How to Create Magnetic Employer Brand Content
Socially conscious HR firms have known for a long time that it's not enough for companies to offer competitive salaries and benefits packages. We knew that before DEI became a top business trend, and we know it now, in the current Executive Order climate where we see many walking back their DEI commitments they made only a few short years ago.
Socially conscious HR firms have told people for years that job candidates want more than just a paycheck. They want to work for employers whose values align with theirs. They want meaningful and purposeful work at a company where they feel valued. They hope to grow with an organization where they feel like they belong.
Whether they realize it or not, job candidates are searching for companies with socially conscious employer branding because socially conscious is the new compelling.
Employer branding is like a magnet that attracts the right people to your organization by reinforcing the story shared on your careers page and in your interview process. And one of the best ways to strengthen any magnet is to stack it with more magnets, which is why you need employer brand content.
What is Employer Brand Content?
If your employer brand is the story that highlights what it's like to work for your company, then employer brand content is how you tell that story. Employer brand content is how you bring your employee experience to life.
Employer brand content takes many forms. Yes, it's your website career pages, and it’s also the authentic employee stories shared on social media, blog posts highlighting your commitment to social impact, and perhaps even a podcast series featuring diverse voices giving a behind-the-scenes look at your organization.
Employer brand content is strategically crafted to strengthen your recruitment marketing. It adds an invaluable integrity layer to your recruitment efforts, helping you build trust, create genuine connections with applicants, and inspire the right people to apply.
Employer brand content translates corporate-sounding mission, vision, values, and value prop statements into heartfelt words and stories that resonate with job seekers' desire for purpose and meaning in their work.
Simply put, Employer Brand Content is like a magnet…
Drawing the right people to you as you cut through all the other recruitment noise and stand out as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice.
Why do you need Employer Brand Content?
If there ever were days of insisting your company is all sunshine and unicorns, those days are long over. This was true before the new administration and EO climate in the US, and after, it’s become even more critical. Employees were already distracted and disengaged, and now many are overwhelmed by all the change and uncertainty post-inauguration.
Candidates don’t expect perfection, but they also don’t believe recruiters or hiring managers who tell them nothing negative about their next job. Candidates expect honesty. People deserve honesty, always, especially in times of great uncertainty.
By the time most people are ready to apply to your open position, they’ve spent a lot of time reading about you. If you want to optimize the strength of your employer brand magnet so it’s easier to attract, engage, and retain the right employees, you need written content. Published consistently.
This is why employer brand content matters — it strengthens your brand integrity and recruitment efforts. It allows you to showcase your company values and culture, inspiring passion about your mission while giving applicants a realistic idea of life on the other side of the job offer.
The Key to Magnetic Employer Brand Content
Storytelling is the key to creating magneting employer brand content. The human brain is hardwired for storytelling. A 2021 study conducted at UC Davis found that “the hippocampus is the brain's storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative.”
This matters for employers because, as The NeuroLeadership Institute puts it, “Our brains like stories because clear narratives cut through distractions. Stories help us pay attention–particularly in this attention era when vying for people’s focus is more coveted than ever.”
The goal of employer brand content is to cultivate authenticity and transparency. Storytelling is arguably the most powerful tool to help you meet that goal. Due to our hardwiring and attention spans, employer brand storytelling content shows people why your company is a great place to work.
Storytelling helps you shine as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice because it helps build trust, create genuine connections, and inspire the right people to act. Storytelling is the magnet that gives meaning to your recruitment marketing by bringing your employer experience to life.
What types of Employer Brand Storytelling Content can you create?
Like your workforce, employer brand storytelling content is powerful because it is versatile, dynamic, and diverse. There are endless opportunities for using brand storytelling content to support your HR, recruitment, and overall business goals.
The best part is that when published consistently, when these magnets are stacked together, they become more powerful. From insightful blog posts to employee spotlights, each piece adds another layer, strengthening your talent and brand marketing. Here are five types of employer brand content that socially conscious HR firms can use to attract the right people.
1. Employee Spotlights and Employee Advocacy Posts
Authentic employee stories can support the narrative your talent acquisition team is marketing to job seekers. When you show your team collaborating on a project, celebrating a success, or participating in a team-building activity, you give your recruiters and job seekers tangible examples of your values, impact, and culture.
Put a face on your employer brand by highlighting employee stories on your company blog, career pages, social media, or recruitment marketing emails. Unleash your most potent talent marketers by training employee advocates and empowering them to post about you, given that 76% of people trust the content that individuals share instead of companies.
You could create a "Meet the Team" series, spotlighting a different employee each week. Talk about their role, career path, and what excites them about your company's future. Have them elaborate on the connection between your Why, mission, and purpose and their Why, mission, and purpose.
Share their passions, what brought them to your company, what keeps them there, and how your company has supported their career growth. Don’t forget to encourage them to share stories about their life beyond work, showcasing your culture and commitment to work-life-balance in action.
2. Behind-The-Scenes Employer Brand Content
As explained by Planoly,“Behind-the-scenes content is more than just a marketing strategy; it's a window into the soul of creativity and innovation. By embracing authenticity, satisfying curiosity, fostering learning, building anticipation, and humanizing brands, BTS content captivates audiences and strengthens connections in ways that traditional marketing cannot.”
