Our first Talking Point: Martin Lehnert, GEO, and a room that turned up

We did it. The first ever Talking Point went out live on Monday, and I want to start where it belongs, which is with thank yous.

The Talking Point is a new fortnightly conversation for EBClub, and the idea is simple enough. Pick a subject the community is already arguing about, find someone who has actually done the work rather than just theorised about it, and let them talk. This first one came straight out of a thread inside the EBClub community hub. Somebody shared an article about GEO, a few of us started chatting, and it became very obvious that most of us, me firmly included, knew roughly enough about generative engine optimisation to be worried and not nearly enough to do anything useful about it.

One person in that thread clearly did know. So I collared him.

Thank you, Martin

Martin Lehnert is Senior People Experience and Employer Branding at Riverty, the fintech arm of Bertelsmann, 4,000 colleagues across twelve countries. He gave up an hour to walk a room full of strangers through work his team has spent eighteen months on, and he did it with a generosity and a clarity that I do not think everyone would have managed. He shared the framework, the mistakes, the bits that have not worked yet. That is rarer than it should be.

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If you want the short version of what he covered, it is this: GEO is not a new technical discipline to be frightened of. It is employer branding fundamentals, done properly and published consistently, across every platform rather than just your careers site.

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A year and a half ago, asking a Riverty manager what the company stood for as an employer got you four or five different answers. So they rebuilt the EVP around a message house with three layers. Why they exist, how they enable people, and what those people actually work on. Then, and this is the part that matters, they attached a real proof point to every single claim. If they could not prove it, they did not say it. Anyone who has watched a beautiful set of pillars collapse the moment someone asks "yes, but where?" will recognise the discipline in that. We wrote about exactly this problem in The EVP is finished, now comes the dangerous bit.

The payoff is that Riverty now sees its own landing pages and employee stories quoted back as sources in AI answers. Not inferred, not hoped for. Cited.

Three things from Martin that I keep turning over:

The Job Fit Checklist. Riverty built a tool that helps a candidate decide whether they would thrive there, on the honest understanding that not everyone will. Every time a manager or recruiter posts a role on LinkedIn, the checklist gets dropped into the comments underneath it. Candidates find it useful. The machines appear to read it as a trust signal. It is a neat illustration of an argument we made recently in employer branding lost control of the narrative because it stopped helping people choose.

Stories beat claims. When Riverty launched with Berlin's public transport operator, they told it three ways, through three different people, each one carrying a different pillar of the EVP. Those stories are now among the pages AI reaches for. Which is more or less what we have been saying about employee generated content, only now there is a machine-shaped reason to care.

Lead with your strengths on the review sites. Martin's advice on Glassdoor and kununu was refreshingly unheroic. Work out what you are already genuinely good at, in their case hybrid working, and communicate consistently around that, while fixing the weaker stuff internally through actual programmes rather than messaging. If you want the numbers behind why reviews matter this much, our Glassdoor statistics for 2026 is the place to go.

And if GEO is new to you, start with what is GEO, a plain explanation for employer brand teams, then read how AI is reshaping candidate research.

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Thank you, everyone in the room

Here is the thing that's fun about the first episode. The questions were better than my questions. Seriously though, that's magic - the whole point of EBClub is bringing together the collective professional minds, answering the right questions, asking the right questions.

Chloe asked how you actually measure whether employee advocacy on LinkedIn is doing anything, which sent Martin into the detail of Riverty's dashboard and the fact that they can now see how many people arrive at the careers site via an LLM. Paulina asked the question everyone in employer branding has asked at some point, which is how on earth you get more Glassdoor reviews. Martin's honest answer was that he has not found the silver bullet either, that they have tried direct asks, automated prompts at twelve months, QR codes on posters, emails, Teams messages, and that progress has still been slow. Part of the problem is friction: Glassdoor makes you register a profile before you can leave a review, where kununu and Indeed do not. Our anonymous columnist covered the sharp end of this in we launched an EVP while our Glassdoor page was a dumpster fire.

Lynn jumped into the chat with her own playbook: internal campaigns, writing to new starters ninety days in, asking recruiters to raise it with hiring managers during briefings, and never, ever asking for a positive review. Just asking. That is the community doing what the community is for, and it was lovely to watch.

Rhian asked a brilliant question about the advocacy programme, and then I removed her from the webinar. Permanently. While trying to unmute her. Sorry Rhian. In my defence it was my first go at hosting one of these, and in Zoom's defence, nothing. For the record, the answer was that Riverty's forty trained ambassadors have generated more than half a million impressions in twelve months, and that one manager who used to get around a thousand impressions on a job post now gets over six thousand. Martin also named the real blocker, which is not tooling or training but imposter syndrome. People want to share, and are frightened of sounding arrogant. Worth reading alongside the personal brand paradox.

EBClub is growing, quickly

A bit of context for anyone new here. EBClub started six and a half years ago, right at the cusp of the pandemic, because I wanted somewhere employer branding people could connect and share problems without a sales pitch attached. This year it stopped being a side project and became the whole job. We spent a chunk of it travelling around Europe checking whether people wanted this. They did.

The community platform opened at the start of August. Right now there are around 250 people inside it and another 130 working through activation. In six weeks. We have already announced the EBClub 50 Voices of Employer Brand, and The Talking Point is only one of the rooms. There is My EB Story, on the people behind the work. And for in-house members there is the EB Therapy Couch, most Fridays, where you bring a problem rather than a presentation. I am not hosting that one. It is not mine to host.

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Come and join us

If you are in-house, in employer branding, TA or HR, EBClub is free and it is built specifically for you. Applications are reviewed within 48 hours, and the practitioner space is kept peer-only and protected, which is the whole point of it. Providers and partners have their own routes into it via the EB Exchange, and both are welcome, just not in the peer rooms.

Join EBClub here.

Or, if you want the longer argument for why, the employer brand job need never be lonely ever again.

Why Employer Branding Professionals Need Community

Employer branding can be a lonely profession. Steve Ward explains how practitioner communities can reduce isolation, strengthen collective knowledge and help the discipline adapt to rapid change.

Employer Branding NewsSteve Ward

What is coming up

The Talking Point runs fortnightly. Next up, Stephen Brand from Rolls-Royce on evolving trust and the erosion of it. After that, Ali Spangler from Manscaped joins us from the States to tackle humour in employer brand, where it works and where it very much does not. And in November we are looking at EB leadership in the AI era with Heather Walker from SAP: how the role is changing, and what we are now expected to manage, lead and measure.

One more thing. Martin is part of the team behind the Global Employer Brand Exchange in Madrid on 3 November. It is built by the community, for the community, and it is not for profit, with any surplus going to charity. The spirit of it is very close to ours, which is probably why we got on. Anyone who joined us live has a discount code waiting.

Thank you, all of you, for turning up to a first episode of a thing that did not exist a month ago. See you in two weeks.

Steve