Not Everything Is a Story: Employer Branding's Storytelling Problem

Bryan Furtado asked me a question on his Let’z Talk podcast that I have not been able to put down: are employer brands telling more stories, or just calling more content storytelling? I had not noticed a problem until he raised it. A few weeks later, I think he is right. (Disclosure, as ever: I run Fathom, an employer branding agency, and co-founded EBN, so I have a stake in how this industry talks about its own work.)

Telling stories is a smart thing to do, and a powerful tool when used properly. The trouble starts when every piece of content gets the label.

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What actually counts as a story?

Boiled down, a story is an account of something that happened. There is an initial situation, there is what happened, and there is the outcome. That template sits underneath almost every story ever told, with endless variations on top.

Take the staples of a careers page. “We have an amazing culture” is a claim. “Come here and you will grow in your career” is a promise (a decent one, but a promise). Neither happened to anybody. Push every piece of content through a story template and storytelling ends up with a bad name.

Bryan added a second test. “I also think a story needs tension,” he said, meaning some change, conflict or consequence. He also made the point that a post does not always have to be a story: “Sometimes we need information, proof, or even a point of view.”

Content can be a story, but not every piece of content is one.

Stories are there to give proof

Employer branding exists to give people, mostly prospective talent and sometimes current employees, meaningful information that helps them choose one employer over another, or over a different path altogether. A story is one vehicle for that. A proof point is another: the initiatives launched, the programmes that run, the things an employer does with its own money.

Some things resist proof points. Everyone says they care about inclusion, that learning matters and that the culture is great. How would anyone check? Where a number or a programme falls short, a story that really happened shows the claim in action, and the listener leaves with something to act on. That is where tension earns its place. Bryan Adams, author of Sell the Truth, made a similar case to Steve Ward on EBClub’s Talking Point, from the careers site end.

Four layers of truth, and one employee’s story

Authenticity is something I wrestle with. When I started out in employer branding, putting a real employee on camera was fairly revolutionary. Big brands were producing stock footage and glossy photos of smiling people, and nobody bought it. A real employee no longer clears the bar on its own. Candidates are choosing somewhere they will spend 30 or 40 hours of every week, so the story has to be believable. I came at the same problem from a different angle in an earlier piece on what authenticity looks like.

The difficulty is that authenticity has layers. A company has an enterprise truth. A big organisation also has local truths: an office in Singapore and an office in India can feel like different employers, because people care about different things. Within an office there are job truths, since marketing, field sales and the R&D centre rarely share the same week. And inside one team there are personal truths. Everybody has worked somewhere with a teammate who loves the place and a neighbour who feels the opposite.

So which truth gets told? A team should be able to say which layer a story sits in: the whole company, a role, or one individual. Without that, an inspiring story from one person slides into an implied promise to everyone. The fair approach is candour. This is this person’s story, it should inspire, and nobody should read it as the experience every new joiner will have.

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Hunting for five stories

Most employer brand teams begin at the end. Someone asks for five employee stories, and the team goes looking for five employees. Looking is fine. What is usually missing is a way to notice a story when it happens.

Large organisations produce triggers all the time: a promotion, a big client landed, something unexpected. Employer brand teams need the habit of reaching out to ask what happened, then judging whether there is tension in it and whether it is worth telling. After that they need a way to tell it fast, while it is still current. When I look at employee stories, in my experience many are a year old and some are five. By then the moment has gone.

Can a script be authentic?

Bryan asked whether a heavily scripted and edited employee story can stay authentic. My answer was yes, and the evidence comes from a current project. We are producing employee stories across APAC for a brand most readers would know (I will leave the name out). The client’s contact found employees with real stories who were happy to tell them.

The first video, in Singapore, was storyboarded, and the employee had free rein to tell the story off the cuff. The content was good. It could have been better.

For the second, in India, we took a different route. The employee had a big story and the video had 60 seconds, so we interviewed him at length, wrote a script from his account, then called him again. Is this your story? Have we overplayed anything, underplayed anything, got anything wrong? He was happy, he kept to the script, and the video was better. The script helped us find the relevant part of a long story and distil it. I do not think we lost any authenticity. If anything, we reached more of it.

The caveat is the approval chain. Authenticity gets polished out afterwards, in the editing rounds, when comms get involved and something “can’t really be said”. Anyone who has worked on one of these has asked for it again with more energy, or just told the employee to be themselves. I have said both many times. Employees are not actors, and they have been pulled off a day job to sit in front of a camera.

Bryan asked whether employers are asking people to perform authenticity for the camera, and whether that makes it corporate theatre. Sometimes, yes. I am not convinced that total hands-off is better, though. An in-house team can bin unusable footage and start again. An agency with deliverables has less room for error.

