Employer Content Marketing

I’ve known Des since school, and these days the main way I get to see him is when he pops up in a TV advert or on a popular BBC show. That usually ends with me pointing at the screen shouting “It’s Des!”, and someone in my family telling wondering how on earth?!So it was really nice to actually get him into a studio for a proper conversation. I always enjoy getting into a studio and having chats like this - I’m curious about how people do what they do, and I’d been wanting to ask Des about something: How similar is putting together the right cast for a production to bringing together the right people in an organisation?It’s very similar, as it turns out. For Des, it all starts with the story you’re trying to tell, and then finding the people it genuinely excites, the ones who read it and feel something and want to be part of it.Working with, not forI loved how Des talked about organisations seeing their people as working with them rather than for them. When everyone’s bought into the story and where it’s heading, he reckons people tend to rally together pretty naturally, without needing to be pushed. That’s super important when you’re filming and ad or TV show to a deadline.He described a film set, which I loved. The producer tells the director they’ve only got the set for one more day, so make it work. The director then turns to everyone else and says the same, and before long the whole crew, actors included, are getting stuck in to make it happen. There’s still someone in charge, of course, but everyone feels like they’re pulling in the same direction.A big part of that comes down to people feeling heard. Not in that suggestion box kind of way, where ideas go in and you’re never quite sure anyone reads them, but properly listened to. Not every idea is going to get acted on, and that’s fine, but when people feel heard they feel like they’re part of the team. Whereas if someone’s always fighting against what their organisation wants from them, there’s always going to be a bit of a disconnect.More than the titleThen he made a point that I reckon anyone working in employer branding will recognise straight away. As an actor, he can’t rely on the title of a script to give him that feeling, and in the same way, an employer can’t rely on a clever headline to give candidates it either.When you watch Des on TV, you’re seeing the finished result, not all the days in between that went into getting there. And candidates, he said, want to see those days in between. What’s the company actually like day to day? Nobody’s happy all the time, but when something goes wrong, how does it get sorted, and does everyone keep moving forward together without anyone being left behind?That, for me, is exactly what good employer brand content should be doing. Showing people what it’s really like to work somewhere, through the people who actually work there, rather than leaning on a slogan and hoping for the best.“Employees aren’t people who work for you, they’re people who work with you.” Nicely put, Des. Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Employer branding still has to shout for a seat at the table as a strategic business asset - and the people who can change that fastest are the practitioners themselves, by using their voice.Sang-Kyun ("Sanny") Park, Global Expert for Employer Branding and Talent Attraction at KWS, is one of them. He's spent the past 18 months building a voice on LinkedIn, and it’s more than just sharing a post or two on LinkedIn.This conversation is about what it takes for employer branding to be recognised as central to how organisations attract and retain talent — not a side function.Sanny didn't wait for a strategy before he started posting; he picked topics he had an opinion on and worked out what resonated by watching the numbers. That habit of sharing expertise, done consistently, is what raises the profile of employer branding as an industry and gives individuals more of a voice inside their own organisations.About Sanny: Sanny moved into employer branding after a career in classic FMCG brand marketing, and now leads employer brand and talent attraction globally at KWS, one of the world's leading plant breeding companies. His weekly LinkedIn videos have grown into a company-wide social media advocates programme.What you'll hear:- Why raising individual profiles on LinkedIn also raises the profile of employer branding as an industry- Why Sanny started posting before he had a content strategy — and why that wasn't a mistake- The personal reason he pushed himself in front of the camera after years working behind it- How one post about "job hugging" hit 3 million impressions, and what he learned from it- Why leading by example is the fastest way to get employees creating content- How KWS built a social media advocates pilot from Sanny's own experimentFind Sanny: www.linkedin.com/in/sang-kyun-park-kwsFind Chris: www.linkedin.com/in/chrislch Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

