Your employer brand can do more than attract talent

Ask most organisations what they want from their employer brand and you’ll hear it’s about attracting the right talent, retaining the best people and telling a clearer story about why someone should join, stay and build a career.

All of that matters but undersells what a good employer brand can do.

At pivotal moments in the life of a business, an employer brand can play a more strategic role. It can help articulate not only what it means to work here, but how to work here such that the organisation and its people succeed.

Think about a business integrating an acquisition, preparing for an IPO, entering a new market, adopting new technology (with AI being the obvious example), refreshing the corporate brand or moving into a new phase of growth. Leaders may be clear about the strategy, but employees will have more immediate questions: what does this mean for me, and what will we need to do differently to succeed?

An employer brand can illuminate those issues. We often think of it as a mirror, reflecting the reality of working for an organisation in a way that feels authentic to the people already there. But during periods of change, it can also serve as a bridge between the organisation today and the organisation you envision for tomorrow.

That might mean preserving a highly collaborative culture while introducing greater accountability for results. It could mean retaining the pride and expertise of a long-established business while encouraging greater innovation and pace. Following an acquisition, it might mean creating a shared identity while helping people collaborate across organisational boundaries in ways they haven’t before.

In other words, an employer brand can do more than describe the current culture. It can signal the cultural shifts and behaviours that will be important to future performance, while being clear about what’s worth preserving along the way.

At Brunswick, we start this kind of work with the business ambition rather than the employer brand itself. We ask what the organisation is trying to achieve and what employees need to think, feel and do differently to help deliver it. The employer brand can then connect that ambition to people’s everyday experience of work.

That also changes the nature of the proposition itself. Employer brands have traditionally focused heavily on what employees get. Purpose, development, flexibility, belonging and reward. Those things matter, but employment is a two-way relationship. A strong employer brand should also be clear about what’s expected in return, whether that’s greater ownership and accountability, more collaboration, faster decision-making or a willingness to build new skills.

Of course, putting those words in an employer brand won’t make them happen. If you promise empowerment while every decision still travels up the hierarchy, employees will spot the contradiction immediately. Leadership behaviours, incentives, processes and the wider employee experience all need to reinforce the same direction.

But done well, an employer brand can provide a shared language for the organisation you’re trying to build and the contribution people can make to its success. It can connect what people value about working there today with what the business will need from them tomorrow.

So instead of only addressing “why someone should work here”, perhaps the best employer brands should also address another question: “How best to work here so we all succeed?”