Employer branding Basics

Employer Branding

Employer branding is the deliberate articulation of the differentiated value your organization offers—through both tangible and intangible attributes—to show why the right talent should choose you because of what sort of employment experience you uniquely promise.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

A proof-backed summary of the rewards, experiences, and purpose employees receive in exchange for their skills and time.

Differentiated Value

The unique mix of rewards, experiences, and purpose your organization offers that directly contrasts with what talent competitors provide. It is the concrete proof—rooted in data, policies, and culture—of why the right candidates should choose you and how working for you will create greater personal and professional value than any close alternative.

Talent Competitor

Any organization your target candidates would seriously consider instead of you. This isn't the same as a competitor for your consumer products.

Employer Brand Equity

The quantifiable value your reputation adds to talent attraction, engagement, and retention.

Candidate Experience (CX)

Every interaction a prospect has with your brand from first click to first day. This is where the canddiate is most interested in what you have to say and is most open to information about your company.

Time to Fill (TTF)

The number of days between job requisition approval and accepted offer. Generally used as "the standard" by which brands and recruiters are measured, but a more useful metric might be to convert time into value.

Quality of Hire

A composite score of performance, retention, and cultural fit for new employees. In most companies, this is both the most important metric of employer brand value, but the hardest to measure.

Cost per Hire (CPH)

Total recruiting spend divided by the number of hires in a period. This metric is useful when showing the value of an increased offer acceptance rate.

Offer-Acceptance Rate

Percentage of extended offers that candidates accept. This is often the most obvious, valuable and useful way to show employer branding's impact to the business.

Retention Rate

Percentage of employees who stay over a given timeframe. Often used as a secondary means of measuring employer rband impact, though many factors go into retention.

Turnover / Attrition / Regretted Attrition

The rate at which employees leave, voluntarily or involuntarily. Regretted attrition refers to those who leave the company would have preferred to stay.

Referral Rate

Proportion of hires sourced through employee referrals. As referrals are often seen as the "best and cheapest" sources of new hires, leadership will lean on this metric as an indicator of employee morale instead of an indicator of clarity as to why people have chosen toworkhere.

Employee Advocacy

Employees sharing stories or content (generally positive) about their workplace on personal channels or in non-tracked situations (like when someone tells their friend about where they work at a party).

Brand Ambassador

An employee officially empowered (and generally trained) to represent and promote the employer brand.

Employer Brand Audit

Systematic review of the company's perception/reputation to outsiders and external audiences.

Sentiment Analysis

Using data tools to gauge aggregate tone and emotion in reviews or social posts. This is often gamed to show "impact" without changing people's perception of the company as an employer.

Glassdoor

Website where employees rate employers and share salary data. Leaders often cite this as a key brand signal, though it is generally more of a measure of how well expectations were set than actual objective metric for company quality.

Comparably

Platform that benchmarks employer culture, pay, and CEO ratings on a more detailed level than Glassdoor, but not cited nearly as often by leadership.

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

Survey metric asking staff how likely they are to recommend the company as a workplace. This metric is derived from consumer marketing, making is an interested though flawed metric for employer branding. Many employees value where they work without recommending it to friends.

Employee Engagement

Emotional and cognitive commitment employees feel toward their work and employer. It can be seen as how enrolled in the company journey the employee is.

Internal Mobility

Movement of employees into new roles or departments within the same company. Leadership loves the idea, but initiatives often fall short because individual managers are unwilling to let go of star players, leading to finger pointing and political gamesmanship that an employee might not want to bother with.

Boomerang Employee

A former employee who returns after working elsewhere. Boomerang stories often make for great employer branding stories as they reinforce the idea that the grass isn't always greener on the other side. These employees are sometimes more willing to provide contrast between this company and the one they left for and returned from.

Total Rewards

Human Resources term for the combined value of compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition. Employees and candidates rarely use this term, but it acknowledges the idea that candidates make their selection on the total value on offer and that value is more than just the salary, though Total Rewards doesn't take into account the non-monetary value derived form working there (less commuting, more autonomy/support/collaboration, status, professional development, etc).

Compensation

Salary, bonuses, and other direct financial pay, generally seen by leadership as the primary (and sometimes sole) driver of candidate interest.

Work-Life Balance

The specific equilibrium between job demands and personal life priorities at a given company. There is no correct or right level, though it is assumed that employees want more emphasis and time for personal matters and employers want more paid to work.