RecFest 2026 was my fourth year going, and Jamie Leonard and the team knocked it out of the park once again. Taking a recruitment conference and mashing it together with a summer festival is no small task — but thousands of talent acquisition and employer brand people in a field at Knebworth showed that it just works.This year I went to find out what’s on the minds of TA and EB people right now — and, more importantly, what they’re doing about it — so I could share it here.Here’s how the day unfolded, plus my own takes along the way.Doing AI vs Doing AI properly — complianceBefore I’d even got through the gates, I bumped into a few people I know and had the kind of catch-up where you spend the first few minutes trying to work out when you last saw each other. I asked one of them, someone who talks to senior people leaders every day, what crops up the most in conversations.Their answer, unprompted: AI — but specifically AI compliance. They told me about someone who was asked to AI themselves, and their own team, out of a job. And another situation where a CEO decided to “pick up AI” alongside people leadership and everything else — needless to say, it became a big addition to their to-do list, and it came with unexpected challenges.AI is moving from just talking about it to actually doing something about it. There’s doing AI, and then there’s doing AI properly. Get the compliance piece wrong, and it can create more problems than it solves. And don’t expect AI to be a silver bullet - like with anything, for it work well you need to put the time and effort into it.Talent Acquisition and AI in 2026This year I wanted to spend more time at the talks than wandering the stands and chatting in the field — although I did plenty of that too. My first stop was Hung Lee (Recruiting Brainfood) on the Inspire Stage, taking us through what we need to know about TA and AI in 2026.Hung covered a lot of ground, but here were some of my takeaways:The pyramid is becoming a diamond. The traditional org shape — a big base of employees, fewer managers, fewer leaders still — is shifting. With fewer people doing the delivery work, and AI doing the heavy lifting underneath - that changes what the remaining humans need to be capable of. If you’re going to have fewer people around AI, those people — managers and leaders included — need to understand both AI and people properly. There’s no room left for a leader who only understands one half of that equation.Everyone’s data is training data now. Hung shared a photo of a woman in India filming herself doing everyday tasks — chopping a mango, iPhone strapped to her head — paid specifically so that footage can be fed into AI models. Wow. What happens to the people doing that kind of task-based work once the model has learned what it needs from them?Recruiting is starting to look like executive search. Individual hires matter more because AI multiplies what one person can now produce, and recruiting capacity is shrinking because more of the process can be automated. That should free recruiters up for the genuinely human parts — mapping the market, building relationships with hiring managers, succession planning — rather than replacing them.“TA Plus” and proximity to value. If the transactional tasks get automated, the job becomes about adding value beyond the task: real relationships with the business, real understanding of what it’s trying to achieve, not just working from the brief a hiring manager hands you. My comparison: it’s like a football agent who can tell you exactly what value their player has delivered for the club, not just that they filled a squad slot.The future of early careers: the missing middle?Next up was a panel on early careers hiring — “The Missing Middle: Why cutting early careers today creates tomorrow’s talent crisis.”The argument: AI is now capable of doing a lot of the entry-level tasks that used to be how people learned the ropes, which makes it tempting for organisations to cut early careers hiring significantly, or altogether. But that just pushes the problem further down the line. Early careers talent brings the fresh thinking, the comfort with new technology, the innovation a business needs to keep evolving.When your senior leaders are thinking short-term, ask them what will the impact on the business be in two to five years’ time? Will leaving a hole of talent in the middle of the business make them more, or less, competitive?Something else from the panel was a great piece of advice wrapped up in a story - an intern who, within weeks of starting, built something that generated $100,000 for the business. That kind of story moves people far more than a slide of data ever will — exactly the kind of proof point employer brand teams should be capturing and telling, not sitting on.ROI matters, of course — but storytelling and relationship-building are what actually position the importance and impact of early careers talent internally.Working in employer branding in-house? You’re the orchestrator, not the ownerOver on the EVP stage, James Ellis and Audra Knight brought some big energy about employer branding in-house. Treat employer brand as a business tool, not a TA tool or an internal engagement nice-to-have — if you can use it to solve an actual business problem, you become far more relevant in the room.There was a brutal little exercise thrown out to the audience: use ChatGPT to look at your website and ask it to pull out the