Attracting top talent is crucial for any organization and especially crucial for socially conscious HR firms that value purpose, people, planet, and then profit. By the time most people are ready to buy or apply, they’ve spent a lot of time reading about you online.

So, if you want to attract, engage, and retain the right employees and customers, you need written content. Published consistently. Otherwise, the only thing they’re reading will be your company reviews on Glassdoor.

Employer branding content isn’t just about attracting new talent. It strengthens your current workforce by celebrating your culture and employees, reminding employees why their work matters. Employees who know they matter keep showing up for your customers.

An employer branding copywriter creates employer branding content that builds trust, creates genuine connections, and inspires people to act. They use heartfelt words and compelling storytelling that bring your employee and customer experience to life.

Finding the right employer branding copywriter can be difficult. This post will make it easier.

Why do People-First HR firms need an employer branding copywriter?

Imagine explaining to a potential employee why your company reviews are overwhelmingly negative despite the website for your HR Consulting or Staffing Firm insisting people are your greatest asset. Or apologizing to a client after your innovative payroll SaaS doubled their employee’s benefit deductions. Again. Only this time, it was in their holiday paycheck.

Or even having to admit to a potential investor or partner for your employee wellbeing software that burnout is the cause of your high turnover and recruitment costs. Ouch. I doubt these conversations are part of any organization’s business plan.

Cohesive client and employer brand narratives: the overarching story at the heart of your HR Firm’s customer and recruitment marketing.

Your internal culture, employer brand, external reputation, and industry brand are inextricably linked. Conflicting perceptions among clients and employees can be a business killer in HR firms that want to stand out as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice. The market perception of your customer and employer brand can either:

✅ Blend into a complementary, compelling, and cohesive story, aka brand narrative, that fuels your success in attracting, hiring, and retaining the right talent and clients.

🚫 Operate independently and/or haphazardly, creating confusing, mixed messages that undermine your ability to attract and retain the right people, whether they’re employees, customers, investors, or partners.

HR folks have known for a while that better quality hiring leads to more engaged and productive employees, happier clients, improved employee and client retention, more profits, decreased turnover and absenteeism costs, happier CEOs, and so on. This is not new.

What is new is the fact that the undeniable links between employee engagement and customer satisfaction have become impossible for other departments to ignore. Most people know now that customer satisfaction problems often start as internal talent problems.

This is where a skilled employer branding copywriter comes in.

An employer branding copywriter can add tremendous value to both your talent and customer marketing and quickly become an indispensable part of your team. Whether on your career site, social media, or job ads, an employer branding copywriter helps maintain a consistent brand identity, story, and voice across marketing materials and platforms.

Their job goes far beyond understanding the perks of working for you or coming up with a catchy line in a job description. They dig deep into your company culture and weave your values into a cohesive story that powers your employer brand and talent marketing.

The ultimate goal of an employer branding copywriter is to humanize your employee value proposition and bring your experience to life.

Employer branding copywriters help articulateThe Why your people are searching for.

A skilled employer branding copywriter translates your corporate-sounding mission, vision, values, and employer value prop statements into heartfelt words that resonate with a candidate’s desire for purpose and meaning in their work.

They create content that builds trust, creates genuine connections, and inspires action. This makes it easier for the right people to understand why they should start working for you or why they should stay.

And when you’re a socially conscious HR firm, if your words inspire the right talent to want to work for and stay with you, the right clients are often inspired to do the same.

The case for a socially conscious employer brand.

The days of “just” offering good pay and only the mandatory benefits are long gone. This is a purpose-and-values-driven moment in time. Values and purpose guide how we work, vote, buy, invest, apply, engage, and give. Today’s job candidates want purpose. They want to contribute to something bigger. They want to believe in their work at a job that connects to their Why.

People want to know what social causes organizations support. We’re upset when our dollars harm people or the planet. We want the time we spend working, time that could be spent doing things we love with the ones we love, to mean something besides more money for our employers.

Not long ago, only the bold openly valued anything other than profits. Now, even if we disagree that it’s our collective moral imperative to value people, planet, and then profit, the evidence is clear:

Showcasing your purpose and values is a business imperative, because socially conscious is the new compelling.

63% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that have a purpose aligned with their values (Accenture)

76% of job seekers consider company values before applying (Glassdoor)
66% of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable products (Nielsen)
70% of people believe businesses have a responsibility to help find solutions to social and environmental problems (BBMG)
78% of employees want to work for a company with a strong sense of purpose (LinkedIn)

This is good news for socially conscious HR firms is you’re already a step ahead of the game because putting people first is not new for you. It’s time to showcase this with a cohesive, compelling, and conscious employer brand.

**Showcase a socially conscious employer brand with storytelling content.**

People connect with stories, not corporate jargon. Humans engage with narratives instinctively. Every company needs a cohesive corporate and employer brand narrative, and a good employer branding copywriter understands this.

Purpose-driven job seekers today aren’t fooled by cookie-cutter values statements, mission statements, or corporate social responsibility stats without real stories backing them up.

They notice when you pay lip service to causes publicly while funding and lobbying privately for contradictory policies. They’re savvy enough to find out the real story behind negative Glassdoor reviews online.

Job seekers crave transparent and authentic storytelling content.

As they consider your job applications and move through your interview process, your people want to read compelling stories that give them a realistic preview of what life is like at your company.

People know that no company is perfect and don’t expect that. They expect you to be transparent about the good, the bad, and the ugly. That’s why you want to make it easy for them to find inspiring thought leadership, authentic leadership stories, transparent culture, and employee advocacy pieces on your website and social media.

