Employer brand teams spend a lot of time and money trying to get in front of talent. Paid social. Careers sites. Videos. Content. Events. Programmatic advertising. LinkedIn campaigns. We research audiences, build propositions, develop messaging frameworks and spend considerable amounts of money getting all of it in front of exactly the right people.
Which makes it slightly odd that many companies barely use the distribution network they already employ... recruitment.
Think about what recruiters actually do all day. They talk to talent. Not anonymous impressions, clicks or website visitors, but actual people from the exact audiences employer branding is trying to reach. Engineers, graduates, salespeople, nurses, executives, developers, finance professionals or whatever happens to be difficult to hire this week.
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A large organisation might have 100 recruiters. If each of them has just ten meaningful external candidate conversations a week, that's 1,000 direct conversations with the talent market every week. Call it 50,000 a year.
Most employer brand people I know would kill for that channel.
Yet recruiters are often remarkably distant from employer brand. They might get briefed on a new EVP. They might receive some trickle down assets. They might be told the three pillars and where to find the messaging framework. Then everyone gets back to work and forgets about it.
... and I think we're missing a fairly massive opportunity.
They're the node where the employer brand becomes real
We tend to think of employer-brand distribution in much the same way we think about marketing distribution. We create something and then work out where to put it.
The careers site says we're collaborative. The LinkedIn campaign says we're innovative. The employee video says people can build brilliant careers here. The EVP says employees are empowered to make an impact.
Then the candidate talks to a recruiter. Suddenly this isn't advertising anymore. They can ask questions.
What does career progression actually look like? How flexible is flexible? Why did the last person leave? What's the manager like? How much autonomy would I really have? Why should I leave the company I'm already perfectly happy working for and join you?
This is where a recruiter can do something a campaign can't. They can explain, adapt, answer, challenge, reassure and provide evidence. They can take "career growth" and say: The person managing this team joined four years ago doing essentially the job you're interviewing for.
They can take "flexibility" and explain what that actually means on a Wednesday afternoon when somebody needs to collect their kid from school. They can take "innovation" and talk about the project the team just finished, rather than hoping anyone is still impressed by repeating the word innovation ad-nausium.
That's a very different kind of employer-brand communication.
Candidates appear to value the human bit. Randstad's 2026 Singapore Employer Brand Research found that 70% of Singapore talent considers in-person contact important when making career choices, rising to 75% among Gen Z.
Apparently even the generation we assume wants to conduct its entire existence through a screen would quite like to speak to a human being before deciding where to spend 40 hours of their life every week.
Recruiters don't just distribute the brand.
They can personalise it.
This is where I think recruiters become much more interesting as an employer-brand channel. Most employer-brand communication has to generalise. Even a very well-segmented campaign is still communicating to groups of people. A recruiter is talking to one - they can ask questions themselves and hyper-persionalise answers.
The reasons an experienced engineer might join your company are unlikely to be identical to the reasons a graduate does. A salesperson may care about earning potential and leadership. A parent may want to understand flexibility properly. Someone moving from a huge multinational to a scale-up may care less about the gym membership and considerably more about whether the place will still exist in three years.
A good recruiter can work out what matters to the person in front of them and make the relevant parts of the employer proposition useful.
This isn't theoretical. LinkedIn's own data has found that personalised recruiter InMails achieve around a 40% higher acceptance rate than non-personalised messages. That particular statistic relates to LinkedIn outreach rather than employer branding, but the underlying point isn't especially surprising. Relevant communication tends to work better than generic communication.
This is why I think we undersell recruiters when we describe them simply as another employer-brand "touchpoint". A banner ad is a touchpoint. A careers page is a touchpoint. A recruiter can have a 30-minute conversation with someone, understand what they care about and explain why this particular opportunity might make sense for them.
That's not really a touchpoint. That's a salesperson with an extremely qualified lead.
Your employees know the truth. Does your EVP? At Fathom we measure the "Credibility Gap" between your promise and their reality.