In an employer branding context, BTS content provides endless options for using storytelling to bring the employee experience to life. It gives potential hires a genuine feel for your work environment and supports their need for a realistic job and culture preview.
BTS content is also a powerful engagement tool when used internally, whether the goal is to remind current employees of opportunities, recognize individuals or teams, or strengthen your internal culture.
Feature employees across departments, providing insight into their daily tasks, interactions, and contributions to your company's mission. Encourage employees to share their challenges or frustrations in addition to “the good stuff” and guide them on how to do this. To build trust, share real stories, photos, or videos across multiple recruitment marketing channels.
What’s it like to work for you?
3. Long-Form HR Thought Leadership Pieces
Craft insightful long-form blog posts, white papers, thought leadership pieces, and Op-Eds, sharing them on your social media, recruitment marketing, and career pages. These are golden opportunities to support your employer branding by positioning your company as the catalyst, partner, and employer of choice in the HR Industry.
Job seekers wonder, "What's it actually like to work there?" Active employees often want to know what other departments or roles look like before they’re willing to admit they’re ready for a change to their manager. In addition to behind-the-scenes content to help address these questions, a day-in-the-life blog post also helps tackle this.
Encourage leadership to write opinion pieces for relevant publications, outlining their vision for a more sustainable and equitable business world. Build credibility and be transparent about any corporate lobbying or political activity. Address current events or legal/ethical industry-related issues to showcase how you live your values.
Support both your client and employee brand marketing by sharing industry-related research. If your team has undertaken studies on ethical labor practices, publish them. “Candidates are so strongly drawn to innovation that 69 percent of American workers would leave their current role for a position at a company considered an innovation leader, according to a new report from EY.”
4. Industry and Corporate Podcasts
Podcasts are another powerful way to amplify and share your employer brand on a larger scale. They’re engaging, personal, and appeal to diverse audiences. Encourage and train leadership, recruiters, and/or employee advocates to participate in relevant industry-related, thought-leadership, or values-aligned podcasts to connect with your stakeholders.
Or, what more and more companies are doing, consider launching your own Internal or Corporate Podcast. Corporate podcasts can improve culture, communication, and collaboration, foster trust and transparency, and encourage continuous learning and innovation. These directly correlate to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and engagement, strengthening your employer brand and employee advocacy.
Your Corporate Podcast could feature an Employee Interview Series to support both your employee engagement and recruitment marketing. Reward employees with a podcast feature and give listeners an inside look at various roles and career paths at your company. Showcase your values by interviewing employees from different backgrounds personally and at different levels professionally.
As with BTS posts, a Client Interview Podcast Series is another way to produce BTS content and keep clients engaged by giving them free marketing. Talk about how your clients benefit from your HR products and services and how they interact with your employees and give them a chance to tell listeners what they do.
5. HR and Employer Brand Case Studies
Case studies are one of the best ways to answer a candidate’s “what is it like to work there” questions. Case studies strengthen your employer brand content by making your storytelling memorable, meaningful, measurable, and magnetic.
In a case study, you capture tangible impact and outcomes by identifying a specific problem and explaining your process to achieve a particular result or solution. Whether they focus on your clients, employees, or social impact, case studies are an excellent way to go more in-depth than a traditional blog post or social media spotlight.
They can speak to those seeking meaningful work, generate excitement for your mission, showcase your HR products and services or work with clients, celebrate your culture, highlight the benefits that help you attract and retain the best clients, demonstrate your commitment to employee growth or DEI, or convey how your company impacts the community.
Case studies can be incredibly magnetic for socially conscious HR firms that want to attract purpose-and-values-aligned employees and clients. Case studies are proof of your dedication to being a force for good, which is good since most employees want to be part of a force for good.
Your company isn't just *in* business. It’s a force *for* good.
Conclusion: Employer Brand Content shows you value purpose, people, planet, then profit
How cool would it be if part of your standard recruitment materials for openings on your engineering team included a blog series spotlighting the actual engineers who developed your employee engagement app? The series could cover everything from BTS development content, to partnering with the clients or end users, to a post from an engineer giving their take on why employee engagement matters.
Or, when a candidate asks about your culture and CSR initiatives, you could refer them to a company-specific hashtag on LinkedIn where your team regularly posts corporate volunteering pictures. While they’re going to LinkedIn, you could give them the profile links for a couple of your employee advocates who regularly post about why they love your mission.
This is the power of employer brand content, and this is what makes your company a magnet for the right people. Employer brand content provides endless opportunities to communicate your values, build trust with current and future employees, create genuine connections, and inspire people to act.
By the time most people are ready to apply, they’ve spent a lot of time reading about you. If you want them to read content that positions you shine as a catalyst, partner, and employer of choice, you don’t want to rely on Glassdoor. You’ll want to publish your own employer brand content. Consistently.
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In the interest of ethics and transparency, this post was written by BrandWell AI, with AI copyediting by me and ChatGPT. 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. Post published February 2025.
