"We're haunted by past ‘employer brand’ failures, which makes leadership gun-shy about doing anything strategic."

If leadership has been burned before, they are not being irrational. They are pattern-matching.

They remember the expensive deck. The glossy language. The rollout that never changed hiring outcomes. They remember a project that looked impressive in a meeting, then collapsed the moment a recruiter had to use it under real pressure.

So when you propose something “strategic,” what they hear is “same movie, different title.”

The only way through that wall is to change what you are selling.

You are not selling “employer brand.” You are selling predictability.

Not in the abstract. In the exact places leadership cares about: offer acceptance, time-to-fill on constraint roles, quality in the funnel, and fewer late-stage surprises that make TA look ineffective.

Here’s the approach that tends to work when trust is already damaged.

Start with a small, provable bet. Something that produces clarity fast, creates a prioritized plan, and gives leadership evidence that this is not theater. The goal is not to win the argument in one meeting. The goal is to earn the right to do the bigger work by showing that better messaging and better proof can move real outcomes.

That means you walk into the conversation with:

• A diagnosis of where candidates lose confidence today
• A read on how your messaging compares to the competitors you actually lose to
• A short list of changes that would improve conversion without adding spend or headcount
• Proof requirements, so you do not create another brand story you cannot support

This is how you rebuild trust: by replacing “brand” with “evidence.”

How Employer Brand Labs helps: Employer Brand Labs offers a low-friction research path designed to answer the question leadership is really asking: “Is this worth pushing harder in our company, and what exactly would we do?” employerbrandlabs.com

Most likely next step: Employer Brand Research & Audits.