to the old playbook. Agreed on that! You don’t have to always reach for the expensive research or EVP development project that takes months.

Incentivise employees to create, and give them time to do it, that’s the part organisations can struggle with.

Bring in creators who have that content-first mindset to work with organisations directly. Use AI to build employees a simple internal resource for getting involved. I saw a version of this recently while judging the Recruitment Marketing Awards, and it’s a good idea in practice.

Building a content studio in-house was another thing on the shopping list. Amelia made this point and I completely agree. It doesn’t need to be expensive. A room used once a month is enough, with someone there who has a producer’s mindset to help employees turn a conversation into something usable. Renting a studio works too, there are plenty in London, and proximity to the space is what helps gets content made - convenience for busy employees helps. This is something I talk about in my new book, The Lean Employer Content Guide. Becoming self-sustainable is really important, and having an in-house studio set up is one of the great ways to do that.

My final thoughts employer brand in the age of infinite content

Creators move fast, and that speed is exactly why brands want to work with them. Startups have fewer barriers, so the same instinct comes naturally too. Bigger organisations struggle a bit more when they try to apply this to existing structures and mindsets, but it’s worth doing.

I think the real answer sits in the middle with a tiered, media-company mindset.

Not total lockdown, with rigid guidelines and templated content. Not a free-for-all either, where every employee is expected to become a creator overnight. It’s somewhere between: keep a core of structured branded assets, let employees who want to create content do so, and alongside both, run something closer to a media operation that draws content out of busy people rather than asking them to do the heavy lifting themselves.

Do that well, and people get more confident sharing their thoughts over time, and some go on to become genuine creators in their own right, especially once the organisation sees the value and puts time and money behind it. You get control without losing freedom. And that’s the version that will make it easier to scale.

Looking forward to the next event.

Chris

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

This year I went to find out what’s on the minds of TA and EB people right now — and, more importantly, what they’re doing about it — so I could share it here.

Here’s how the day unfolded, plus my own takes along the way.

Doing AI vs Doing AI properly — compliance

Before I’d even got through the gates, I bumped into a few people I know and had the kind of catch-up where you spend the first few minutes trying to work out when you last saw each other. I asked one of them, someone who talks to senior people leaders every day, what crops up the most in conversations.

Their answer, unprompted: AI — but specifically AI compliance. They told me about someone who was asked to AI themselves, and their own team, out of a job. And another situation where a CEO decided to “pick up AI” alongside people leadership and everything else — needless to say, it became a big addition to their to-do list, and it came with unexpected challenges.

AI is moving from just talking about it to actually doing something about it. There’s doing AI, and then there’s doing AI properly. Get the compliance piece wrong, and it can create more problems than it solves. And don’t expect AI to be a silver bullet - like with anything, for it work well you need to put the time and effort into it.

Talent Acquisition and AI in 2026

This year I wanted to spend more time at the talks than wandering the stands and chatting in the field — although I did plenty of that too. My first stop was Hung Lee (Recruiting Brainfood) on the Inspire Stage, taking us through what we need to know about TA and AI in 2026.

Hung covered a lot of ground, but here were some of my takeaways:

The pyramid is becoming a diamond. The traditional org shape — a big base of employees, fewer managers, fewer leaders still — is shifting. With fewer people doing the delivery work, and AI doing the heavy lifting underneath - that changes what the remaining humans need to be capable of. If you’re going to have fewer people around AI, those people — managers and leaders included — need to understand both AI and people properly. There’s no room left for a leader who only understands one half of that equation.

Everyone’s data is training data now. Hung shared a photo of a woman in India filming herself doing everyday tasks — chopping a mango, iPhone strapped to her head — paid specifically so that footage can be fed into AI models. Wow. What happens to the people doing that kind of task-based work once the model has learned what it needs from them?

Recruiting is starting to look like executive search. Individual hires matter more because AI multiplies what one person can now produce, and recruiting capacity is shrinking because more of the process can be automated. That should free recruiters up for the genuinely human parts — mapping the market, building relationships with hiring managers, succession planning — rather than replacing them.

“TA Plus” and proximity to value. If the transactional tasks get automated, the job becomes about adding value beyond the task: real relationships with the business, real understanding of what it’s trying to achieve, not just working from the brief a hiring manager hands you. My comparison: it’s like a football agent who can tell you exactly what value their player has delivered for the club, not just that they filled a squad slot.

The future of early careers: the missing middle?

Next up was a panel on early careers hiring — “The Missing Middle: Why cutting early careers today creates tomorrow’s talent crisis.”

The argument: AI is now capable of doing a lot of the entry-level tasks that used to be how people learned the ropes, which makes it tempting for organisations to cut early careers hiring significantly, or altogether. But that just pushes the problem further down the line. Early careers talent brings the fresh thinking, the comfort with new technology, the innovation a business needs to keep evolving.

When your senior leaders are thinking short-term, ask them what will the impact on the business be in two to five years’ time? Will leaving a hole of talent in the middle of the business make them more, or less, competitive?

Something else from the panel was a great piece of advice wrapped up in a story - an intern who, within weeks of starting, built something that generated $100,000 for the business. That kind of story moves people far more than a slide of data ever will — exactly the kind of proof point employer brand teams should be capturing and telling, not sitting on.

ROI matters, of course — but storytelling and relationship-building are what actually position the importance and impact of early careers talent internally.

Working in employer branding in-house? You’re the orchestrator, not the owner

Over on the EVP stage, James Ellis and Audra Knight brought some big energy about employer branding in-house. Treat employer brand as a business tool, not a TA tool or an internal engagement nice-to-have — if you can use it to solve an actual business problem, you become far more relevant in the room.

There was a brutal little exercise thrown out to the audience: use ChatGPT to look at your website and ask it to pull out the key messages. Now do the same for your competitors and see the difference. The results will likely tell you that differentiation is lacking more than it should be in employer branding.