key messages. Now do the same for your competitors and see the difference. The results will likely tell you that differentiation is lacking more than it should be in employer branding.There was a comforting message for EBers. Often, employer branding comes down to one person or a small team. As an employer brand person, you don’t have the authority to tell the whole business what its story is — you’re the orchestrator, not the owner. This really resonated with me - the job is surfacing the knowledge and experience that’s already sitting inside teams and giving it a shape. That’s also, not coincidentally, exactly the point I keep making about content: it’s not a bolt-on to a business strategy, it’s the front end of it.Culture and EVP: the Mars bar analogy“Insight to Impact with Great Place to Work: Building an Authentic EVP Rooted in Culture Data,” with Claire Knights (Chief Growth Officer, Great Place to Work) and Vicki Saunders (Founding Director, The EVP Consultancy), was a really interesting session on the foundations of authentic EVPs.It was interesting to see that Great Place to Work doesn’t just see themselves as an accreditation body handing out badges — it’s a data company. And the analogy Vicki used is that of a Mars bar: the ingredients, the bar itself, the wrapper, the tasting, and the reviews. You can have the glossiest wrapper in the industry, but if there’s no substance in the bar, people find out fast — and increasingly, so does AI. In a world where LLMs are shaping how candidates form opinions about employers, generic marketing language with no proof points behind it just won’t land.Interrogate your data, find your proof points, and look at the long-term pattern rather than a single good year. That’s what makes an EVP true rather than a campaign — and the payoff has multiple benefits. Internally, people believe it because they can see it’s real, which kills cynicism. Externally, the wrong people self-select out before they apply, and the right people arrive with fewer surprises when they join. Conversations between the talksThe conversations flowed from the tents to in between the agenda, and here are some of the things we talked about in the July sunshine.On the agency model. A properly interesting conversation about whether agencies still need to be the size they used to be, or whether a leaner model — bringing in the right specialist at the right moment — is actually the better way to work now. AI and monetisation: If AI makes things quicker does that mean age… Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

I had a conversation with Nick Homer at Chapter 2 about the future of employer branding — it was such a good one that we decided to do a shorter episode on the future of employer branding agencies. This article covers the things we talked about. Watch the episode above, or listen to it below. The agency landscape has changed a lot across mine and Nick’s careers. Recruitment advertising agencies that used to book media and fill it with creative evolved into something more. Websites, brochures, events, social media, employee comms… and employer branding.Then over the last decade we saw employer brand emerge as agency projects, new specialist agencies, and in-house job titles.So with the rise of in-house specialists and them working with other in-house teams, there’s a commercial question from the bosses who hold the purse strings - do you need an agency at all?But the question isn’t whether to use an agency. It’s what they’re actually there to do — and when.Because the thing agencies do really well, the thing that’s hard to replicate inside an organisation, is creativity. Not creativity as a vague concept — but the kind that comes from working across dozens of organisations, sectors and challenges. From having different reference points in the room. From seeing the same problem play out in ten different ways and knowing what actually works.And that’s not just “words, pictures and pixels” creativity. It’s problem solving creativity.The opportunity is agencies bringing that creativity at the right time, alongside in-house teams who have their own deep knowledge of the organisation. Not taking over. Not just delivering a brief and walking away. But coming in when it matters, adding the thing that’s genuinely hard to build internally, and leaving something better behind.That sounds like a true partnership, right?The knowledge transfer opportunityOne of the things Nick and I talked about is how much value sits in the movement of knowledge — in both directions.People who’ve worked agency-side before moving in-house are often great hires for an organisation. They’ve seen the same problems play out across multiple organisations, built instincts from a breadth of experience, and can transfer that to a team quickly. But there’s an opportunity for agencies too. Rather than the traditional model — take the brief, go away, come back with the work — what if agencies embedded alongside in-house teams, filled in the gaps, amplified what was already happening, and left the team genuinely better than they found it?That’s a different kind of engagement. Smaller maybe, but higher impact [and value]. And it keeps the relationship going — because