Think about the last time you picked a restaurant.
Did you go with the restaurant's own website promising "a culinary experience like no other"? Or with your mate who told you the lamb was unreal?
Exactly.
Candidates work the same way. They'll read your job ad. They'll probably have a look at your careers page. But when they want to know what it's actually like to work for you, they go looking for someone who works there.
And they'll believe that person far more than they'll ever believe you.
Your people are the most credible voice you have.
This isn't new. It just keeps getting truer. For years, Edelman's Trust Barometer has found that a regular employee is a more trusted source of information about a business than its CEO.
Which is a fun thing to drop into a leadership meeting.
It makes sense when you think about it. Your careers page says you're "like a family". Candidates have heard that one before. Some of them have met families.
Your people, on the other hand, have nothing to sell. When a nurse, a site manager or a graduate engineer says they love working somewhere, it lands. So the question isn't whether your people are influencing what candidates think. They already are. The question is whether you're helping them do it well.
The best EVPs are told by your people.
Every strong employer brand I've seen does this. The EVP isn't delivered by the organisation. It's told through the people who live it.
That means putting your people on camera and letting them talk about what it's really like. It means celebrating their stories, properly, and often.
Some big names do this brilliantly. Cisco runs a whole blog, We Are Cisco, where employees tell their stories in their own words. Canva's careers site runs interview series with its own people, like its Women in Leadership series. Neither of them leads with the CEO.
Closer to home, it's what we did with hipages, with careers videos for each part of the business, and with Revlon, where employer brand videos show each part of the organisation.
A small tip from far too many shoots: film people where they actually work, not in the boardroom, and don't hand them a script. The moment someone reads a line off a card, candidates can tell. The unpolished, slightly rambling answer about why they stayed after a tough first year is almost always the one that works. If you want help getting that on film, that's what our recruitment video work is for.
Encourage more employee generated content.
Then there's the content your people create without you. Posts about a project they're proud of, a team day, a promotion, a thank you to a manager.
This is employee generated content, and it's gold because nobody in marketing touched it. The job isn't to control it. It's to encourage more of it. Make it easy, give people permission, and celebrate the ones who do it. There's more on how to go about that in why your employees are the best media channel you have, and it's a big part of bringing an EVP to life.
Your reviews are your people talking too.
Here's the bit a lot of organisations would rather ignore. Candidates are reading your reviews on Seek, Indeed and Glassdoor. Every one of those reviews is one of your people, or one of your former people, telling the story for you.
And candidates weight those voices heavily. LinkedIn's research found candidates trust a company's employees three times more than the company itself to give them credible information about what it's like to work there.
Three times. Your careers page is starting a long way behind.
So you need a review strategy, and it's simpler than it sounds. Find your strongest advocates and ask them to share their experience, ideally after a moment they're proud of rather than in a mass email to the whole company. Make it easy with a direct link. Don't script it and don't offer anything in return, because a review that reads like a press release defeats the point. And respond to the reviews you get, especially the tough ones. A calm, genuine reply tells a candidate as much about your culture as the review itself.
Then there's everything you can't see. The word of mouth, the barbecue conversations, the referrals. It's hard to track, but it's real, and great places to work always seem to get far more employee referrals. People only recommend somewhere to their friends when they'd happily defend that recommendation later.
It's the people. Obviously.
Yes, I'm aware of what our business is called.
But it's true. Your most effective employer branding strategy is your people. Be a place they'd genuinely recommend, and no amount of marketing can stand in for that. Then celebrate them, get them on video, give them room to share, and make sure their voices show up where candidates are looking.
Here's something to try tonight. Look up your organisation on Seek, Indeed and Glassdoor, and read the last ten reviews as if you were a candidate. Then think about who in your business would write a better one, and whether anyone has ever asked them.
If you want the bigger picture of how all of this fits together, start with what employer branding is and why it matters.
About the author.
Sean Withford is the co-founder of It's the People, a Sydney-based employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) consultancy. He has led more than 50 EVP and employer brand projects, helping Australian organisations attract the right people and keep them. Before co-founding It's the People, he spent six years at Hays, worked with Korn Ferry Futurestep, then spent six years at LinkedIn as one of its first employees in Asia Pacific.
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