There was a comforting message for EBers. Often, employer branding comes down to one person or a small team. As an employer brand person, you don’t have the authority to tell the whole business what its story is — you’re the orchestrator, not the owner. This really resonated with me - the job is surfacing the knowledge and experience that’s already sitting inside teams and giving it a shape. That’s also, not coincidentally, exactly the point I keep making about content: it’s not a bolt-on to a business strategy, it’s the front end of it.

Culture and EVP: the Mars bar analogy

“Insight to Impact with Great Place to Work: Building an Authentic EVP Rooted in Culture Data,” with Claire Knights (Chief Growth Officer, Great Place to Work) and Vicki Saunders (Founding Director, The EVP Consultancy), was a really interesting session on the foundations of authentic EVPs.

It was interesting to see that Great Place to Work doesn’t just see themselves as an accreditation body handing out badges — it’s a data company.

And the analogy Vicki used is that of a Mars bar: the ingredients, the bar itself, the wrapper, the tasting, and the reviews. You can have the glossiest wrapper in the industry, but if there’s no substance in the bar, people find out fast — and increasingly, so does AI. In a world where LLMs are shaping how candidates form opinions about employers, generic marketing language with no proof points behind it just won’t land.

Interrogate your data, find your proof points, and look at the long-term pattern rather than a single good year. That’s what makes an EVP true rather than a campaign — and the payoff has multiple benefits. Internally, people believe it because they can see it’s real, which kills cynicism. Externally, the wrong people self-select out before they apply, and the right people arrive with fewer surprises when they join.

Conversations between the talks

The conversations flowed from the tents to in between the agenda, and here are some of the things we talked about in the July sunshine.

On the agency model. A properly interesting conversation about whether agencies still need to be the size they used to be, or whether a leaner model — bringing in the right specialist at the right moment — is actually the better way to work now. AI and monetisation: If AI makes things quicker does that mean agencies should charge less? Yes, and no - it depends. But AI in the hands of someone who doesn’t know a specialism produces something generic, but AI in the hands of someone who really knows their craft produces something sharper. That’s a big case for partners with real knowledge working alongside in-house teams.

On the science of storytelling. A great conversation about understanding how people actually react to content, rather than just what they say they think about it — looking at the physical, almost instinctive response to a piece of video versus the polite feedback you get when you ask someone’s opinion of it afterwards. It’s a good reminder that there’s real craft and science behind storytelling that works. Even when plenty of it can be done in-house, it’s worth investing in content production experts, while also building your in-house capability - both help each other.

On employee-generated video. A conversation about the real barrier many in-house teams face with video — it’s rarely desire, it’s headspace, resource, time and capability. In-house teams who decide to “do video” often only realise what it actually takes once they start doing it themselves. That’s important for internal learning, and it shows that software which helps employees generate their own content really helps — but so does having the bandwidth to manage the process. Using partners in the right way can make all the difference.

On hiring for storytelling. I chatted to a global brand who’d hired for a senior storytelling role a few months back — and what’s interesting is that the role sits in comms, not TA. So it’s not just a TA thing — storytelling is something that covers multiple touch points in a business, and therefore brings value in multiple places. Building the business case is about looking at the true strategic impact and ROI to the business. Companies are full of stories, so it’s genuinely great to see it being taken seriously, and I hope more follow suit. I’ll be picking this up in a future podcast episode.

TA as a strategic partner? Amazon shows how it’s done

Amazon took the Inspire Stage to talk about moving TA from vacancy filler to strategic business partner — it’s great to see this shift actually happening, and it’s not just conference talk. The question they left the audience with was a great mic-drop moment: If your business removed the TA function entirely, what would it lose beyond the ability to hire?

If you’re struggling to answer that, it’s worth taking a proper look at how TA can genuinely help the business.

It was great to see a panel of people actually making this happen — especially from a company like Amazon.

The answer keeps coming back to the same place: have a deep understanding of what the business actually needs, and build relationships with stakeholders across it. You can’t just ask TA questions — you have to ask business questions.

AI is smart, humans are genius

This session took aim at the traditional recruitment processes as ways to spot the people who are actually going to help a business grow through thinking differently and dealing with unknowns. As AI takes over the more “logical” parts of the process there’s a danger of making things too logical. Tom Stevenson - Founder & CEO at Pynea made the case for assessing people against a future problem instead of asking questions with a clean, Google-able or LLM-able answer. Open-ended questions are harder to fake and harder for AI to answer generically on someone’s behalf — which gives you a good read on how someone thinks.

My take: Hung and Tom’s point about CVs — that they capture a record of achievement but not the trait or mindset behind it — connects straight back to content. If you’re creating opinion-led, story-led content that genuinely shows what it’s like to work somewhere and who succeeds there, you’re doing some of that assessment work before a candidate even applies. People self-select in — or, just as usefully, self-select out.

Closing out at the EVP stage

The last session of the day? I went back to the EVP tent. A hot field, music getting louder outside, drinks flowing, and a speaker who said she was nervous but didn’t show it once she got going.

Nicola Plenderleith - Head of Talent Acquisition at Leyton - was great. She gave practical, take-it-away-and-do-it-Monday advice, and her core point was simple: your EVP isn’t the polished version you’ve built, it’s whether that promise actually shows up at every touchpoint someone experiences — from the first conversation with a hiring manager, to whether your career site would still be recognisably you with the logo covered up, to the rejection emails you send out. Go back and reread your own rejection emails. Do they sound like boilerplate, or do they sound like you? That was a genuinely good way to close the day.

The Lean Guide to Employer Content

I’d brought a few copies of my recently published book: The Lean Guide to Employer Content along with me for the day, and it was great getting it into people’s hands and talking about the why and what of it. The response was a valuable reaffirmation for writing the book.

If you’re in talent acquisition or employer branding and want a framework to build self-sustainable content creation in-house then you can find out more here.

The Lean Employer Content Guide

Why I love going to events like RecFest

The big takeaway for me is that it’s worth going to events like this.

It’s a rare chance to meet multiple people in one place, and to take your team along so they can learn from others too. And it’s just as important to have some good conversations and a few drinks in the sun — it might not feel like work, but stepping back and actually enjoying yourself is exactly what sends you back to work with energy and focus.

If you see me at an event, pop over and say hi.