you’re building capability rather than creating dependency.Look at the RADs six or seven years ago. The usual suspects. Now there’s a much wider range — smaller agencies, boutique outfits, even in-house teams entering their own work. That diversity is healthy. It pushes innovation, it pushes the bigger agencies to think differently, and it creates better work across the board.And when agencies shed people — as has been happening — you get independent consultants and small groups doing things differently. Faster to mobilise, lower overhead, able to bolt into a team for a sprint and step back out. That model is growing because it meets a real need [and one of the reasons I set up my business].What next?The future of employer branding agencies isn’t smaller or larger. It’s different, more targeted, and more about knowing when to come in and what to bring — rather than owning the whole thing.What’s going to be happening in five years is being worked out right now. In new agency shapes, in how knowledge moves between organisations, in conversations like the one I had with Nick. That feels like an exciting place to be.If you know someone who would find this topic helpful then please do pass it on to them.And if you want to talk about how I can help you with my fractional content marketing capabilities then I’d be happy to talk.ThanksChrisChris Le’cand-HarwoodHost, Employer Content MarketingFounder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

In Episode of 155 of Employer Content Marketing, Chris Le’cand-Harwood is joined by Crista and Matt Vance - co-founders of Mobrium and hosts of The Culture Profit podcast - to explore the powerful link between company culture and business performance.With global employee disengagement on the rise (as highlighted in Gallup’s State of the Workplace report), organisations can no longer afford to treat culture as a “soft” topic. This conversation unpacks why culture directly impacts profitability, retention, and employer reputation - and how businesses can start taking it seriously.Crista and Matt share insights from their work helping organisations manage employee reviews and online reputation, as well as lessons from their book The Review Cycle. Together, they dive into how transparency, feedback, and employee voice shape both internal culture and external perception.In this episode, you’ll learn:- Why culture has a measurable impact on profit, retention, and customer experience - How employee reviews influence hiring, turnover, and brand perception - The role of transparency in building trust with candidates and employees - Why employee voices are more credible than employer messaging - How to turn culture into compelling content that attracts the right talent - Practical ways to build feedback loops and strengthen your employer brand Key themes:- Culture vs. “soft” business thinking - The rise of employee-driven transparency - Online reviews, AI, and employer reputation - Emotional storytelling vs. data-driven proof - Building trust through authentic employee voice Crista and Matt also explain why you’ll “never be better than your star ratings” and how organisations can proactively manage their reputation without manipulating the truth—by amplifying real employee experiences.About the guests:Crista and Matt Vance are the co-founders of Mobrium, a platform that helps organisations manage employee reviews and improve employer reputation across the web. They are also the hosts of The Culture Profit podcast and co-authors of The Review Cycle, a book focused on feedback, ratings, and workplace culture.Links:- Connect with Crista and Matt on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/crista-vance/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattrvance/- Check out The Culture Profit podcast https://www.thecultureprofit.com/- Get the book: The Review Cycle https://www.amazon.co.uk/Review-Cycle-four-step-mastering-reviews/dp/B0B2HGHPHY- Learn more about Mobrium https://mobrium.com/If you’re interested in employer branding, employee engagement, and turning culture into a competitive advantage, this episode is packed with practical insights. Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Employee advocacy is growing - and that's a good thing for employer brand.But there's a gap between where most organisations are and where they could be. Right now, the dominant model is using employees as a distribution channel. Brand creates content. Employees reshare it. A bit more reach, not much more engagement, and the people involved don't feel especially connected to any of it.The shift - and this is what this conversation is really about - is from distribution to co-creation. When employer brand teams work with employees to surface their genuine expertise, knowledge, opinions and stories, something different happens. Employees are more bought in. They share the content because it's actually theirs. And the content does more: it helps retain existing clients and customers, brings in new ones, keeps people motivated, and attracts the talent you're trying to reach.That's not a content strategy. That's demonstrable business impact.Andy Lambert has been building towards this thinking for over a decade. He co-founded