Employer Branding: 4 Lessons Inspired from Companies That Hire Differently

The recruiting world is in the middle of a full shake-up. Sure, we have more powerful tools than ever to post job listings, sort through resumes, and identify talent; but the connection with candidates is breaking down. With applications up +93% since 2021, per recruiter, per year (according to a 2026 GEM study), teams are overwhelmed. Candidates feel left in the dust, with no follow-up, no feedback. AI sorts, automates, speeds things up, but it can't recreate the human connection recruitment is all about.

The numbers speak for themselves. Revolut received 1.6 million applications in 2025. Deel got 1.3 million, that's nearly 400 applications per job posting.

In this context, employer brand, candidate experience, and employee experience are no longer optional. It's time to rethink how we hire.

Here are 4 pillars we took away from a employer brand conference we attended.

1. Sense of Belonging: The New Ultimate KPI

Until now, recruiting success was measured mainly by cost per hire and time to hire. That's not enough anymore. You can hire fast and hire wrong. Someone leaving your company in the first six months is the most expensive window for turnover. The real challenge isn't just attracting talent, it's keeping them.

Belonging is the key lever to activate. Not just a mere cultural "nice to have", it’s a real performance driver. Companies that invest in it see 50% less turnover risk and 56% higher individual performance.

Here are three approaches that show concretely how to build belonging:

• Through social commitment. LDLC ASVEL Feminin women's basketball club in France went through a radical transformation by becoming a mission-driven company. Athletic performance alone wasn't enough to stand out in the highly competitive Lyon job market. The club coupled its on-court results with a societal mission centered on gender equality and self-confidence. Today, players and staff alike join a bigger project. Joining the club means joining a social cause. And sometimes, that means turning down opportunities to stay true to that mission. The collective comes first.
  
  

   

• Through internal experience and communication. Internal comms is often the forgotten pillar of employer branding. We think about attracting candidates and forget that retention and engagement start from within. And it's usually underused: the wrong tools, teams that don't feel involved, an HR culture that doesn't speak to everyone. At Volkswagen Group France, building that internal foundation is a real challenge: six brands, six micro-cultures, very separate networks. Their answer? Betting on the intranet. Not as just another HR tool, but as the cornerstone of belonging. First through UX (an intranet people actually use), then through content (creating a shared thread between entities that have little in common day-to-day). They audited real usage patterns and created internal personas to understand how each employee profile actually experiences the tool. The goal: being "glocal", projecting at the group level while adapting to the local reality of each brand.
  
  

   

• Through internal communities. Gender equality, disability, shared passions... Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) bring people together around common ground and turn them into influence multipliers. The golden rule: it can't be driven only by the HR department. People trust a colleague's word far more than a corporate statement. True in consumer marketing, true inside a company as well. Volkswagen France turned this into a full employer brand lever. The starting problem: each entity talked about itself (Audi talked about Audi, Volkswagen about Volkswagen) but never about the group. The question: how do we leverage our employees' reach to benefit the whole organization, while making those people feel valued? One ambassador pilot program later, the answer is clear. People put in the spotlight feel recognized, which deepens their sense of belonging. And externally, it drives inbound recruiting, for free, and authentically.

2. HR and Comms: The Winning Duo

Employer branding has long been a contested territory. Is it an HR topic? A Comms topic? What if it's actually both and neither team can pull it off alone?

That's the vision at NGE BTP and GL events. For both companies, the Comms team brings emotional storytelling and the ability to make unfamiliar roles accessible. HR ensures operational grounding.

At NGE BTP, Comms took the lead: a low-profile group that needed to scale quickly (from 500 to 5,000 hires per year), they had to build brand awareness first. But the image they projected, a young and dynamic company, didn't match the lived reality. Immediate consequence: high attrition in year one. It was only by aligning both teams' goals that they found the right direction. From that alignment came job-focused videos, explaining roles that the public barely knew existed and building real awareness of the group. Today, the Comms unit dedicated to employer branding is moving under HR's umbrella, to better get the whole company on board.

At GL events, the approach was different from day one: both teams worked together with complementary goals. Comms handling the qualitative (storytelling, emotional appeal, explaining the roles of a multi-business group known in B2B but not as an employer). HR handling the quantitative. All of this with one golden rule: a narrative that comes from the ground up, not buzzwords disconnected from reality. GL events even created video series around it. Here, the stakes are especially high: projects are by nature temporary (the Olympics, major international summits), hiring peaks come fast and close just as fast. The employer brand has to be strong enough to perform without delay. No room for improvisation.

In both cases, the same takeaway: without a shared goal, silos kill the employer brand.

3. Talent Sharing: Cooperate to Hire Better

Every year, millions of hiring processes run in silos. Tons of applications are rejected. Those candidates start from scratch every time. No one capitalizes on the work already done. A massive human and economic waste.

Talent sharing can break that cycle. The idea: when a company finishes a hiring process, it recommends strong but non-selected candidates to other companies in its network. No more starting from zero.

Companies using it report up to 10x higher conversion rates and gain access to pre-screened profiles with a baseline of trust already established. For candidates, it's a safety net and the feeling of being respected through the process.

At the macro level, this talent-sharing model addresses a persistent paradox: a large pool of candidates, yet companies struggling to fill roles. It brings back into focus profiles that algorithms often make invisible: non-traditional backgrounds, career changers, workers 55 and older. Employability is a collective challenge. Companies have a role to play and everything to gain.

4. AI vs. Candidate Expectations: The Art of Walking the Talk

AI has reshuffled the deck. According to a January 2026 Statista survey conducted in the US and UK, 79% of Millennials in the UK have used AI in their job application process over the past two years, at the risk of every candidate profile looking exactly the same, smoothed out by algorithms. And yet, candidates consistently push back against automated screening in the early stages of the process. We're heading toward a system where AI talks to AI. The paradox is complete.

Candidates accept automation for practical reasons. But what they're actually looking for is a human connection. Something that tells them: this is where I want to go, this is where I want to grow.

For companies, the answer comes down to a formula from Corentin Chardin, Head of Employer Brand at Decathlon France: "Walk the talk." Be it before you say it.

Decathlon manages over 620,000 applications a year and has made radical transparency its choice. Substance has to come before style. Hiring processes now favor real-world scenarios over traditional screening, to cut through AI-assisted shortcuts. With hard skills increasingly seen as coverable by AI, soft skills like ways of working and adaptability are what make the real difference. You're hiring a colleague you'll interact with every day, not just a technical executor.

The era of big campaigns and polished scripts is coming to an end. What people remember about their professional lives are the people. Not the processes. Connection is the new KPI and that comes through Belonging at work. If you'd like to know more about it, read our manifesto.