Chris

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

Spending time together in person is really valuable, especially for small teams and solo practitioners. That’s something well understood in employer branding.

That’s why events like The EB Space’s Uncut [Un]Conference matter so much for the employer branding community - and why it was great to return to Havas People for the second year running.

What Claire’s built here is fantastic - more on that later, when I share my conversation with her from the end of a long day.

Here’s what stood out for me, with my own take thrown in where I’ve got one.

[A quick note: as this was a safe space for conversations within four walls, I haven’t gone into detail of who said what specifically - but I want you to get a feel for the themes discussed, and hopefully it encourages you to join future events].

AI Won’t Replace Employer Brand...But It Might Replace Average Employer Branders

Right off the bat, we took on the massive topic of AI - it’s unavoidable, weaving its way into life, society, and work like the internet on steroids.

Will AI replace employer branding, or just the people who do the things it can now take on? One interesting opinion was that the job description for an “average” employer brander doesn’t really exist anymore, and addressing that is down to leadership - understanding what the discipline needs to look like in a world with AI in it, which means a willingness to embrace change.

AI isn’t there to replace what already exists - it’s there to scale it. Research is a good example: AI has massively increased the practical capability available to employer branders, though the output still needs checking. AI shouldn’t replace strategy, but it can support it by accelerating the research strategy is built on. What it shouldn’t replace is the underlying skills - you need those first if you want to use AI well.

Creativity came up too - there’s something inherently human that AI can’t replicate, and a real danger of everything starting to look the same when people lean on it too much. My take: that danger exists with humans too - the result being corporate jargon and empty messages - it’s why my fellow podcaster Chris Murdoch started a podcast called Employer Bland - love that title.

A big piece was seeing AI-generated creative work that’s technically fine but missing the punch of great human creative - and that shows up in performance, not just looks. One example: a video where an employee hesitated on camera, the editor offering to smooth it out - but it was the hesitation that needed to stay in. I said it myself in the LinkedIn comments on this event last week: those imperfections are perfect. AI would remove that - and that’s something we see far too often in employer branding.

My take: the hesitation story is less about AI. It’s an editing-philosophy point that AI just happens to have made more visible. Polish a moment too much, whether by algorithm or editor, and you lose the heart and soul.

Who Are You Without Your Job Title?

This session was a good example of the difference this conference brings to the employer branding space - a conversation that really helps everyone reflect and get value from other people’s experiences.

One thing was about how you introduce yourself to someone. In the UK, the instinctive question is “what do you do?” - but less of a thing in other countries. A job is, no doubt, a big part of our lives. It shouldn’t define you - though it can be part of your identity.

As personal branding becomes more important, presenting yourself matters - but only if it’s true to you. Being one person online and someone totally different in person is the real issue. Your reputation is real, so stay true to yourself - it’s you who works with colleagues and peers day to day, not your online persona.

The conversation encourages everyone to think about how they introduce themselves - not job title first, but something distinctive or genuinely part of who you are. From writer to coffee drinker to curious person - these all help us be more us. The conference lived this out - there were no job titles on name badges, just your name and an icebreaker question.

My take: the unpolished, real version of a story is almost always worth more than the manufactured one.

Pitch Slapped: What Nobody Says About Agency-Client Relationships

It’s really refreshing to hear this topic discussed openly at an industry event - it’s something a lot of people in employer branding feel and go through, but rarely say it out loud.

One theme was that clients sometimes forget an agency has other clients, breeding unrealistic, ASAP expectations. But agencies often get selected precisely because of the variety of clients they work across - this isn’t always acknowledged once a client assumes they’re the only one being served.

In-house teams often navigate internal approval chains agency people don’t see, which can explain a lot of the back-and-forth that frustrates people on the outside. Empathy on both sides is the answer.

Then there’s the balance between answering a brief exactly as given and offering what you think is the right solution. Is an unanswered brief a misunderstanding, or a genuine push toward something better? The answer, I think, is clarity: a short conversation, before or after the brief lands, avoids the email ping-pong of second-guessing each other.

There was a great audience question: should companies pay agencies to pitch? My own view: it pushes companies to select the right ones in the first place, and it shows a respect for time, money, and contribution from day one. But agencies need to position themselves clearly enough that companies know who to invite in the first place too.

Culture Isn’t a Content Strategy

Employer brand can tell powerful stories, but it can’t fix culture on its own. This session explored the tension between what we say externally and what people actually experience internally.

This was a really interesting session for me, considering I live in the employer content space - I often say I’m about helping organisations turn workplace culture into content. Employer brand doesn’t fix culture; the truest expressions of it are strategy and communications simply wrapped around a culture that already exists.

One of the POVs from the panel wasn’t just to communicate culture anymore - it was to actually shift it. My first reaction: agencies can talk all day about influencing culture, but they’re rarely embedded deep enough inside a business to move it through branding alone. Real change happens from really being in the inside.

The panel’s conversation built toward something similar. Spin collapses the moment employees stop believing the story told about their workplace - and if they don’t believe it, candidates won’t either.

Another key point was how company values get interpreted differently around the world. Real co-creation with local teams matters - if you don’t localise the meaning, it just becomes hollow.

My take: I’d frame the title differently - “Content strategy isn’t your culture, but it can help bring it alive.” Your culture already exists, good or bad, and content’s job is to give it a pulse, out loud, through real engagement with the people living inside it. Done well, the vibe comes through implicitly - and it cuts both ways, because the people who wouldn’t fit sense that just as clearly as the people who would.

The Debate: Employer Brand Is Dead. Long Live Reputation

2pm is when energy at an all day event usually dips - so this debate injected some spiciness into the room. Speakers were told which side they had to argue seconds before talking on stage, which made for some afternoon chuckles.

One argument centred on control - employer brand is what you can shape and own, while reputation is largely what happens to you. The counter-argument leaned on consumer trust: would you trust the company selling the air fryer, or the hundreds of reviews saying it burns your fish fingers? There was a very timely political comparison too - reputation is Kier Starmer, whereas Employer Branding is Andy Burnham.

