Before a company starts telling people why it is a great place to work, it first needs to understand what it genuinely has to offer.
A company can have a great careers page, attractive job ads and regularly showcase team life on LinkedIn. It can talk about a positive atmosphere, development opportunities, openness and values.
But sooner or later, a candidate becomes an employee. And that is when they begin to see how much of what was communicated externally actually holds true inside the organisation.
That is why effective employer branding does not start with a recruitment campaign. It starts with an employer brand strategy, a clearly defined EVP and an experience that the company genuinely provides to its people. Communication comes later. Its role is not to invent an attractive story, but to tell a compelling story that reflects reality.
So the first question is not: “What should we publish?” It is: What is our company really about as a place to work?
Employer branding strategy: first, you need to know who you are as an employer
It is very easy to approach employer branding from the wrong end. We need a new careers page. A series of employee posts. An employer branding video. A recruitment campaign. Maybe a few company values turned into graphics. Each of these activities can make sense. The problem begins when there is no clear idea connecting them.
That is why the starting point should be an employer branding strategy that helps answer a few fundamental questions. Who are we as an employer? What genuinely defines our culture? Why do people join us, and why do they stay? What kind of employees do we want to attract? What can we offer beyond salary and benefits? What role do our values, mission and management style play?
And there is one more question, often the most interesting one: Would the management team, HR, marketing and employees themselves answer these questions in a similar way?
If everyone tells a completely different story about the organisation, it is difficult to expect a consistent employer brand to emerge on its own. A strong employer branding strategy should not reinvent the company. Its role is to identify what is already valuable and distinctive, confront the organisation’s ambitions with employees’ actual experiences and use this as the foundation for clear employer positioning.
EVP is not a list of benefits
This is where EVP, or Employee Value Proposition, comes in. Behind the corporate acronym lies a fairly simple question: Why would someone want to work here, and why would they want to stay? The answer is not a sports card, private healthcare, fruit in the office or hybrid working. These things can be important, but most competing employers can offer exactly the same.
A strong EVP should highlight something more distinctive. It might come from the type of projects employees work on, the level of autonomy they have, the culture of collaboration, the opportunity to make an impact, the approach to professional development, stability, the quality of the team or the sense of purpose people find in their work. Most importantly, it needs to be attractive, distinctive and true at the same time. That is why EVP development should not happen exclusively around a marketing table. It requires conversations with employees, workshops, a close look at organisational culture and a comparison between management’s vision and the team’s everyday experience. Sometimes, the greatest value of this process is not even the final statement or tagline. It is the moment when an organisation genuinely aligns, perhaps for the first time, around what it wants to stand for as an employer.
Internal communication is the first test of employer branding
It is relatively easy to tell an attractive story to candidates who do not yet know the organisation. It is much harder to tell that story to people who experience the company from the inside every day. That is why internal communication is one of the most important elements of internal employer branding and, at the same time, a very good test of whether the employer brand promise is actually true. If a company talks externally about openness, but employees are the last to hear about important changes, there is a disconnect. If it talks about appreciating people, but all internal communication consists of impersonal corporate announcements, that value becomes difficult to feel. If collaboration is supposed to be important, but every department operates like a separate communication island, sooner or later that contradiction will become visible as well.
Internal communication is therefore not just about sharing information. It can be one of the tools that brings the organisation’s strategy, values and character into employees’ everyday experience.
Veolia: one idea for very different employees
In our employer branding work for Veolia, the starting point was a platform we created called “Great to Have You Here” The company employs people in very different roles, working across numerous locations and environments. We therefore needed an idea that was simple and universal enough to bring this diversity together while expressing appreciation for every employee. “Great to Have You Here” became more than just a campaign tagline. It became a platform that could be developed across different touchpoints, including digital channels, the intranet, email communication and materials used in the workplace. (>> see more)
And this is exactly the difference between a one-off campaign and a well-designed employer branding platform. A tagline ends when the campaign ends. A strong idea gives the company a language it can use for much longer.
First the idea, then the channels
Newsletter or intranet? LinkedIn or Teams? Video, podcast or graphics? These are important questions, but they should come later.
First, you need to determine what you want to communicate, to whom, why, and what would make the audience believe it. Only then can you define the role of individual channels and people within the organisation.
The management team can be responsible for communicating direction and the purpose behind change. Managers can translate it into the everyday reality of their teams. HR can lead communication around employee experience and development. Experts and employees can show the organisation from the perspective of their own work. Not everyone needs to communicate in exactly the same way. But everyone should understand the same story.
An employer brand needs a shared language
An employer branding strategy should not end in a presentation. The next step is to translate it into an employer brand communication platform: a central idea, key themes, core messages, tone of voice and principles that allow communication to evolve over the months and years ahead. If development is one of the pillars of your EVP, simply saying “you can grow with us” means very little. You need to show proof. Stories of people who have moved into new roles. A mentoring programme. Projects that allow employees to develop new skills. Experts speaking at conferences. Training opportunities. Space for people to develop their own areas of expertise. Only then does a value stop being a declaration and become an experience people can actually see.
