In the post-recession world, a huge swath of the workforce is young, educated and unemployed or employed below skill-level. In this setting, companies have to work harder to engage their employees and encourage new promising applicants to apply.

This dilemma has led to the concept of employer branding. Essentially this means that potential employees choose a company because it has a good reputation for being a fun/cool/supportive/interesting/etc employer. Google, Waitrose and ASDA fall nicely into this category while somewhere like Amazon, that has perennial issues with internal satisfaction, doesn’t.

At theblueballroom’s fourth installment of thefuturestory on employer brand examined these issues in the internal comms landscape. Discussions at the event linked brand values strongly with internal communications and the benefits of having a good reputation as an employer.

Yet speaker at the conference and publisher of Communicate magazine, Andrew Thomas, disagrees. He says it’s not an issue of the employer promoting itself, but of the organisation living up to its brand values. “It isn’t necessarily about employer branding, it’s about brand-led communications. Companies that put their brand at the heart of their comms strategy, are companies that will be succeeding at both internal communications and brand reputation.”

While the issue of employer branding is prominent in big international companies, it may be more relevant to startups. Startups and SMEs rely on small workforces and hands-on leaders. Thefuturestory looked at how individualist Millenials consider a company’s culture and brand values more than ever before when making an employment decision.

The next thefuturestory event takes place at RADA on 7 May.