Values-and purpose-driven job seekers also expect honesty and transparency about your social and political advocacy and community work. Imagine if your social media was flooded with posts by your current employees celebrating culture days or volunteer days, essentially proving your DEIB commitments and values statements.

Job seekers want a consistent story to emerge in your online content. They will evaluate your recruitment marketing materials and interview experience against the rest of the stuff they read about you online.

Hiring your ideal employer branding copywriter

Often, in HR Firms, the person (or team) responsible for employer branding content is not a marketing person, and the person (or team) writing your B2B marketing content is not an HR person. The results can be confusing, jargon-intense, and mixed messages that aren’t memorable, inspiring, or resonant.

Strong employer branding will naturally help you shine as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice if done well. This makes hiring and retaining the right employees easier, which will help you hire and retain the right clients. An employer branding copywriter will help you do exactly that.

While finding a copywriter with HR and talent acquisition experience can be challenging, as an HR firm, you’re pretty good at finding good people to hire. Hiring a copywriter is no different than hiring any other employee or contractor. If you’ve never hired a copywriter for your HR firm, here are a few considerations to think about when scoping out the role:

1. Define your content marketing needs first

Content marketing is a long-term game, and like anything in business, it requires a forward-thinking and data-informed strategy. Before hiring an employer brand copywriter, you’ll want to consider what content you have and need.

Do you have blog posts that address the questions your recruiters are tired of answering? Social media posts directly from your employee ambassadors? A rewritten career site? Do you need to audit and make edits of all published recruitment and employer branding content to align with your new mission and values statements? Do you need internal content vs external content?

You’ll also want to consider where potential employees go to read more about you while interviewing with you. Do you have content there that supports your recruitment efforts? Does the content need updating? Does any particular type of content or any particular channel seem to be more effective?

Are you a new HR firm that doesn’t have any of the above and needs to figure out all of the above but has no idea where to start?

2. Determine your budget

You can determine your budget after you have a better handle on your needs. The needs assessment will also help you assess how much independence, authority, and control you’ll need to maintain, which will help you identify if you’re budgeting for a W2 or 1099. This will also help you be transparent about your needs and budget with potential copywriters.

3. Identity your ideal candidate profile

Like any hiring decision, it’s unlikely that there is a magical unicorn out there who has absolutely everything you need at the exact right price point.

Some writers are comfortable and skilled in writing all the things, while others have unique specialties and only write a particular type of content. No different than HR generalists vs Specialists. Which lines up better with your content needs?

Do you need a content writer who is also an HR professional so there’s a level of trust about technical knowledge, so you can hand work off to an HR writer who can just get it done? Or do you need a resource that will work closely with your internal teams, someone who will be doing technical editing anyway?

Will your content needs be best addressed with one or a handful of specific projects, or do you need someone who can partner with you long-term to keep your vision and voice consistent?

4. Interview considerations

When interviewing, you’ll want to assess communication styles, relevant experience, and cultural fit, even if hiring a 1099 or other outsourced creative partner. Discuss potential project workflows to ensure alignment of expectations, especially if you’re outsourcing.

For many HR firms, an employer branding copywriter is a mission-critical project partner. For socially conscious firms, you’ll want to hire someone who understands and aligns with your mission, vision, and values. Gauge passion by presenting potential projects.

Ask about their previous content strategy approaches and how they stay current with trends and tools in the content marketing and copywriting space, as well as in the HR and employer branding space.

Discuss their process for learning your brand, voice, and HR product or service suite. Find out what research they do to understand your target employees. Find out how they tailor their writing style based on the target audience and platform.

**Key qualities of a great employer branding copywriter for HR firms**

A great employer branding copywriter will help an HR firm shine as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice. Here are some skills to screen for when interviewing:

Skill and Why It Matters

Strong communication skills: crafting clear, engaging, and persuasive employer brand copy across all platforms
Storytelling expertise: weaving narratives that build trust and create genuine connections with different audiences
SEO knowledge: optimizing content for organic traffic from job seekers
Research focus: developing a strategic content marketing plan informed by evolving job market data and the latest trends in employer branding, HR, content marketing, etc.
HR expertise: standing out in the HR industry with technically sound and engaging content

Conclusion

Your employee experience will directly impact your customer experience. That’s why a strong employer brand makes it easy to attract, engage, and retain the right people, whether employees or customers. For socially conscious HR firms, partnering with a great employer branding copywriter is essential. It's easy to see why.

A people-first approach helps you address applicants' core needs. These include purpose, belonging, and contributing to meaningful work. An employer branding copywriter will help ensure the story is consistent in your content.

An employer branding copywriter with HR expertise and experience will create amazing stories about your people in words that make sense to them. They’ll be able to give meaning to your HR products and services and help people understand why they matter.

A socially conscious employer branding copywriter shares your commitment to positive change in the HR industry and beyond. They want you to succeed because they know your work is important. They want amazing people to know how awesome your workplace is. They want the world to know about the powerful work you do.

It's time for the world to know you are a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice. It’s time to hire a socially conscious employer branding copywriter so the right people know how great you are.

I'm a socially conscious HR firm, and I want to hire you as my freelance employer branding copywriter. What's next?

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In the interest of ethics and transparency, this post was written by BrandWell AI, with AI copyediting by me. When blogging for myself, I experiment with AI, a lot. Please note that I’m an affiliate with BrandWell and prefer their AI to others I’ve seen for long-form content creation. I may receive a commission if you use this link to sign up for any of their services.

How to Find the Right Employer Branding Copywriter