One more point was that AI is now doing candidates’ research for them, stripping away even more control.

Part of the debate spilled into a different question - where employer brand should actually sit within a business. This age-old question could have been a session in its own right, so I picked it up with Richard Gordon afterwards.

Where should employer brand sit in an organisation? Listen to Richard Gordon 🔊

Richard worked both agency-side and across several different companies in-house, and I wanted his view given that breadth of experience. His take: there’s no universally right answer. He had a case for sitting within Talent & Learning, since housing EB only inside TA narrows it to attraction, without asking whether the external story holds up once someone’s inside the building.

The Candidate Trust Crisis

It’s great to see this topic discussed so openly - because for everything we do in employer brand and talent, the candidate is ultimately a huge part of it.

AI came up again: candidates using it to apply at scale and game the system, while companies use it to assess applications at the same scale - a trust crisis sitting right in the middle. But it’s just as much about ghosting, vague job descriptions, and the gap between what’s promised and what candidates actually experience.

One point that stood out for me was that this erosion of trust starts even earlier than the job market itself - tied to a broader decline in trust in institutions like universities, accelerated through COVID.

My take: the fix is mostly unglamorous. My mum and dad always said please and thank you doesn’t cost anything - and that’s what can get dropped first when teams are stretched and AI becomes “the answer’.

EB Therapy - Closing Q&A

This session is another good example of why this event is great - pre-submitted questions from all delegates were put into a box and plucked out for answering.

Two questions stood out for me. Are careers sites still necessary? Yes - but the role is shifting fast given how much job discovery now happens through AI. My own view: they need to stop being a build-it-and-forget asset and start operating like a living editorial hub. The other: how job search behaviour itself is changing.

There were plenty of other questions and side conversations too, and that was a great way to end the day - focused purely on value to the people attending.

And Relax: A Conversation With Claire de Souza After Another Epic Day 🔊

As the [un]conference wound down, I grabbed a drink and managed to catch Claire to find out why she gives up this much extra time, in an already busy life, to keep making this happen.

Here’s our conversation:

She really cares about doing this, and wants to build a space for genuinely good, unpolished conversation. What she’s built is deliberately hand-made, down to gluing lolly sticks onto cards and stuffing sweets into bags in her living room.

Claire wants people to leave with more than a goody bag and pages of notes. She wants them feeling a bit challenged, and a bit refreshed. Nothing beats human connection - very true, Claire!

It was a great event, and I’m super glad to have been part of it again. Keep an eye out for other events by The EB Space.

Chris

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

Why I wrote this

It started as an idea during on an early morning walk. Then when I started talking to people about it the feedback was positive. So I decided to write this guide that’s here in my hand.

And I wrote it for good reason.

The content attention crisis is the single biggest shift in employer content. And it’s the problem this guide helps you solve.

In a world of constant notifications and endless feeds, the competition for attention is brutal. Today’s candidates are drowning in content. Holding attention has never been harder.

Which is exactly why a lean approach and being self-sustainable matters. Rather than committing months to planning campaigns, or relying on spending tens or hundreds of thousands on productions with uncertain outcomes, lean lets you:

• Test ideas quickly, without breaking the budget

• Learn what resonates with your specific audiences

• Scale what works across roles, business areas, channels and formats

After months of writing and editing and building in between work, family and friends, The Lean Employer Content Guide is now available.

What it is

The Lean Employer Content Guide is a practical framework for in-house teams in employer branding and talent acquisition.

Lean is a way to be more self-sustainable and to take small steps towards something bigger.

It’s the approach I’ve built my business around, and it’s how I’ve taken clients from mobile-shot employee videos all the way through to full video productions - without the blockbusting film budgets.It’s also how I’ve run this newsletter, podcast, YouTube Channel and my LinkedIn.

The Lean Employer Content Guide is built around a framework that covers two things: the foundations you need to get right before you start creating — how you think, how you plan, and how you set yourself up to produce consistently — and a three-stage cycle for actually running your content operation.

Every chapter ends with five take-action items you can run that same week. It’s nearly 90 pages, about an hour’s read end to end, and built to be dipped into as a working reference rather than read once and shelved.

What you get

• The printed guide itself, with notes pages built in so you can capture your own thinking as you read

• The 4-Week Sprint Toolkit, to run your first Content Cycle as a proper time-boxed sprint

• The Content Cycle Canvas, a single-page worksheet worth pinning above your desk

• Occasional emails from me, nothing relentless

For my first print run the guide costs £26, UK shipping included.

Order the printed guide - £26

Thank you to the early-morning starts, the coffee shops, the sofa sessions, and to everyone who encouraged me to turn the idea of this guide into the guide itself. You know who you are.

Chris

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

There’s a YouTube channel called Life At The BBC.

If you haven’t come across it, it does exactly what it says on the tin — a peek behind the curtain at one of the world’s most recognisable organisations. Who works there. What they actually do. What it feels like to be part of it.

Over the last few months they’ve been quietly putting out a stream of YouTube Shorts. Short, punchy, filmed simply. And if you work in employer brand or internal comms, I recommend spending twenty minutes with them — because there’s a masterclass buried in there.

Here’s what stands out.

The setup is deceptively simple

The first thing you notice watching these Shorts is that nobody’s spent a fortune on kit. It’s sometimes a walk-and-talk through a familiar BBC location. And sometimes a quick explainer from someone in a craft role you’d never normally hear from.

That’s intentional because one of the biggest excuses I’ve heard from in-house teams is that they can’t do video properly without a production budget. The BBC is proving otherwise, week after week, on a short-form format that anyone with a camera and a subject can replicate.

The format is a permission slip to crack on. If they can do it lean, so can you.

But the content goes somewhere most employer content doesn’t

Here’s what I find really interesting.

The Shorts aren’t just “here’s what it’s like to work here” fluff. They lift the lid on what the BBC actually does — the craft, the decision-making, the experience of being inside a big, complex organisation with a lot of moving parts.

That’s a different angle. Most employer content stays surface-level: the office looks nice, the people are friendly, there are good benefits. This is my day full of commuting, coffee, lunch and maybe a hint of the work in between. Tick, tick, tick. The BBC content goes deeper. It shows process. It shows expertise. It treats the audience like grown-ups who are genuinely curious about how things get made.

