Employer branding can't be faked

Ten things that worked for me, and why a thousand campaigns won’t save a bad place to work.

What is employer branding, anyway?

If branding is what people think about what your company does or builds, employer branding is what current and potential employees think about the company. The two aren’t orthogonal, but they also aren’t as directly connected as people think.

For example, I think a Tesla is a great car, but I’m not sure I’d want a boss like Musk. The best example I always give is Pornhub: a company many people would hesitate to attach their name to, whose engineering brand is actually very good.

And why do you need it? Almost always for hiring and retention. When hiring gets hard, everyone remembers employer branding, although the conversation often turns shallow (who’s performing at the Purim party, for example). It doesn’t have to be that way.

Over the last few years a number of people consulted with me about this, partly because WeWork managed to build a good employer brand in Israel (amazing work by Ron Gura, whom I learned a lot from). Here’s some of what worked for me:

1. Retention comes before hiring. Many people think employer branding should focus on recruiting, but retention is more important. What good is filling a leaking bucket? If you focus only on recruiting, the people already in the organization feel less important. That’s what you’re spending money on? Why didn’t you invest like this in me?

2. Don’t build an image for nothing. A big company can’t move fast, so there’s no point pumping that message (“we operate like a startup without the financial pressure of a startup!”) only for people to arrive, see it isn’t so, and leave after six months. Understand your real relative strengths, and double down on them.

3. Empower people. That’s how you create a culture of people who are proud of where they work. A CEO speaking at a conference is a drop in the ocean. Dozens of employees who keep writing about how interesting and fun their work is, that’s an army. And invest in people in general. It seems like good advice regardless, even if they never write a post about you.

4. Think hard about the DNA you want to create, and act on it. We had a good candidate who we asked, during her interviews, why she wanted to join us. She said she missed the feeling she’d had at another startup, where they worked into the evening and then all went out together. I told her it would be a shame for her to come, because it wouldn’t be like that with us.

5. Remember the candidates you reject. Your image forms in everyone who has interacted with the company. Do you know the biggest group that interacts with you, and that you ignore? Candidates, specifically the ones who didn’t get in (probably 90% of the pipeline). They’ll end up at another company, and your name might come up. Candidates with a bad experience will make sure to tell everyone how much you suck.

6. It’s never too early. You probably need to think about this from day one. It’s a long process, and the first people who join teach a lot about the company you’re building and shape the culture and what you stand for. Employer branding is more and more activities whose fruits you sometimes see only after months or years.

7. Can’t talk about what you do? Focus on the goal. Focus on the mission rather than the specific solution. Our product changed a lot, but our goal, helping developers grow professionally in a playful way, stayed relatively stable.

8. People. People. People. People want to work with good people, who are fun to be around and who they can learn from. Few people are interested in insurance, but Lemonade has amazing people. What you do is nice, but for many people it isn’t the most critical thing, and who their manager is matters more. Invest in bringing in good people, from the start.

9. Share. You’re not working on the atomic bomb here. Nothing will happen if everyone sees how you’re progressing. Share failures too, because no company is all roses. The more information people have, the shorter the due diligence in interviews, and the fewer false positives.

10. More than anything, you can’t fake it. If the company isn’t a good place to work, a thousand campaigns won’t fix that. If there are toxic people, they’ll poison everyone who comes. And if there are no big, interesting problems, maybe you don’t need hundreds of people who are all seniors.

This post started as a thread on X and later a LinkedIn post.