So naturally, we give them a PowerPoint
This is perhaps where employer branding needs to take some responsibility. Imagine spending six months researching an EVP. You've surveyed employees, interviewed leaders, researched external talent, analysed competitors, run workshops, built the proposition, created the pillars, developed a messaging framework and produced some beautiful creative.
Then you introduce it to the recruitment team.
Here are our three pillars. Here are the approved messages. Here's a 47-slide deck. Please use the new assets. Job done.
Except the recruiter gets on a call the following morning and somebody asks: Why should I leave Google and join you? I'm not convinced knowing that the EVP has three pillars called Grow, Belong and Impact is going to get them very far.
If we genuinely want recruiters to carry the employer brand, they don't need slogans. They need the material underneath them. Give them stories. Give them proof. Give them examples of actual career journeys. Give them employee evidence. Tell them how flexibility really works. Show them why people stay. Explain where the company genuinely beats its competitors and, perhaps more importantly, where it doesn't.
Give them the awkward stuff too, the trade-offs that are (or should be) part of the new EVP. If workloads can be intense, tell them and explain why it's worth it for the people who work here. If progression is fast but people have to earn it, explain how it works. If the company pays around market average but offers unusually strong development, that's useful for a candidate to know. If the environment isn't for everyone, explain why, that's useful too.
A recruiter who understands the employer proposition properly doesn't need to recite it. They can simply explain it.
This matters even more when things go wrong
Recruiters don't just influence the people you eventually hire. They interact with considerably more people who you don't. And this is another part that, I'm afraid, us employer branders aren't great at.
The 2025 CandE candidate experience benchmark, drawing on more than 66,000 candidate surveys, found that lack of communication, ghosting and poor follow-up remained the biggest negative themes in candidate feedback. In North America, 31% of candidates had heard nothing one to two months after applying, while 56% received no feedback after being rejected during screening or interviewing.
Only 32% of rejected candidates received a personal email from a recruiter or hiring manager. Think about what that means from an employer-brand perspective.
We spend money introducing people to the company, persuading them to consider us, getting them interested enough to apply and perhaps putting them through several interviews. Then, for a significant proportion of them, one of their final interactions with the brand is silence or an automated rejection.
That's an expensive way to create detractors.
There is academic evidence behind this too. A 2025 study of 344 professionals found that candidate experience significantly influenced the relationship between recruitment processes and employer-brand reputation. Which shouldn't really surprise anyone. The careers site tells candidates what kind of company you are. The recruitment process gives them some actual evidence.
Candidates will probably believe the evidence over the hyperbole.
The open standard for employer branding research. The Talent Gravity Standard is free to use, CC-licensed, and built by the team behind Fathom.
But recruiters aren't just a distribution network
This is the bit I think we overlook even more. Recruiters spend all day talking to the talent market. That means they're not only distributing information outwards. They're collecting it on the way back.
What are candidates asking about? Which competitors keep appearing? Why are people turning jobs down? What do candidates misunderstand about the company? Which parts of the proposition actually get a reaction? What doesn't seem to matter anymore? Are salary expectations moving? Has flexibility suddenly become more important? Are candidates worried about AI? Layoffs? Leadership? Return-to-office policies?
That's a goldmine of employer-brand intelligence. And we're collecting it every day.
Companies will happily commission an external perception study every year to find out what talent thinks about them. That's sensible. We do plenty of them ourselves.
But it is slightly ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars asking the talent market what it thinks while largely ignoring the people in your own organisation who talk to that market every day.
To be clear, recruiter feedback isn't research. Twenty recruiters saying "I'm hearing this a lot" isn't a representative sample and shouldn't be treated as one. But it is an incredibly useful listening system.
If recruiters suddenly start hearing the same objection repeatedly, employer brand should know about it. If candidates consistently have the same misconception about the company, employer brand should know about it. If a competitor has suddenly started winning candidates because of something they're offering, employer brand should definitely know about it.
This shouldn't require waiting for the next EVP research project. But the information doesn't get through most of the time. I know this because I've lost count of the amount of EVP I've worked on over the past 12 years and none of them we're able to access this goldmine.