Hybrid Work

Schedule blending on-site and remote days each week. Many job boards offer a check box indicating that a role is hybrid, giving it inherent value, leading to a mis-match between what constitutes hybrid between candidates and employers, where candidates expect at least 1-2 days a week remotely, and companies who use the term to attract interest offering as little as 1-2 days a month.  

Remote Work

Performing one’s job entirely off-site, typically at home. Many job boards offer a check box indicating that a role is remore, giving it inherent value, leading to a mis-match between what constitutes "remote" between candidates and employers.

Flexible Work Arrangements

Policies allowing variable hours, compressed weeks, or location choice. Generally the vaguest claim a company will make in suggesting that roles are not 9-5 with an in-person commute.

Purpose

The reason the company exists. Many companies stretch this idea to include the meaningful impact or mission that motivates employees beyond paycheck in the hope that it attracts people willing to forgo a salary premium for their skills and talents.

Purpose-identified

Companies for whom their reason for being is attractive enough to a segment of the talent audience to forgo a salary premium (including sometimes taking a pay cut) and generally positive working conditions to work there. This is a very small fraction of all companies claiming to be purpose-identified, perhaps as few as 3-7% of all companies.

Mission Statement

Formal description of the organization’s overarching goal, often a legacy from the early 1990's when these sorts of things were very fashionable.

Core Values

Guiding principles that shape decisions and behaviors. Companies often point to their core values as a way of differentiating, though in reality there are likely no more than 15 total core values being claimed by all companies. These include values like "integrity," "teamwork," "accountability," "customer-focus," and "leadership." Values claimed without proof points around how those values imfluence decisions and behaviors (or without showing the cost of living with those values) should be treated as PR spin.

Culture

How people behave when there is no explicit rule or authority present to say otherwise. A culture exists any time two or more people are in the same space, and culture is changed every time someone enters or leaves that shared space.

Psychological Safety

The sense of how safe employees feel to speak up to leadership/authority without fear of punishment.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB)

Organizational commitment and investment to varied representation, fair treatment, and a sense of welcome. Employer branders can and should leverage people who are classically under-represented to reinforce brand narratives to reach wider audiences, but also as "proof" of the brand being not just for "some people," but a widespread sentiment.

This value goes both ways, as the DEIB function can leverage the employer brand to ensure that more audiences are represented in storytelling, attracting more varied audiences.

Candidate Funnel

Stages a prospect moves through: awareness, interest, apply, interview, offer, hire. Taken from consumer marketing, it can be extended beyond those boundaries to speak to those with little or no awareness, and consider becoming an employee and former employee part of the funnel.

The funnel is often the scaffolding for recruitment marketing metrics, leading to gaming of those metrics without changing the underlying impact to the business.

Onboarding

Structured process of integrating new hires into the company’s culture and workflows. This is a prime area of leverage to establish expectations that employees here embody and communicate the employee brand.

Employee Story

A personal anecdote or testimony that illustrates brand values in action. Often used as more credible proof of the brand narrative.

Content Pillar

Core brand theme around which multiple pieces of employer-brand content are developed. Repetition and offering multiple perspectives increases theme credibility.

Social Proof

Evidence—reviews, awards, testimonials— from a variety of sources and channels that signals legitimacy to candidates.

EVP Pillar

One of the distinct concepts that either support or further describes the overall EVP. While these come standard on classic employer brand EVPs, they are not inherently necessary to build a strong brand.

Brand Brief

A concise internal document outlining brand promise, support points, audience, and guardrails.

Brand Activation

Tactics that bring the employer brand to life across touchpoints.

Employee Advocacy Program

Structured initiative that trains and incentivizes staff to share brand content. This is often built around a specific technology, but that isn't actually necessary.

Choosability

The degree to which your company and employer brand makes the right talent actively select you over other competitors. High choosability shows up in rising offer-acceptance rates and falling pay-premium gaps.

Decision Engine

A repeatable framework (Position → Focus → Communicate → Connect) that guides every brand decision and keeps it current without agency hand-holding.

Blue-Ocean Messaging

Language that carves out uncontested space in the talent market by avoiding “me-too” promises. It’s discovered through competitive copy scraping and sentiment analysis, then distilled into your Differentiated Value.

Proof-Backed Content

Any brand claim anchored in data, policy, or specific employee stories (e.g. “70% of engineers ship code Day 1”). Turns slogans into trust-building evidence and lowers candidate skepticism.

Value-Creation Lens

A mindset that tests every tactic—headline, perk, piece of swag—against the measurable value it generates for both employer (e.g., lower cost-per-hire) and employee (e.g., faster growth path).