Employer Branding Action Plan: Build It Before You Need It

An employer branding action plan is a structured approach to defining, communicating, and consistently delivering your organisation’s employee value proposition, so that the right candidates find you credible before a vacancy appears. Done well, it reduces hiring costs, shortens time-to-fill, and gives you a meaningful edge in competitive talent markets. Done poorly, it is a set of aspirational values on a careers page that nobody believes.

Most companies treat employer branding as a reactive exercise. A role opens, someone panics, and the marketing team is asked to write something warm about the culture. That is not a strategy. It is a patch. The organisations that consistently attract strong candidates have built something over time, and they built it before they were under pressure to hire.

Why Most Employer Branding Fails Before It Starts

I have been on both sides of this. When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, talent was one of the most consequential commercial variables in the business. A bad hire at a senior level could cost you a client. A strong hire could open a new category. The quality of the people you attracted was not an HR metric. It was a P&L metric.

What I noticed, both inside agencies and across the client-side businesses we worked with, was that most employer branding efforts failed for the same reason: they were built around what the organisation wanted to say, not what candidates needed to hear. There is a meaningful difference. One is a broadcast. The other is a conversation.

The second failure mode is inconsistency. A polished careers page paired with a chaotic interview process, or a values statement about people-first culture followed by a six-week onboarding silence, creates a credibility gap that spreads fast. Candidates talk. Former employees talk. The gap between the brand you project and the experience you deliver is not a secret.

If you are building or rebuilding your employer brand, the work worth doing is less about the messaging and more about the substance underneath it. Get the substance right first. The messaging follows.

For a broader view of how commercial thinking applies to leadership and team-building decisions, the Career & Leadership in Marketing hub covers the territory in depth.

What Is an Employee Value Proposition and Why Does It Need to Be Honest?

Your employee value proposition, or EVP, is the specific set of things someone gets in exchange for working at your organisation. Compensation, development, culture, flexibility, purpose, stability, challenge. It is not a tagline. It is an honest account of the deal.

The problem is that most EVPs are written by committees and end up sounding like every other EVP. Collaborative. Innovative. People-first. Fast-paced. These words appear on careers pages across every sector, every size of company, and every geography. They mean nothing because they describe everything.

A strong EVP is specific enough to put people off. If your culture genuinely requires high autonomy and low structure, say that. Some candidates will self-select out. That is a feature, not a bug. The wrong hire in a high-autonomy environment is expensive for everyone. The right hire in that same environment is significant for the business and the individual.

To build an honest EVP, start with your existing people. Not a survey with a five-point scale, but real conversations. What made them say yes? What surprised them after they joined, positively or negatively? What would make them leave? What do they tell friends when they recommend the company as a place to work? That raw material is more valuable than any positioning workshop.

When I was running agency turnarounds, one of the first things I did was talk to the people who had already left. Exit interviews conducted while someone is still employed are often sanitised. The real picture comes six months later when someone has nothing to lose. Those conversations were uncomfortable, but they were accurate. They told me what the employer brand actually was, not what we hoped it was.

How to Build Your Employer Branding Action Plan Step by Step

What follows is a practical sequence. It is not a theoretical framework. It is the order in which the work actually needs to happen if you want an employer brand that holds up under scrutiny.

Step 1: Audit the current state

Before you build anything, understand what already exists. Review your careers page, your job descriptions, your Glassdoor and LinkedIn presence, your onboarding materials, and any employer awards or recognition you hold. Then compare that against what your current employees actually say, and what your hiring data tells you. Where is your drop-off in the application funnel? Which roles take longest to fill? Which teams have the highest churn?

This audit will surface gaps you were not aware of. It will also show you where you already have genuine strengths that are being undersold. Both are useful.

Step 2: Define your target talent audiences

Employer branding is not one message to everyone. A software engineer and a commercial director are looking for different things, respond to different signals, and spend time in different places. Treat your talent audiences the way you would treat customer segments. Build profiles. Understand their motivations, their concerns, their alternatives.

The most common mistake here is defaulting to job titles instead of mindsets. A senior performance marketer who wants to build something from scratch is a completely different candidate profile from a senior performance marketer who wants a well-resourced team and a clear brief. Both might apply for the same role. Only one of them will thrive in your environment. Your employer brand should be specific enough to attract the right one.

Step 3: Develop your EVP with input from inside the business

Use the conversations and data from your audit to draft an EVP that is honest, specific, and differentiated. Test it against your best current employees: does this describe why they joined and why they stay? Test it against recent joiners: does this match what they experienced in their first 90 days? If there is a significant gap, the EVP needs to change, or the experience does.

The EVP should cover five areas: the work itself, the people and culture, the growth and development opportunity, the compensation and benefits, and the organisation’s purpose or direction. Not all five will be equally strong. That is fine. Lead with your genuine strengths. Do not fabricate strengths you do not have.

Step 4: Build your content and channel strategy

Once you have a credible EVP, you need to make it visible and believable. The best employer brand content is not produced by the marketing or HR team. It is produced by employees, with support from those teams. Real stories, real faces, real specifics. A video of a software engineer explaining what a typical week looks like is worth more than a glossy brand film about your company values.

