Your employer branding strategy is only as strong as the reality behind it. Here are four lessons from companies that prove it.
Your careers page says you have a “great culture.” Your Glassdoor rating is decent. You’ve ticked the employer brand box. So why aren’t more of the right people applying?
A strong employer branding strategy does more than make your careers page look good; it helps candidates understand what your company is really like, gives employees a reason to speak positively about it and makes hiring teams more credible in a competitive market.
The companies getting this right aren’t necessarily publishing the most content or running the biggest campaigns. They’re showing the real employee experience in their public storytelling and giving candidates enough evidence to decide whether they belong.
We looked at four companies taking a different approach to employer branding and the takeaways for your employer brand: Checkout.com, Orbital Witness, Cuckoo and Hook.
1. Make belonging visible, not abstract
For a long time, employer branding focused on attraction. The goal was to increase applications, promote vacancies and make the company look appealing to potential hires.
That’s no longer enough. Candidates are also trying to work out whether they’ll feel comfortable, valued and able to do their best work once they join.
That makes belonging a central part of any employer branding strategy. It isn’t a slogan to add to a career website. It’s a practical question:
Can a candidate see how people experience your company and imagine themselves becoming part of it?
Checkout.com offers a useful example. As the fintech grew, it needed to make more than 30 key hires across commercial, product, data and engineering teams. According to the company’s Welcome to the Jungle case study, 60% of its graduate software engineers applied through the platform, making it the company’s biggest source of early-careers talent. More than 100,000 relevant candidates also saw its employer brand content.
The company’s Employer Brand Manager, Tom Pattison, described the storytelling capabilities of Welcome to the Jungle as “brilliant.”
That matters because storytelling isn’t only about producing attractive content. It’s about giving people a clearer picture of the employee experience.
A candidate might want to know:
- How do teams work together?
- What does collaboration look like in practice?
- How are different opinions handled?
- What kind of person tends to thrive here?
- What does the company care about when work gets difficult?
The answers are often more persuasive than a list of benefits. A weekly lunch, a well-designed office or a generous perks package can be useful. They don’t, on their own, explain whether people feel they belong.
What this means for your employer brand
Start by identifying the moments that create belonging internally. These could include:
- An employee resource group that has genuine influence
- A clear approach to flexible or hybrid work
- Peer recognition that happens regularly
- A strong onboarding experience
- Leaders who communicate openly during periods of change
- Projects that help employees connect their work to a wider purpose
Then turn those moments into stories. Don’t ask employees to repeat company messaging word for word. Give them space to explain what belonging looks like in their own experience.
This is one of the most important employer branding best practices: show the experience instead of simply describing the culture.
2. Make sure your internal reality matches your external story
An employer brand isn’t only an external communications project. It’s also an internal operating principle.
Current employees should recognise your employer brand before you promote it to future candidates. If your careers page talks about transparency but employees can’t access basic information, the gap will eventually become visible. If your recruitment campaign celebrates flexibility but managers quietly discourage it, the message will lose credibility. If your company says it welcomes different perspectives but employee feedback goes nowhere, candidates may notice.
Orbital Witness demonstrates the value of making transparency tangible. The company used Welcome to the Jungle while scaling with a single-person talent team. Its approach helped strengthen the employer brand while making the candidate experience more visible.
Transparency can take many forms:
- Clear information about the recruitment process
- Honest explanations of how teams work
- Realistic job descriptions
- Visible salary ranges where appropriate
- Employee feedback that isn’t overly polished
- Direct answers to common candidate questions
- A clear explanation of what the company is still working to improve
This is also where people and communications teams need to work together.
Communications teams can help shape the narrative, simplify complex messages and bring the company’s work to life. HR and people teams can test whether that narrative reflects the real employee and candidate experience.
Neither team can do the job alone. A strong employer branding strategy needs both:
- The story: what the company wants people to understand
- The evidence: what employees and candidates actually experience
A practical test
Before publishing a campaign, ask five employees:
“Would you recognise our company in this description?”
If the answer is no, the problem may not be the copy. It may be that the employee value proposition is too generic, too ambitious or disconnected from daily working life.
Fixing that gap will do more for your employer brand than adding another layer of creative messaging.
3. You don’t need a huge team to build an authentic employer brand
Employer branding can sometimes sound like a large-scale operation. A central team creates a content calendar. Designers produce assets. Videographers visit different offices. Social teams distribute the campaign. Recruitment marketing tracks the results.
That model can work, but it isn’t the only model.
Cuckoo shows how a growing business can build a clear and authentic employer brand with a lean team. The company used Welcome to the Jungle while building its core team and ultimately hired the majority of its employees through the platform. Rosie McInerney, Cuckoo’s Talent Manager, said that almost 80% of the team had come through Welcome to the Jungle.
The company’s approach was straightforward: explain what makes Cuckoo different, make the information useful to candidates and don’t hide behind generic employer language.
McInerney described the simplicity of being able to “set out our stall” and said she was confident the company profile gave candidates the information they wanted.
The point is simple: candidates aren’t looking for a perfect employer brand. They need enough useful detail to decide whether the company could be right for them.
An authentic employer brand should help someone answer:
- What does this company do?
- Why does its work matter?
- How does it operate?
- What would I be expected to contribute?
- What makes it different from similar employers?
- What kind of environment am I likely to join?
You can answer those questions without a large production budget.
