Opinion pieces and thought leadership from across the employer branding community. External voices, bold takes, and new ideas worth debating.
For many people, a career is not just a way to earn. It is also status, structure, belonging, and identity. As AI reshapes skilled work, employer brands may need to offer something more grounded than lofty promises of purpose and authenticity.
Many employer branding briefs often aren’t really briefs at all. They’re shopping lists of activities without a clearly defined problem to solve. The result? Wasted time, diluted budgets and projects that struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes.
AI was meant to cut the drudge work, free up time and make leaner teams look clever. Instead, the evidence so far points to patchy gains, longer hours, shakier quality and a great deal of managerial confidence unsupported by anything so vulgar as proof.
For a decade, corporate life was a very expensive pantomime of meetings, steering groups and “strategic” projects that achieved very little. The bloat is finally being cut out, and employer brand and talent teams now have to prove their worth in a leaner, colder reality.
Employer branding exploded during the hiring boom, then was abruptly cut. Now there are far more EB professionals than meaningful roles, and most employers still don’t fully understand what EB is for... or how to hire for it. It feels like a mess.
If layoffs are now a feature of modern work, not a bug, then employer branding has to stop acting surprised and start telling the truth. What you say, and do not say, when people leave matters more than any “top workplace” badge.
Skills based hiring was meant to replace pedigree. In many organisations it has simply learned to live alongside it. Degrees vanish from job ads, but preferred schools and brands still dominate shortlists, while “skills evidence” shows up as one more hurdle at the end of the process.