And there seems to be plenty we don't know about how we're perceived
Built In's 2026 research among predominantly North American talent and HR leaders found that 76% considered employer reputation important to their talent strategy. So far, so unsurprising. But only 24% believed internal and external perceptions of their employer were aligned.
Three-quarters think reputation matters. Fewer than one in four think what the outside world sees matches what the company sees internally. In which case, you'd think we might spend a little more time listening to the people who talk to the outside world all day.
Instead, employer brand and recruitment tend to operate like distant relatives. EB develops the proposition and campaigns. Recruitment fills the vacancies. They'll collaborate on some job advertising, perhaps attend the same meetings and hopefully get along at the Christmas party. But the real opportunity is much bigger than that.
Recruitment should be continuously feeding market intelligence into employer brand. Employer brand should be continuously giving recruitment better stories, evidence, talking points, messages and tools to take back into the market. That's the loop most miss. In plenty of companies, I can see it's barely connected.
Don't make this another job for recruiters
There is an obvious danger in all of this. Someone reads this article, organises a meeting and announces that recruiters are now responsible for employer branding too. Please don't.
Recruiters already have quite enough to do. Aptitude Research's 2026 work on recruiter experience found that nearly half described their working environment as reactive and overloaded, while more than half spent at least half their time on activities that don't directly contribute to hiring outcomes.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn's Future of Recruiting research found recruiters using generative AI reported an average 20% reduction in workload, with the obvious opportunity being to redirect some of that time towards higher-value activities such as candidate engagement.
So this isn't about adding "be an employer brand ambassador" to the recruiter's annual objectives. It's about employer-brand teams making it easier for recruiters to be good at something they're already doing.
Give them useful evidence rather than campaign slogans. Give them stories rather than scripts. Help them understand different talent audiences. Make competitive intelligence accessible. Give them something useful to say when candidates ask difficult questions.
Then build a simple way for what recruiters hear to come back. Not another 17-field form in the ATS. Nobody needs that. A monthly conversation would be a start.
You've already built the network
Employer branding has become increasingly sophisticated at reaching talent. We can target by occupation, location, interest, behaviour and seniority. We can buy media against tiny specialist audiences. We can retarget visitors, optimise campaigns and measure impressions down to the last decimal place. All useful.
But perhaps one of the most powerful employer-brand channels isn't a channel we've traditionally thought of as media at all. It's the recruiter who speaks to top talent and explains why this role might genuinely be better than the one they already have. It's the recruiter who turns "career development" from a line on the careers site into an actual story. It's the recruiter who answers an awkward question honestly and makes the company more credible by doing so.
It's also the recruiter who hears for the tenth time that candidates think your company is bureaucratic, your salaries are behind the market or nobody knows you have an office in Singapore. That network already exists.
Companies spend a fortune trying to get their employer brand in front of the right people. Meanwhile, the right people are already on the phone with their recruiters.
Maybe we should make a little more of that.
Takeaways
Recruiters are an employer-brand distribution network
They speak directly to the exact talent audiences employer branding is trying to reach, often thousands of times a year. Yet many companies barely treat those conversations as an employer-brand channel.
Recruiters can personalise the employer proposition
Campaigns communicate to audiences. Recruiters talk to individuals. They can understand what matters to each candidate and make the relevant parts of the employer proposition meaningful to them.
Give recruiters evidence, not EVP slogans
Recruiters don't need to memorise three pillars or recite approved messaging. They need stories, proof points, real examples, competitive context and honest answers to difficult candidate questions.
Recruiters are also a talent-market listening network
Candidate conversations reveal changing expectations, competitor activity, misconceptions, objections and reasons people say no. That intelligence should continuously feed back into employer-brand strategy.
Employer brand and recruitment should operate as a loop
Employer brand should equip recruiters to have better conversations with talent. Recruitment should feed what it learns from those conversations back into employer brand. In many companies, that loop is barely connected.