This content goes from “here’s our culture” to “here’s how we work” — and I think it is one of the most underused moves in employer branding. It builds credibility in a way that a careers page can never quite manage. People don’t just want to know what it’s like to work somewhere. They want to know what they’d actually be doing.

Building intrigue

There’s one more thing working in the BBC’s favour, and it’s worth naming honestly: the organisation itself carries intrigue.

People are curious about what happens behind a Strictly camera, or inside a BBC news studio, or in the writers’ room on a flagship drama. That curiosity exists before the content starts. The Shorts plug straight into it.

You might be thinking: that’s easy for the BBC. We’re not a household name.

Fair point — but only partially. Every organisation has things that would genuinely surprise an outsider. The decisions that happen in the room. The skills that nobody associates with your sector. The moments where your people are doing something quietly extraordinary. Most of it never sees the light of day because teams assume it’s not interesting.

It is. It just needs someone to find it and film it.

The BBC’s advantage is a head start on intrigue. Your advantage is that your story is probably less told — which means there’s more room to surprise people.

Here are more of their YouTube Shorts.

What to actually do with this

If you’re building or refreshing your employer content programme, here are a few things:

Pick a format and stick to it. The BBC Shorts work partly because they’re consistent. The audience knows what they’re getting. That predictability is an asset — it builds a habit of watching.

Go beyond culture, into craft. Find the people in your organisation who are genuinely good at something specific, and put them on camera explaining it. Not their job title. What they actually do. The granularity is what makes it compelling.

Let the organisation’s reality be the story. You don’t need a narrative overlay or a clever concept. What happens at your company every day is already interesting. The job is getting it out of people’s heads and onto screen.

Use the short format as a discipline. The constraint of short form forces you to find the single sharpest thing in any given conversation. That’s a skill worth building — and it applies well beyond short-form video.

A note on where this fits

This piece is part of a series I’m running through the rest of the year — looking at organisations doing employer content well, and pulling out the thinking behind it. Some are household names. Some aren’t. What they have in common is a clear instinct about what they’re trying to do and why.

If you’re working through how to approach this for your own organisation, you’ll be interested in a guide for in-house teams that I’m release very soon. It’s called The Lean Guide To Employer Content, and it’s packed with guidance for in-house teams who want to build self-sustainable and scalable content functions. So if you want to know more about it then keep an eye on here or subscribe and get it in your inbox.

More to come in my Field Notes on Employer Storytelling Series. If there’s an organisation you think I should be looking at, drop it in the comments — I’m always looking for the next one.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

This article covers the things we talked about. Watch the episode above, or listen to it below.

The agency landscape has changed a lot across mine and Nick’s careers. Recruitment advertising agencies that used to book media and fill it with creative evolved into something more. Websites, brochures, events, social media, employee comms… and employer branding.

Then over the last decade we saw employer brand emerge as agency projects, new specialist agencies, and in-house job titles.

So with the rise of in-house specialists and them working with other in-house teams, there’s a commercial question from the bosses who hold the purse strings - do you need an agency at all?

But the question isn’t whether to use an agency. It’s what they’re actually there to do — and when.

Because the thing agencies do really well, the thing that’s hard to replicate inside an organisation, is creativity. Not creativity as a vague concept — but the kind that comes from working across dozens of organisations, sectors and challenges. From having different reference points in the room. From seeing the same problem play out in ten different ways and knowing what actually works.

And that’s not just “words, pictures and pixels” creativity. It’s problem solving creativity.

The opportunity is agencies bringing that creativity at the right time, alongside in-house teams who have their own deep knowledge of the organisation. Not taking over. Not just delivering a brief and walking away. But coming in when it matters, adding the thing that’s genuinely hard to build internally, and leaving something better behind.

That sounds like a true partnership, right?

The knowledge transfer opportunity

One of the things Nick and I talked about is how much value sits in the movement of knowledge — in both directions.

People who’ve worked agency-side before moving in-house are often great hires for an organisation. They’ve seen the same problems play out across multiple organisations, built instincts from a breadth of experience, and can transfer that to a team quickly.

But there’s an opportunity for agencies too. Rather than the traditional model — take the brief, go away, come back with the work — what if agencies embedded alongside in-house teams, filled in the gaps, amplified what was already happening, and left the team genuinely better than they found it?

That’s a different kind of engagement. Smaller maybe, but higher impact [and value]. And it keeps the relationship going — because you’re building capability rather than creating dependency.

Look at the RADs six or seven years ago. The usual suspects. Now there’s a much wider range — smaller agencies, boutique outfits, even in-house teams entering their own work. That diversity is healthy. It pushes innovation, it pushes the bigger agencies to think differently, and it creates better work across the board.

And when agencies shed people — as has been happening — you get independent consultants and small groups doing things differently. Faster to mobilise, lower overhead, able to bolt into a team for a sprint and step back out. That model is growing because it meets a real need [and one of the reasons I set up my business].

What next?

The future of employer branding agencies isn’t smaller or larger. It’s different, more targeted, and more about knowing when to come in and what to bring — rather than owning the whole thing.

What’s going to be happening in five years is being worked out right now. In new agency shapes, in how knowledge moves between organisations, in conversations like the one I had with Nick. That feels like an exciting place to be.

If you know someone who would find this topic helpful then please do pass it on to them.

And if you want to talk about how I can help you with my fractional content marketing capabilities then I’d be happy to talk.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

With global employee disengagement on the rise (highlighted in Gallup’s State of the Workplace report), organisations can no longer afford to treat culture as a “soft” topic.

In Episode 155 we’re looking at why culture impacts profitability, retention, and employer reputation.

Crista and Matt share insights from their work helping organisations manage employee reviews and online reputation, as well as lessons from their book The Review Cycle. Together, they dive into how transparency, feedback, and employee voice shape both internal culture and external perception.

Crista and Matt also go into why you’ll “never be better than your star ratings” and how organisations can proactively manage their reputation without manipulating the truth—by amplifying real employee experiences.