When the story outruns the experience

Bryan told a story of his own. A few weeks ago he was talking to a practitioner about an EVP and asked for the first pillar. “Fairness,” came the answer. Bryan asked whether the company was fair. “Absolutely not.” Meanwhile the company’s website, he said, was full of smiling people. (He did not name the company.)

Can great storytelling make an employer brand problem worse by raising expectations? One hundred per cent. Content produced to avoid a problem draws in people who expect an experience they will not get. The costs show up as regretted attrition, repeat hiring and a Glassdoor page that looks like a car crash. I have written before about the gap between the profile and the person. A good story suits a good employment experience well, and it cannot repair a broken one. Product marketing works the same way: a terrible product marketed well gets bought once and then experienced.

When the issue sits in the employment experience, communication cannot fix it. As I told Bryan: “Don’t try and market yourself out of a hole.” It will not work.

FROM THE EBN NETWORK

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Know the truth before telling it

That is why the EVP matters so much. I recently saw someone say they had built theirs with ChatGPT, and I winced. The damage from an unresearched EVP does not show up tomorrow. It shows up six months, a year or two years later. Bryan made the same point from the other direction: EVPs used to come out of boardrooms where everybody felt they knew it all and nobody spoke to employees. Now they come out of ChatGPT or Claude, and again nobody speaks to employees. I made the longer argument against AI-built EVPs recently.

A credible EVP needs a 360 view of data. That means the employee experience, the leadership and strategic perspective, competitive intelligence for positioning and differentiation, and the perception of external target talent (the EBN guide to what an EVP is covers the method). Standing out is the hardest part, and it cannot be done by looking inward only. An employer that looks only inside ends up saying what everyone else says.

Data also settles arguments. In a workshop the CEO arrives with a favourite topic, and few people in the room can stand up and call it an opinion. With data they can say it is a fair idea, though rivals already claim it, external talent is not looking for it and internal talent does not experience it. Without the data, that conversation is an opinion fight with the CEO, and the CEO wins.

The practical advice I gave Bryan is to have the data and to segment it by department or by gender, because the truth differs between groups. Then stick to it. Stretching one employee’s experience across everyone who joins is the moment a truth turns into a lie. Understand the truth before trying to tell it.

AI, agencies and the premium on real

AI makes content fast, cheap and scalable, and it keeps improving. I have seen the full range, from awful content that probably repels talent to polished work that looks decent and was clearly made quickly and cheaply. Use it, but never blindly. Keep a lot of human oversight, stay aware of how the output looks from outside, and put a warning sticker on every use.

Bryan, whose business is also an agency, asked whether agencies share responsibility for the stories that get told, since clients ask for storytelling and agencies deliver it. It depends. With a new client, an agency cannot know whether the stories it proposes reflect the real employment experience. With a long-term client, and with research and an EVP behind the relationship, the agency knows what can and cannot be said, and the job becomes advising. First engagements are hard. I sympathise with agencies that simply want to deliver quality and trust that the people across the table are not papering over cracks.

After the layoffs across HR and employer branding, the market has filled with freelancers and fledgling agencies, and quality varies hugely. Some have polished AI-assisted content and plenty of confidence, and cannot drive business outcomes. The properly experienced sometimes get drowned out. The best outcomes I see pair a very lean in-house team with an experienced agency, which brings flexibility by project or retainer. Consumer marketers bring some transferable skills, but the talent and data side is a different game. I do not think experience costs more, either. (Yes, I run an agency. Weigh that last sentence accordingly.)

Selling employment also differs from selling luxury. A handbag or a watch can sell the dream: the model stepping off the private jet, a lifestyle the buyer will never live. Nobody sells a junior engineer a ride in the CEO’s limousine. Candidates will live the job, so the pitch needs to describe it as it is.

What this means for employer brand teams

The practical changes are small. Before commissioning five stories, check what the data says is true and for whom. Build a trigger, so that a promotion or a client win prompts a call and a quick test for tension. Label the layer of truth each story sits in. Keep the script close to the employee’s own words and protect it through the approval rounds. And where the real problem is the employment experience, take it to the people who own that experience.

Where this is heading

I expect authenticity to command a premium, and AI is the reason. A great deal of cheap, sloppy content is going to flood the feed and become the norm. The employers that stand out will be the ones with real creativity and human passion behind what they publish.

I also think a changing of the guard is under way. Household names that once topped every ranking are taking a reputational hit: trust is weaker, layoffs are in the news, and some chief executives have said controversial things or leaned into AI harder than into their people. Newer, faster-growing companies, AI businesses among them, look like more exciting places to work. (This is my read of the market, with no data behind it yet, and it remains to be seen.)

Bryan closed the conversation with a challenge I will borrow. Stop asking what story can be told, and ask whether there is truth in it. The strongest employer brands do not need to manufacture stories, because the experiences already exist. How many of the stories on a careers page would survive a conversation with the employee’s own teammates?

Takeaways

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