The same applies to a company’s mission. If it is meant to be more than a sentence on the “About Us” page, employees need to understand what it means for their own work.
This approach works beyond employer branding as well. In our work for EFL, we also started by finding one central idea that could bring consistency to the brand’s communication. After analysing the brand itself, its competitors and its audiences, we developed the “That’s gonna work!” platform, built around a partnership-driven approach to entrepreneurs and their business goals. Only then did we translate that idea into specific messages and activities across different channels. (>> see more)
Employer branding works in much the same way. First, you need to understand what genuinely distinguishes the company and what it wants to promise its people. Only then can you decide how to tell that story.
Don’t say you put people first. Show the people
Employees themselves are one of the most powerful employer branding tools. Employee profiles, interviews with experts, project stories, career journeys and different perspectives on working within the company all give a human face to otherwise abstract values. Instead of saying, “we have great experts,” you can show an expert, their knowledge and the project they are working on. Instead of saying, “we offer opportunities for development,” you can tell the story of someone who has followed a specific career path within the organisation.
This type of content matters internally as well. It helps people get to know other teams, highlights the expertise that exists within the organisation and signals to employees that their work is noticed and valued.
There is just one condition: an employee story should not turn into a polished corporate success story every single time. Real experiences are simply more credible.
Employee advocacy: when employees start speaking in their own voice
The next step can be employee advocacy. A company can tell stories about its employees, but it can also create the right conditions for employees to share their own knowledge, experiences and opinions. This is not about sending the team a ready-made post with the message: “Everyone, please share this on LinkedIn.” That usually sounds exactly like what it is: corporate communication.
A much more interesting approach is to equip people with the knowledge, tools and confidence they need to build their own presence. An expert can comment on changes in the industry. Talk about a project from their own perspective. Show behind-the-scenes aspects of their work. Share knowledge gained within the organisation. Both sides benefit. Employees develop their own expert brands, while the company becomes more visible and credible through the people who genuinely make it what it is.
Nexocode: corporate brand, employer branding and social selling in one system
Our collaboration with nexocode was a good example of an approach in which the employer brand was not treated as a separate HR project.
We worked more broadly on the brand, including refreshing its visual identity, developing a communication platform, website, social media and content. At the same time, we supported employer branding and recruitment activities and created a social selling manual for employees. (>> see more)
This matters because a corporate brand and an employer brand should not exist in two separate worlds. It is still the same organisation. Sometimes it speaks to a client, at other times to a candidate, employee, business partner or potential expert it would like to recruit. The audience changes. The core of the brand should not.
Employer branding works across many touchpoints
An employer brand is not built through campaigns alone. It is also shaped by onboarding, presentations, change communication, internal events, newsletters, training materials, the intranet, office spaces and even the way a company runs meetings with employees. Each of these elements may seem small on its own. Together, they create the experience of the organisation.
That is why consistency in employer branding should not be understood as using the same layout or repeating a single tagline everywhere. It should exist at the level of meaning, character and the way people are treated. The management team may communicate differently from an expert. HR may speak differently from an employee describing their project on LinkedIn. Onboarding will naturally look different from communication around an important organisational change.
And that is a good thing. Consistency does not mean everyone has to speak in exactly the same way. It means everyone is telling different parts of the same story.
What does a strong employer branding process look like?
There is no single model that will work for every organisation, but the overall logic should usually be similar.
First, you need to understand the organisation: its culture, employees, business objectives, recruitment challenges and market image.
Then you can define employer positioning and EVP, meaning what the company wants to promise its people and can credibly deliver.
The next step is to create a communication platform that translates strategy into language, themes and ideas that can be used in everyday activities.
Only then should you design specific tools: internal communication, employer branding and recruitment campaigns, content, employee programmes, employee advocacy, social media or branded materials.
Finally, you need to check whether the whole system works, both in terms of how communication is received and more business-focused metrics related to recruitment, engagement and retention. Reversing this order very often results in simply producing more content.
Employer branding starts long before recruitment
So before creating another employer branding video, campaign or series of posts, it is worth asking one question: Do we actually know what our company stands for as an employer?
If the answer is clear to management, HR, marketing and employees themselves, you have a strong starting point. From there, you can build your EVP. A communication platform. Internal and external employer branding. Employee programmes. Employee advocacy. Recruitment campaigns. Content and additional touchpoints. Each of these tools serves a slightly different purpose. But they should all tell the same story.
Because a strong employer brand is not created when a company learns how to talk about itself well. It is created when the company first understands who it is as an employer and then translates that understanding into an employee experience and communication that people can genuinely believe in.
Need an employer branding strategy, EVP or communication platform?
At Neon Shake, we combine employer brand strategy with creative development and implementation. We work on employer positioning and EVP, communication platforms, employer branding and recruitment campaigns, internal communication, employee advocacy and content.
If you already have employer branding activities in place but they lack a common direction, or you are only beginning to build one, let’s talk.