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the episode here.

About the guests:
Crista and Matt Vance are the co-founders of Mobrium, a platform that helps organisations manage employee reviews and improve employer reputation across the web. They are also the hosts of The Culture Profit podcast and co-authors of The Review Cycle, a book focused on feedback, ratings, and workplace culture.

Links:
- Connect with Crista and Matt on LinkedIn
- Check out The Culture Profit podcast
- Get the book: The Review Cycle
- Learn more about Mobrium

If you know someone who would find this topic helpful then please do pass it on to them.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

So last week I found myself on the 22nd floor of 22 Bishopsgate in a room with about 300 other people, looking out over London while Steven Bartlett and Dr Kristen Holmes got comfortable on stage.

The event was called The Reset. Chapter 2 put it on, and Nick Homer kindly invited me along so I thought I’d share some of the gems from the stage.

The room was full of CHROs, CPOs, Heads of People, Directors of Talent Acquisition and Heads of Talent Acquisition. That tells you something — two names pulled this crowd out for a Thursday night. That doesn’t happen often these days.

The conversation on stage was one that’s on the mind of many: what leadership skills help you succeed when AI keeps reshuffling the deck?

Over the next hour or so, Steven and Kristen went in a load of directions. Failure. Humility. 1% gains. Psychological safety. Storytelling. Hiring that actually predicts how someone will perform rather than how they want to be seen. The big thing: being human is the moat, and the organisations built for this decade are the ones willing to question everything, experiment constantly, and push through the paper walls.

I filmed five segments of the conversation. Here they are:

Why “unromantic” leaders are going to win the AI decade

Steven went in hard early doors with this one.

His argument: if the correct answer to every part of your business is now changing faster than it ever has, you cannot afford to be romantic about how you do what you do. Stay romantic about the impact. Be completely ruthless about the process.

Then he tied it to identity. “Someone would rather go to the ends of the earth than make an edit to their own identity,” he said. Because our identities are our harbour. They’re where we feel safe. But in a world where new AI models drop every week and yesterday’s correct answer is already wrong, that harbour quietly becomes a liability. Cue cognitive dissonance — the brain’s reflex to reject whichever piece of new information threatens the old one. It happens to leaders. It happens to their teams.

So what do you do about it? His answer: experiment at a ridiculous rate, fail openly, and build a company where humility runs top to bottom. Flight Story literally has a Head of Experimentation and Failure. They track the number of experiments and failures they run, and the job is to get that number up. “Kill the guesswork” is apparently a phrase the interns use as fluently as the CEOs.

And he was refreshingly honest about the personal cost of getting this wrong. His first startup failed, he said, because he couldn’t bring himself to admit he was wrong. That stuck.

Have a watch.

Scaling WHOOP from 30 to nearly 1,000 through high intensity and high humility

When Kristen joined WHOOP there were 30 people. There are now nearly a thousand, and they’re hiring another 600 this year. In the meantime they’ve switched their model, switched their subscriptions, and gone from a hardware business to a software one.

So when she talks about change, she’s knows all about it.

Ask her what has actually held through all of that and she points at two things. The values they hire for — “high intensity, high humility” — and a flat-out willingness to experiment in public. Loads of what WHOOP has tried has failed.

What you see now as a neat suite of features is really the result of an enormous amount of trial, error and tweaking.

Celebrating the small things is big thing for the business. WHOOP runs a gratitude ritual at the start of every meeting. You thank someone. It has to be someone outside your team. It loops back round through HR. They’ve got a Slack channel where the little wins get celebrated.

On paper, it may sound fluffy. In practice, Kristen’s point is that the work is unglamorous most of the time, and psychological momentum is the thing that keeps people going when nobody’s clapping for the big stuff.

Worth a listen.

Psychological safety, storytelling, and spies

I couldn’t stop recording this stretch of the conversation. So it’s the longest segment, but worth the time.

Kristen kicked off with the research. Google’s Project Aristotle found psychological safety was the defining trait of their best teams — and those teams produced $4.5m more than the average. Her point: bring it up as a bottom-line conversation, not a wellness one.

Then Steven talked about something fundamental to us humans - storytelling. Facts and stats don’t really move people. Stories do. He’s interviewed a lot of former spies for his Diary of a CEO, and they all say the same thing: the real skill is listening. Andrew Bustamante - a former CIA Agent - told Steven he could get your secrets in nine months, starting with a casual bump-in at an event… exactly like this one.

Then he tied it back to his own company. Flight Story disbanded their innovation team and embedded innovators across every department, wrapped in a simple story: our people have magic in them, and our job is to remove the stuff that isn’t.

His take on failure: focus on the input, not the output. Reward the attempt. They’re literally building a hall of failure. Classic Bartlett.

Have a watch — there’s a lot in this one.

Hire the people who push through “paper walls”

Steven’s “paper wall” idea worth hearing about.

He’s sceptical of psychometric tests that ask if you’re ambitious. Of course you’ll say yes. He wants to know what you’d actually *do* in a specific, awkward situation. So his company built a culture test using real scenarios. Every answer sounds reasonable on paper. Your biggest client’s locked out of Instagram on a Saturday and the only person with the password is on honeymoon — what do you do? A supplier says delivery has slipped from four weeks to six. Do you scale back, push it out, or ask why it takes six weeks?

His most successful people ask why. They push through the paper wall.

He cited Amancio Ortega moving Zara’s supply chain from nine months to 14 days. Most thought this would be impossible but he pushed on. And Bernard Sado was told men would never wheel suitcases — until he sold them to women first. The first queue at the retailer was mostly men. Now 99% of suitcases have wheels.

120,000 people have taken Steven’s test. He says he’s never found a better predictor of performance, in either direction.

Watch him explain it.

Why you should clap for the air freshener

1% gains. They really do make a difference.

Flight Story has a Slack channel where the team literally claps when someone makes a change that looks petty on the surface. Jemima swaps the air freshener in one of the podcast studios. Somebody posts. Clap and flare emojis all over the place.