Channel selection should follow your audience research. LinkedIn is the obvious starting point for most professional roles, but it is not the only option. Specialist communities, industry events, university partnerships, and internal referral programmes all have a role. Forrester’s work on marketing influence makes a point that applies directly here: reach without relevance is wasted. Broadcasting your employer brand to the wrong audience at scale is less effective than reaching the right audience in a smaller, more targeted way.

Step 5: Align the candidate experience with the brand promise

This is where most employer branding efforts fall apart. The brand says one thing. The application process, the interview, the offer, and the onboarding say something else. Every touchpoint in the candidate experience is either reinforcing or undermining your employer brand. There is no neutral.

Map the candidate experience from first awareness to 90 days post-hire. At each stage, ask: does this experience match what we have promised? A slow response to an application from a strong candidate is not just an operational failure. It is a brand signal. It tells that candidate something about how the organisation operates. Make sure it is telling the right story.

Step 6: Activate your employees as advocates

Your current employees are your most credible employer brand channel. A recommendation from someone already inside the business carries more weight than anything you publish on a careers page. This is not about asking people to post on LinkedIn. It is about creating an environment and a culture that people genuinely want to talk about, and then making it easy for them to do so.

Employee advocacy programmes work when they are built on genuine pride, not incentivised compliance. If you have to bribe people to say good things about working for you, the problem is not the programme. The problem is the experience.

Step 7: Measure what matters and iterate

Employer branding is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing programme that needs measurement and iteration. The metrics worth tracking are: time-to-fill for key roles, quality of hire (assessed at 6 and 12 months), offer acceptance rate, employee referral rate, and retention rate in the first 18 months. These are business outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Glassdoor scores and LinkedIn follower counts are directional signals at best. Do not optimise for them directly. Optimise for the underlying experience, and the scores will follow.

The Relationship Between Employer Branding and Commercial Performance

Earlier in my career, I was guilty of treating employer branding as a soft function. A nice-to-have that lived somewhere between HR and internal comms. It took running a business with genuine P&L accountability to understand how wrong that was.

The commercial logic is straightforward. A strong employer brand reduces your cost per hire because you spend less on job boards and recruitment agencies. It shortens your time-to-fill because you have a warm pipeline of candidates who already know and respect you. It improves quality of hire because the people who apply have chosen you, not just responded to an ad. And it reduces churn because people who joined for the right reasons tend to stay for the right reasons.

I have seen this play out in practice. When we built genuine momentum in our employer brand at one agency, the referral rate climbed significantly. People inside the business were recommending it to people they respected. That is the compounding effect of employer branding done well. It is slow to build and hard to reverse once it has momentum in either direction.

There is a parallel here with how I think about brand versus performance in consumer marketing. I spent years watching performance marketing teams take credit for conversions that would have happened anyway, because the brand had already done the work of building intent. Employer branding operates the same way. The candidate who applies because they have respected your brand for two years is a different quality of candidate from the one who clicked a sponsored job post. Both matter. But the first one is the compounding return on a long-term investment.

The BCG work on brand transformation and demand-centric growth makes a related point about how brand investment creates conditions for commercial performance that shorter-term tactics cannot replicate. The same logic applies to talent markets.

Where Marketing Teams Should Own the Brief

Employer branding sits awkwardly between marketing and HR in most organisations, and that ambiguity is part of why it often underperforms. HR owns the candidate experience and the internal culture. Marketing owns audience insight, messaging, and channel strategy. Neither can do the job alone.

My view is that marketing should own the brief. Not because HR is not capable, but because employer branding is fundamentally a communications and positioning challenge. It requires the same rigour you would apply to a consumer brand: audience research, message testing, channel planning, and performance measurement. These are marketing competencies.

What HR brings is the operational knowledge of the candidate and employee experience, and the credibility to ensure that what marketing promises is what the organisation actually delivers. That collaboration is essential. But without marketing discipline at the centre of the brief, employer branding tends to drift toward corporate communications, which is a different thing with a different audience and a different objective.

I have seen this dynamic play out in both directions. When marketing leads without HR grounding, the brand looks polished but the experience is inconsistent. When HR leads without marketing rigour, the content is authentic but invisible. The combination is what makes it work.

If you are a marketing leader thinking about how employer branding fits into your wider remit, the Career & Leadership in Marketing section covers the full range of challenges that come with leading marketing functions in commercial organisations.

The One Mistake That Undermines Everything Else

I will finish with the single most common and most damaging mistake I have seen organisations make with employer branding: building a brand around the culture they aspire to have rather than the culture they actually have.

I understand the temptation. You are trying to attract people who will help you build the thing you are becoming, not just reflect the thing you are today. But candidates are not naive. They will find out what the organisation is really like. They will read the reviews, talk to former employees, and form their own view in the first few weeks after joining. If what they find does not match what they were sold, you have a retention problem before you have even solved the hiring problem.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard pen in a pitch brainstorm when the founder had to leave the room. The internal reaction was something close to panic. But the lesson I took from that moment was not about confidence. It was about credibility. You can only perform at the level you have actually prepared for. Employer branding works the same way. You can only promise what you can actually deliver. The gap between the two is where trust goes to die.

Build the substance first. Then build the brand around it. That is the sequence. Everything else is decoration.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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