ContentCal in 2016, grew it to become the fastest-growing platform in its category against Hootsuite, Sprinklr and Sprout, and sold it to Adobe in 2021. He built that business almost entirely through people-powered content. He's now the author of Spheres of Influence - a framework for turning genuine human voices into sustainable word-of-mouth growth.Andy and I have known each other for about ten years. This is a conversation where the thinking has had time to develop - and it shows.What we talked about:- Why co-creating content with employees beats just using them as a distribution channel- How giving employees a genuine voice creates buy-in - and better content- The business case: talent attraction, employee motivation, reputation, sales and client retention- Why LinkedIn's AI discovery shift makes this more urgent than ever right now- How to get employees creating content without handing them a blank page- Andy's six spheres of influence — a practical framework for personality-led growthFind Andy and get his book:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyrlambert/Spheres of Influence: https://amzn.eu/d/0198edDsSubscribe to the Employer Content Marketing newsletter: www.employercontent.marketingFind ChrisLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chrislecandharwoodNewsletter: www.employercontent.marketingWebsite: www.contentmarketingpod.com#EmployerBrand #EmployeeAdvocacy #LinkedInMarketing #employerbranding Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Nick Homer has done employer branding in-house and in agencies across his career, most recently at Chapter 2. In this conversation, we get into where agencies genuinely add value, where the current model is falling short, and what a more relevant version of the relationship between agencies and in-house teams might look like.The honest answer isn't that agencies are irrelevant. It's how we can close the gap between what clients need and what agencies deliver. The opportunity is real — but so is the need to change.Here are some of the points we cover:- Why the in-house vs agency cost comparison is forcing harder questions- Where creativity is still the clearest case for agency involvement- Why knowledge transfer — not just execution — could redefine what agencies offer- How independent consultants are filling gaps that neither agencies nor in-house teams cover well- What the RADs this year suggests about where employer branding creativity is heading- Why disruption from smaller entities is probably good for the whole industryThis episode was recorded during a session for a broader episode about the future of employer branding - you can watch that episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/165mXweEyhXN0scVxR85yI?si=ry3YOz80QEmOHMcZimELpQ Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Most employer brand content is built to attract - too often built to fix underlying business issues. Nick Homer has been making this argument for a while - and his case is that until EB teams start treating reputation as something to be improved rather than marketed around, they'll keep filling a bucket with a hole in it.I had a great conversation with Nick about what employer branding actually needs to do to stay relevant — and what gets in the way.Here are some of the things we talk about: - Why employer brand is a reputation discipline first, not a marketing channelHow to spot whether your EVP is already out of date — and what to do about it- What authentic content actually looks like (and why most of it isn't)- Why the loyalty contract between employers and employees has fundamentally shifted- How in-house EB teams can build capability and move faster- Why the pace of organisational change means your EVP needs to keep upAbout Nick HomerNick works in employer brand at Chapter 2, a talent business working across embedded talent, talent intelligence, and employer brand. He brings a great combination of in-house and agency experience — having led employer brand globally at Bumble and Wayfair, and worked across specialist agencies including ThirtyThree, Tonic, and Blackbridge. Nick likes challenging received wisdom in employer branding, including a widely-discussed post on LinkedIn arguing that employer brand is fundamentally about reputation.BONUS EPISODE: The role of employer branding agencies in the future: https://youtu.be/wcKYKOsiHUUSubscribe for more episodes direct to your inbox: https://www.employercontent.marketing/ Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Do you want to understand workplace happiness? Get your sleeves rolled up and see what motivates and engages people at work?Understanding this isn’t a nice to have - it’s a strategic business imperative. It’s what makes businesses succeed.I was fortunate enough to be invited to the launch of The Global Workplace Happiness Report at Google in London - hosted by The Happiness Index.I did a Substack Livestream with Matt Phelan [Co-Founder of The Happiness Index] on stage before the day kicked off.We cover the why and what of The Global Workplace Happiness Report [it’s based on 1.9 million data points!]. I ask Matt about the key themes in this episode.It’s always great chatting with Matt - his third time on the podcast - and this is episode 150! A worth topic for such a milestone 🫶🏻Matt and the team do really important work so it’s a real privilege to chat with them and share this episode with you.Want to dive into the report?You can download it here https://thehappinessindex.com/the-global-workplace-happiness-report/ And get on to LinkedIn to connect with Matt https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewphelan/Subscribe for more content like this in your inbox https://www.employercontent.marketing/Good times. Thanks for the invite Matt! Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe

Recently I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Culture Profit Podcast, hosted by Crista and Matt Vance, to talk about something I believe more organisations should be doing: turning workplace culture into meaningful content.The Culture Profit Podcast focuses on something that really resonates with me: that workplace culture is not just an internal “people topic”, but something that can directly influence business performance. Strong cultures shape better products, better customer experiences, and ultimately stronger commercial outcomes.So I was super happy to get an invite on to their podcast recently. The more we can connect culture with cash, the better.Here are some of the themes from the episode:Why culture needs to be seen, not just describedMany organisations invest time defining their values, their mission, and their Employer Value Proposition. But when people outside the organisation encounter that messaging, it can feel abstract.Statements like “we value collaboration” or “our people are our greatest asset” are common, but they rarely tell you what it actually feels like to work somewhere.Content changes that.When employees talk about the work they do, the problems they solve, and the impact they have, culture stops being a slogan and starts becoming something tangible. A short video conversation, a podcast discussion, or a behind-the-scenes story can reveal far more about an organisation than really polished piece of copy on a careers page.That’s why I’m so interested in helping organisations capture these stories.Employees are the most credible storytellersOne of the themes we discussed in the episode is the importance of letting employees speak for themselves.Too often employer branding content tries to sound like marketing. But audiences - especially candidates - are increasingly good at recognising polished messaging.What they respond to instead is authenticity.* An apprentice explaining how they faced the world of work for the first time.* A nurse describing the moments they see the real impact of their work, despite the challenges.* A graduate talking about what culture looks like in their day to day.These kinds of conversations create content that is informative, credible and often genuinely inspiring. They allow people outside the organisation to understand the purpose behind the work, not just the job description.The important thing is to create the environment that helps them bring their authentic self to the screen or mic. Here’s a clip about how I do that.From storytelling to business valueWhen organisations consistently share thoughtful, useful content about the work happening inside their teams, several things start to happen.First, they build trust with potential candidates. People considering a role gain a much clearer picture of the environment they might be joining.Second, the organisation develops a reputation for expertise and openness. The same content that attracts candidates can also resonate with customers, partners and industry peers.And third, employees themselves often feel a stronger sense of pride and ownership when their work is shared and recognised publicly.In other words, workplace culture content doesn’t just support hiring - it contributes to brand, reputation and commercial success.A practical way to startOne of the points I always emphasise is that organisations don’t need a large production budget to start creating this kind of content. The most important ingredient is curiosity.Start by recording conversations with people who are doing interesting work inside the organisation. Ask them about the challenges they’re tackling, the expertise they’ve developed, and the moments that made them proud.Those conversations can become podcast episodes, short videos, articles or social clips.Over time, these stories build a body of content that reveals what the organisation actually does and why it matters.It also means you can build internal confidence, proof of concept and business cases for higher production content that sits alongside this.Watch or listen to the full conversationIf you’re interested in employer branding, organisational culture, or the role content can play in connecting the two, I hope you enjoy the conversation.You can watch the full episode here:Thanks again to Matt and Crista for inviting me. It was a great opportunity to chat about how organisations can move beyond describing culture - and start showing it through the stories of the people who create it every day.Check out their podcast here. Get full access to Employer Content Marketing at www.employercontent.marketing/subscribe