1% changes look petty in foresight and obvious in hindsight. He gave one example — they changed seven seconds at the top of *Diary of a CEO*, and the view-to-subscription rate went up 178%.

His argument: chasing big step changes is demoralising because they’re rare. Chasing small ones is motivating because they happen all the time, and they compound. That’s a culture you can build on purpose.

A good night out

The Reset was well worth the trip into London. 300+ people in one room, along with the great conversations, really gave me energy. AI is changing the game in front of our very eyes, so to have such influential and engaging humans on stage was really valuable.

And I always enjoy bumping into familiar faces and meeting new ones!

Big thanks to Nick Homer for the invite, and to Leo Harrison and the Chapter 2 team for putting the night on and running it so well.

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

Right now, the dominant model is using employees as a distribution channel. Brand creates content. Employees reshare it. A bit more reach, not much more engagement, and the people involved don't feel especially connected to any of it.

The shift - and this is what this conversation is really about - is from distribution to co-creation. When employer brand teams work with employees to surface their genuine expertise, knowledge, opinions and stories, something different happens.

Employees are more bought in. They share the content because it's actually theirs. And the content does more: it helps retain existing clients and customers, brings in new ones, keeps people motivated, and attracts the talent you're trying to reach.

That's not a content strategy. That's demonstrable business impact.

Andy Lambert has been building towards this thinking for over a decade. He co-founded ContentCal in 2016, grew it to become the fastest-growing platform in its category against Hootsuite, Sprinklr and Sprout, and sold it to Adobe in 2021.

He built that business almost entirely through people-powered content. He's now the author of Spheres of Influence - a framework for turning genuine human voices into sustainable word-of-mouth growth.

Andy and I have known each other for about ten years. This is a conversation where the thinking has had time to develop - and it shows.

What we talked about:
- Why co-creating content with employees beats just using them as a distribution channel
- How giving employees a genuine voice creates buy-in - and better content
- The business case: talent attraction, employee motivation, reputation, sales and client retention
- Why LinkedIn's AI discovery shift makes this more urgent than ever right now
- How to get employees creating content without handing them a blank page
- Andy's six spheres of influence — a practical framework for personality-led growth

Find Andy and get his book:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/andyrlambert/
Spheres of Influence

Watch or listen to the episode here:

How are you getting the most value from employee advocacy? It’d be good to hear your thoughts.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

The pattern most people in EB will recognise goes something like this. An organisation has a hiring challenge. Someone decides what they need is better employer brand content. A campaign gets made. Maybe an EVP refresh. A careers site. A hero film. Content goes out. The Glassdoor score stays where it is.

Nick put it in a way I thought was great:

”Sometimes the question can often be, how can we use our employer brand to get over the fact we’ve got a poor Glassdoor score? Rather than, if we’ve got a poor Glassdoor score, what are we going to do about it?”

Using employer brand to paper over something that hasn’t been fixed. You can produce the best career site in your sector, a compelling EVP, well-crafted social content. But if the experience people have when they arrive doesn’t match what you told them, none of it does what you need it to do.

Nick used the restaurant analogy during our chat: If your reviews say the food is poor, you don’t run a campaign about how great the food is. You fix the food. Then you tell people about it. The same logic applies to employer brand, but most organisations don’t operate that way.

There’s also something else we got into. The loyalty equation between employers and employees has shifted. When people can see redundancy decisions playing out in real time on LinkedIn, when AI is creating uncertainty about job security, reputation matters more than ever. And it isn’t built by campaigns. It’s built by what actually happens.

The thing we kept coming back to in our chat was the question of agility. How do you build an employer brand that keeps up with what’s actually going on inside an organisation?

Nick argues the EVP has to be treated as a living framework, not a static asset. I think he’s right.

”The EVP has to be organic and has to be iterative. If you’re still talking about the same thing that you were a year ago or 18 months ago, it should be actually a bit out of date just by the very nature of the companies changing.”

We also talked about what happens once someone is inside the business. An EVP that only works as an attraction tool is only doing half the job. There’s real opportunity to use it internally too, reinforcing what made the proposition compelling and being honest about the gaps. Most organisations running surveys already have data on projected tenure and what’s not landing. That data should be feeding into EB strategy.

The teams doing employer branding well right now aren’t necessarily producing the best content. They’re asking better questions. The content follows from that. It doesn’t lead it.

Here’s the full episode to watch or listen - would love to get your thoughts on this topic.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

Of course those things exist, and they can be powerful. But they’re only part of the picture.

Much of the real work of employer branding happens in the day-to-day. It’s about how teams test ideas, adapt their approach, learn what resonates with employees and candidates, and gradually build systems that help the organisation tell its story.

In other words, employer branding is rarely plug-and-play marketing campaigns. It’s an iterative process.

This is something we explore in Episode 151.

In this episode, I speak with Dennis Borchers from Tractor Supply Company about how their team is building employer branding inside the organisation.

The episode is part of a series supported by Cliquify – the Employer Branding Operating System for organisations – where I speak with in-house practitioners about how employer branding really works inside organisations and what the work looks like day to day.

Starting with the foundations

When employer branding came into Dennis’ team’s remit, there was already activity happening in the organisation. Recruiters were posting roles on social media, channels existed, and people in the business playing their part.

So rather than launching a large campaign, the first step was to look carefully at what already existed. Were the channels still reflecting the organisation as it is today? Were recruiters being supported with the right assets and resources? And was there consistency in how the company appeared across platforms?

This kind of foundational work may not always be the most visible part of employer branding, but it’s essential if the work is going to scale.

Recognising advocacy that already exists

Another interesting part of the conversation was around employee-generated content.

At Tractor Supply there were already employees sharing parts of their lives online — often because they genuinely enjoy the lifestyle the company supports.

The team realised this content was incredibly authentic. So rather than immediately building a formal advocacy programme, they simply started connecting with some of those employees and asking if they could share their posts on the company’s employer brand channels.

It was a small step, but it allowed the organisation to highlight real stories that genuinely reflect the culture of the business.

Why experimentation matters - Start Up Mode

One of the biggest things that resonated with me from the conversation was that employer branding evolves through experimentation. Teams test ideas, see what works, and refine their approach over time.

