There Is No Such Thing As “Employer Brand” If Your Recruiters Are Awful (Or Spread Too Thin)

Yet many organizations don’t seem to realize this.

I am certainly no expert on “employer branding.” However, I can tell you I did a lot of freelance writing work within the general “HR Tech” ecosystem from 2016 to 2019–2020, and I encountered lots of “employer brand” experts at various events. It always, and I mean always, felt to me like an invented position because a company didn’t want to fire a pre-existing HR person, so they simply moved them around to another place. I had no idea what the purpose of these roles was. Years later, I got into it with James Ellis (an employer brand expert) because he didn’t like receiving emails from me. He complained about this every day for about 2–3 months. If you have that much time to complain about emails vs. deleting them, how busy is your work, truly?

Here’s the other thing. You could go out and spend $1 million on an “employer brand” campaign. I don’t even fully know all the elements that would go into such a campaign, but let’s say you went out and spent a cool mil on it. Nice.

Now, as this campaign rolls out, you have a series of recruiters who are:

• Not well-trained
• Spread too thin