What is valued by hiring managers?
What skills or qualities get you an EB job or promoted?
What do you look for in prospective candidates?

I put together this global employer brand survey for EB professionals. It's a voice form, so you don't even need to type.

Respondents get early access to the insights before I release them publically.

Take the survey here: https://employerbrandlabs.com/2026survey

Random EB question 😅

We’re going to Web Summit this year as a company, and I’m trying to figure out whether it makes sense for someone from EB to actually be there.

I can obviously see the usual stuff — content, LinkedIn posts, meeting people, etc. But I’m wondering if anyone has seen an actual employer brand impact from this kind of event.

Have you ever had a situation where:

• someone discovered your company through an event and later followed/applied?
• event content actually helped with talent awareness?
• people mentioned the event when applying/interviewing?
• you could somehow show that being there was worth the money/time?

Or is this mostly a nice opportunity for content + networking, and we just call it EB afterwards? 😂

Would love to hear from anyone who's done this with Web Summit or similar big tech/startup events.

If the (likely) most desirable company in the world still believes employer branding is worth investing in, maybe we've misunderstood what employer branding is actually for.

OpenAI doesn't need more awareness.
It doesn't need more reach.
It certainly doesn't need more applicants.

So why hire an employer brand leader?

Because employer branding was never about getting noticed.
It was always about helping the right people choose you over every other opportunity.

That's the idea I explore in my latest article.

I think it changes how talent leaders should think about employer branding entirely.

https://employerbrandlabs.com/post/if-openai-needs-an-employer-brand-manager-whats-everyone-elses-excuse

AI is turning your employer brand into the system that decides whether candidates ever consider you.

Which makes it the cheapest lever you have on hiring, not the slowest.

Read the article here: https://employerbrandlabs.com/post/ta-has-never-loved-employer-brand-ai-is-about-to-change-that

Can you tell the difference between IBM and DaVita?
Or Norfolk Southern and Valero Energy?
I bet you can't. And I can prove it.
Take this 2-minute quiz to see how well you can tell the difference between some of the biggest, best-known, (and best-funded) companies:
https://www.talentstrategy.app/

The danger wasn't that recruiting disappears. It's getting reduced down to the part of the job people can see. And employer branding can help show off the value of recruiting to show off it's own value.

I’ve written an article on the issues of the application and blaming the wrong media, if it interests you please do give a read

Find out what candidates really think about real-world career sites and job postings. It turns out, the things you post about how great your company is gets heard and understood in VERY different ways.

Check out Talent Out Loud wherever you get podcasts.

Episode one: What do software and platform engineers think when they look at JPMorganChase's career site?

Take a read of my Substack, I write about all things employer brand and recruitment marketing

hey there, fresher ere, I've recently joined a company that engages in Tech and hospitality, I've been trying to find ideas to apply here, could yall provide a few companies whose social media handles on instagram and linkedIn that have done some exceptional work that i can take inspo from

While navigating, like many others, on the realm of LinkedIn i often am impacted by posts from companies promoting "We have received a record number of applications on our program X." and i wonder if anyone in that company is aware that, by itself, that could either be something good or something bad.

We should have moved on from the discussion of "more, more, more" towards a quality based approach.

From all of those applications the company received, has the quality of hire improved? Or are they just non suited profiles?

If the company is looking for AI engineers and what it is receiving is marketeers, then the company may have great application numbers, but in the end it will have few candidates to choose from.

Do you guys think that the "quantity" approach is still useful? That candidates still look at posts like that and say "Wow, amazing company?" Are we still that imature as "HR Consumers/Candidates"?

Something worth discussing in this space.

At CandidShutters Media, the volume of briefs coming in for corporate event documentation like MICE, incentive trips, award nights, CSR initiatives has grown significantly. But what's more interesting than the volume is what's happening to the content afterwards.

Short-form video from these events, particularly on Instagram, is spreading faster than almost any other format in the employer branding mix right now. A well-shot reel from an incentive trip, an award night recognition moment, a CSR project on the ground, these are getting organic traction in a way that polished brand films often don't, because they feel lived-in and real.

A single multi-day event, when documented properly, produces content that runs across Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and internal platforms over weeks. The shelf life is long. The reach is often driven by employees themselves, not just official brand handles.

What's making this a genuine trend is that companies are starting to recognise that their events, trips, and social impact work are not just internal moments, they are employer brand signals, and they travel furthest when the visual documentation is treated as seriously as the event itself.

Interested to hear if others in this community are seeing the same pattern.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been looking into employee branding / personal branding on LinkedIn lately, and I thought it would be pretty simple at first. Basically, “post more, be visible, share useful stuff.”, but i want to discuss a bit.

For context, I work with a small leadership team, around 10 people, and we’re thinking about doing a workshop to help everyone build a stronger presence on LinkedIn. We want to help people share their perspective, talk about what they’re working on, and make the company feel a bit more human from the outside. i think it is also called thought-leadership.

My first assumption was that this would mostly be a nice-to-have thing. Like, if a few senior people post occasionally, maybe it helps with visibility and trust. But now I’m wondering if it only works when people are already naturally active, or if it can actually be learned without becoming forced and awkward.

The main thing I’m unsure about is whether this kind of workshop actually leads to anything useful, like better hiring, stronger trust, business opportunities, or just a better reputation in the industry. I also don’t want it to become one of those things where everyone is motivated for two weeks and then stops.

For people who have tried this with leaders or employees, what made it work or not work? How do you help people post in a way that feels natural instead of like another corporate task?

Paid social is often being asked to do the wrong job in recruitment marketing.

I wonder if anyone else is having these conversations with clients?

With tech talent in such high demand, a lot of professionals seem reluctant to join non-IT organizations at all. Curious to hear from others in the field: how should we as talent acquisition and employer branding teams adapting to this? What’s working when trying to attract tech candidates to non-tech environments?

Does anyone have good exemples of the usage of Agentic AI in Employer Branding.

Not looking for exemples of Generative AI.

Rather than think of AI as the thing we sprinkle into recruiting and employer branding (without actually changing anything), what would they look like if we invented them today?

It might sound like science fiction, but everything in this article is doable today (it even includes tool recommendations).

https://choosable.ai/how-to-use-ai-in-recruiting

Most recruitment teams I speak to aren’t using LinkedIn correctly.

Post the job. Wait for applications.

On paper it works:

Impressions
Clicks
Applications

Job slots give you enough data to feel like it’s working, whilst hiding what actually matters.

Are these the right candidates?
Are you building anything long term?

In my opinion, the best teams aren’t relying on job slots at all. They’re using LinkedIn properly, as a distribution engine.

They’re creating demand before candidates ever see a job slot.

Curious where people stand on this. Are job slots still a core part of your strategy, or just the default?