I like to call this “startup mode” - a mindset that allows the team to try things, learn quickly, and gradually build systems that support recruiters and share employee stories more effectively.

For many employer brand teams, particularly smaller ones, that approach will feel very familiar. And importantly, it isn’t a sign that something is missing.

In many cases, it’s exactly how effective employer branding should take shape. Because life doesn’t fit into a theoretical strategy deck.

Listen to the full conversation

If you work in employer branding, talent acquisition, or HR communications, there’s plenty more in the conversation with Dennis about how this approach is evolving inside Tractor Supply.

Employer Content Marketing Podcast - Episode 151 (Cliquify Series)

I’d be curious to hear your perspective too.

Does employer branding in your organisation feel like a carefully designed programme, or something that’s evolving step by step? It may be a bit of both!

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

Understanding this isn’t a nice to have - it’s a strategic business imperative. It’s what makes businesses succeed.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the launch of The Global Workplace Happiness Report at Google in London - hosted by The Happiness Index.

I did a Substack Livestream with Matt Phelan [Co-Founder of The Happiness Index] on stage before the day kicked off.

We cover the why and what of The Global Workplace Happiness Report [it’s based on 1.9 million data points!]. I ask Matt about the key themes here:

It’s always great chatting with Matt - his third time on the podcast - and this is episode 150! A worth topic for such a milestone 🫶🏻

Matt and the team do really important work so it’s a real privilege to chat with them and share this episode with you.

Want to dive into the report?

You can download it here.

And get on to LinkedIn to connect with Matt.

Now on to the rest of the event - looking forward to the talks and having some more conversations about workplace happiness today. Subscribe for more content like this in your inbox.

Good times. Thanks for the invite Matt!

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd

It happens in leadership discussions. In project debriefs. In team events. In everyday conversations between employees.

The problem is those moments rarely get captured properly. Because teams are busy doing the thing!

And afterwards someone usually says: “We should have got loads of content from that.”

When you approach it more intentionally, something interesting happens.

A single day can generate 20+ pieces of meaningful content - short-form video, employee insight clips, LinkedIn posts, written articles, and content that can support hiring campaigns for months afterwards.

And it doesn’t feel like marketing.

It’s simply employees sharing their knowledge, experience and perspective. The kind of conversations that already happen internally, but rarely get captured and shared externally.

That kind of content tends to work because it does a few important things at once.

It fuels hiring campaigns with credible, human stories. It helps employees raise their professional profile. It strengthens internal engagement and recognition. And it builds reputation for both the organisation and the people inside it.

There are a few ways to make this work depending on the situation.

- Sometimes it’s agile, on-the-day interviews with a lightweight setup.

- Sometimes it’s bringing in a small crew to record structured conversations.

- And sometimes it’s running a remote studio-style interview day so employees can join easily from anywhere.

But the key thing is simply planning to capture the moment before it happens.

If you’ve got something coming up and would love to turn it into months’ worth of content, then feel free to message me.

The Culture Profit Podcast focuses on something that really resonates with me: that workplace culture is not just an internal “people topic”, but something that can directly influence business performance.

Strong cultures shape better products, better customer experiences, and ultimately stronger commercial outcomes.

So I was super happy to get an invite on to their podcast recently. The more we can connect culture with cash, the better.

Here are some of the themes from the episode:

Why culture needs to be seen, not just described

Many organisations invest time defining their values, their mission, and their Employer Value Proposition. But when people outside the organisation encounter that messaging, it can feel abstract.

Statements like “we value collaboration” or “our people are our greatest asset” are common, but they rarely tell you what it actually feels like to work somewhere.

Content changes that.

When employees talk about the work they do, the problems they solve, and the impact they have, culture stops being a slogan and starts becoming something tangible. A short video conversation, a podcast discussion, or a behind-the-scenes story can reveal far more about an organisation than really polished piece of copy on a careers page.

That’s why I’m so interested in helping organisations capture these stories.

Employees are the most credible storytellers

One of the themes we discussed in the episode is the importance of letting employees speak for themselves.

Too often employer branding content tries to sound like marketing. But audiences - especially candidates - are increasingly good at recognising polished messaging.

What they respond to instead is authenticity.

• An apprentice explaining how they faced the world of work for the first time.

• A nurse describing the moments they see the real impact of their work, despite the challenges.

• A graduate talking about what culture looks like in their day to day.

These kinds of conversations create content that is informative, credible and often genuinely inspiring. They allow people outside the organisation to understand the purpose behind the work, not just the job description.

The important thing is to create the environment that helps them bring their authentic self to the screen or mic. Here’s a clip about how I do that.

From storytelling to business value

When organisations consistently share thoughtful, useful content about the work happening inside their teams, several things start to happen.

First, they build trust with potential candidates. People considering a role gain a much clearer picture of the environment they might be joining.

Second, the organisation develops a reputation for expertise and openness. The same content that attracts candidates can also resonate with customers, partners and industry peers.

And third, employees themselves often feel a stronger sense of pride and ownership when their work is shared and recognised publicly.

In other words, workplace culture content doesn’t just support hiring - it contributes to brand, reputation and commercial success.

A practical way to start

One of the points I always emphasise is that organisations don’t need a large production budget to start creating this kind of content. The most important ingredient is curiosity.

Start by recording conversations with people who are doing interesting work inside the organisation. Ask them about the challenges they’re tackling, the expertise they’ve developed, and the moments that made them proud.

Those conversations can become podcast episodes, short videos, articles or social clips.

Over time, these stories build a body of content that reveals what the organisation actually does and why it matters.

It also means you can build internal confidence, proof of concept and business cases for higher production content that sits alongside this.

Watch or listen to the full conversation

If you’re interested in employer branding, organisational culture, or the role content can play in connecting the two, I hope you enjoy the conversation.

You can watch the full episode here:

Thanks again to Matt and Crista for inviting me. It was a great opportunity to chat about how organisations can move beyond describing culture - and start showing it through the stories of the people who create it every day.

Check out their podcast here.