How to build with limited resources
Choose three or four themes that genuinely define the employee experience. For example:
- Working in a small, high-trust team
- Solving a specific customer problem
- Learning quickly through ownership
- Building a company with a clear social or environmental purpose
Then repeat those themes consistently across your job descriptions, career website, candidate communications and employee stories. Don’t try to document everything. A small number of clear, specific stories will usually be more effective than a large volume of vague content.
You can also create a simple content rhythm:
- One employee story each month
- One team or role spotlight each quarter
- One practical explanation of the hiring process
- One internal story that demonstrates a company value
This is more sustainable than launching a campaign that the team can’t maintain.
It also creates the foundations for an employee advocacy strategy. When employees understand the employer brand and recognise themselves in it, they’re more likely to share it naturally. Advocacy shouldn’t mean asking people to copy and paste recruitment messages. It should mean giving them something worth talking about.
4. Replace big claims with evidence
The final lesson is simple: candidates trust proof more than promises.
In a crowded hiring market, almost every employer can describe itself as inclusive, collaborative, ambitious, flexible or people-first. Those words aren’t meaningless, but they’re no longer enough on their own.
Candidates want to know what those claims look like in practice.
Hook provides a useful example. The company used Welcome to the Jungle to communicate more than its job openings. Its profile included employee reviews, diversity statistics and team photos, giving candidates a richer view of the organisation.
Firaas Rashid, Hook’s Founder and CEO, said:
“Welcome to the Jungle gives us the opportunity to portray our hiring brand in a much richer way with data such as employee reviews, our diversity statistics and team photos.”
He added that this helped candidates see how Hook differentiated itself from other employers.
The difference is between saying “We care about diversity” and showing candidates what that means in practice:
- The diversity data you collect and publish
- The actions you take when representation is uneven
- How your interview process has changed
- What employees say about inclusion
- Which employee resource groups exist
- How leaders are held accountable
The same applies to culture. Instead of simply saying “We have a great culture,” show candidates:
- An employee describing how decisions are made
- A manager explaining how feedback works
- A realistic view of a team meeting
- A review that describes both strengths and challenges
- A clear explanation of how the company supports development
This is particularly important as more recruitment content is created or edited with AI. Polished language is easier to produce than credible evidence. The organisations that stand out will be the ones that can show how their promises are reflected in real experiences.
Build an evidence library
Create a shared bank of proof points that HR, communications and hiring managers can use. It might include:
- Employee stories
- Candidate feedback
- Engagement survey themes
- Diversity data
- Retention or progression examples
- Customer or product stories connected to employee work
- Recognition, certification or external validation
- Examples of changes made after employee feedback
Review your library regularly. Remove outdated material and add evidence that reflects the current employee experience. The goal isn’t to present your company as flawless. In fact, acknowledging what you’re still improving can make your employer brand more credible.
How to apply these lessons to your employer branding strategy
Taken together, these examples point to a few practical decisions for your employer branding strategy:
Start with the internal experience
Speak to employees, recent hires and people who recently left. Ask what they expected before joining, what surprised them and what they’d tell a friend about working there.
This gives you a more accurate starting point than a workshop built entirely around aspirational language.
Define a small number of employer brand themes
Choose themes that are specific enough to guide content. “Innovation” is broad. “Small teams with ownership from day one” is more useful.
Connect HR and communications
Agree on the main audience, the message, the evidence and the business objective. Your employer brand shouldn’t change completely depending on whether someone sees a job description, a LinkedIn post or an interview invitation.
Give employees a real voice
An employee advocacy strategy works best when participation is voluntary and content remains personal. Provide guidance, not scripts. Share stories that employees would be comfortable associating with their own professional identity.
Measure trust as well as volume
Applications matter, but they’re only one part of the picture. Track:
- Qualified application rate
- Offer acceptance rate
- Candidate experience feedback
- Employee referral activity
- Source of hire
- Representation across the funnel
- Retention during the first six or 12 months
- Employee understanding of the employee value proposition
The CIPD recommends combining perception research, candidate journey audits and recruitment and retention metrics when assessing an employer brand.
Frequently asked questions
What is an employer branding strategy?
An employer branding strategy is a structured plan for shaping how current employees, candidates and other talent audiences experience and perceive an organisation as an employer. It connects the internal employee experience with external communication across careers pages, job descriptions, recruitment campaigns, social channels and candidate interactions.
What are the most effective employer branding best practices?
The most effective practices are usually authenticity, consistency, transparency and evidence. Start with the real employee experience, define a clear employee value proposition, align HR and communications, involve employees in storytelling and measure whether your employer brand is improving the quality and experience of hiring.
What does “internal employer brand” mean?
An internal employer brand refers to the way an organisation builds and communicates its employer brand among current employees. It includes internal communication, onboarding, leadership behaviour, employee listening, recognition and the day-to-day experience of working at the company.
How can companies create an employee advocacy strategy?
Start by making sure employees understand and recognise the employer brand. Then invite people to share their own experiences voluntarily. Provide useful themes, examples and practical guidance, but avoid scripted posts. The strongest advocacy comes from credible employee voices, not forced promotion.
How does Welcome to the Jungle support employer branding?
Welcome to the Jungle helps companies make their employer brand visible throughout the hiring journey. Welcome Employer Brand supports company profiles and the distribution of employer brand content across recruitment touchpoints.
Ready to make your employer brand more credible?
Candidates need to see the people, work and day-to-day reality behind your vacancies; not another polished promise.
Welcome to the Jungle helps companies turn that reality into an employer brand that attracts the right candidates and gives them better reasons to apply.
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