EBN
Before you brief anyone, read this. EBN and Fathom have built two free briefing templates, one for EVP research, one for creative campaigns, that raise the standard of what a brief should actually contain.
After 22 years in marketing - and the past 12 of those in employer branding and recruitment marketing - I’ve developed a deep appreciation for a good brief.
Mainly because they’re so bloody rare.
Having worked across both B2B marketing and employer branding, I feel I’ve seen enough to say with some confidence that when marketing agencies pitch to marketing teams, the brief is usually decent. Not perfect, but coherent. Objectives are defined, desired outcomes are clear enough, and budgets are grounded in something resembling reality.
In short, the people writing the brief tend to understand the work they’re commissioning. And boy oh boy, does that help.
Honestly, it’s one of the quiet but well-known truths of employer branding: HR teams are often expected to commission marketing-grade work without ever having been trained to brief marketing agencies properly. And they're terrible at it. Akin to asking someone to order the wine for the table when the only two types they know are red or white. They'll get the job done, but....
When HR folk brief branding and communications work to agencies the experience can be… interesting. And by interesting, I mean vague, contradictory, wildly optimistic, or occasionally written as if someone Googled the term “employer branding” five minutes before sending the RFP.
Your employees know the truth. Does your EVP? At Fathom we measure the "Credibility Gap" between your promise and their reality.
The “We Want Better Talent” Brief
If you’ve worked in this field for any amount of time, you’ll recognise one of the most common briefs almost immediately.
“We want to attract better talent.”
Fantastic. Who doesn’t?
But improve it how? To solve what hiring problem? For which talent segments? Measured against what metrics? And what, exactly, triggered this sudden urgency?
This is usually where things become… interpretive.
Far too often, when I ask the obvious follow-up questions – why? why now? what are we trying to solve? - things don’t get a lot clearer. Common rationales for the work can be loose or advasive. It’s genuinely alarming how common it is to hear something along the lines of...
“a senior leader said we should do something about employer branding.”
Or
“we've not done anything in a while so we thought we should.”
Yes, I know you’re screaming at the screen whilst reading this “go and talk to the actual adults”. I kid you not, this is often coming from the adult, or senior person in the room. Of course, it’s not always this bad, but it’s not uncommon.
Most employer brand briefs are too vague to be useful and too ambitious to be honest. These free templates fix both problems.
Navigating these engagements quickly becomes tricky. What follows is typically a brief that doesn’t contain a single problem or business objective, just a long shopping list of tasks and activities.
“We want an EVP.”
“We want a campaign.”
“We want a new careers site.”
All perfectly sensible things. But they are tools, not objectives. If you don’t know what you’re trying to solve, these tools won’t solve a thing. It’s a bit like telling an architect you’d like a hammer, some bricks and a door... and hoping you end up with your dream house.
Fathom
Agencies Aren’t Innocent Either
It’s tempting to throw all the shade on the people producing these briefs, but agencies need to shoulder some of the blame too. Me included.
Too many agencies look at a vague brief and think, “Excellent. Let’s sell them something.”
I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I suspect most agencies have at some point. Instead of pushing back, asking questions, or helping shape a better brief, we squeeze a familiar package into whatever budget has been mentioned and give the client what they asked for - even when we know they have no idea whether it will solve their problem (or even what the problem is in the first place).
For an industry that loves talking about “strategic partnerships,” this behaviour isn’t particularly strategic. I’ll always try, but when I see it’s a lost cause I should probably make my exit.
Helping a client clarify their problem takes time, effort and occasionally difficult conversations. It requires a buyer to show their cards and share problems they probably wish they didn’t have. But without that work, the chances of producing genuinely meaningful outcomes drop significantly. You might still deliver something beautifully executed, but did it actually move the needle?
More importantly, did anyone ever define which needle you were trying to move? On any side!
The Three Quotes Circus
Then there’s procurement - specifically the moment when a company announces that they need three quotes.
Sometimes this is legitimate. Sometimes the process is followed in the spirit it was intended. But more often than anyone likes to admit, it’s total theatre.
The organisation has already decided which partner they want to work with. They’ve spoken to them, bought into their approach and are ready to proceed. Then someone remembers procurement requires multiple bids.
So, two additional agencies are invited to participate in what is essentially a very elaborate waste of their time.
EBN
I know this happens because I’ve been on both sides of it. I’ve helped clients shape briefs that were so clearly aligned with our methodology that other agencies never stood a chance. And I’ve also spent weeks working late nights on proposals only to discover later that the brief had effectively been written for someone else.
Lovely and compliant for procurement. A farce and significant drain of resources for the agencies making up the numbers.
Like so many processes designed with good intentions, humans quickly find the loopholes. The collateral damage is predictable: lost revenue, wasted time, burnout, and agency teams missing evenings with their families to produce unpaid work that doesn’t see the light of day.
The Feedback Black Hole
And then, often after weeks of pitching and hard graft, comes the most galling part of it all... silence.
An agency loses the pitch. That’s fair enough - nobody expects to win every time. But when they politely ask for feedback - not a full post-mortem, just a few honest comments on where they fell short vs. the winning bid - it's like they're suddenly shouting into space.
Which is odd, because those same kind agency folk just spent weeks researching your company, thinking about your brand, generating ideas and often sharing insights you didn’t previously have. They responded to every request at lightning speed, battled through your antiquated procurement portal and jumped through every hoop asked of them.
Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.
And when they ask for a couple of minutes worth of feedback, everyone disappears. It’s uncanny. Perhaps everyone always gets struck down by lightening at this exact moment. Or perhaps it’s simply a lack of professional courtesy.
Or, worse still... perhaps it’s hard to put a positive swing on “sorry, your approach was actually better and priced well, but we’d long decided to work with someone else and just needed another quote”.
Either way, and call me old-fashioned, if someone has invested weeks responding to your brief, giving them a few nuggets of honest feedback feels like the bare minimum.
“your price was too high”
“your didn’t have these great features”
“the winning bidders did this and that”
“the winning bidders had worked with X in the past”
The Budget Reality Gap
And while we’re here, it would be remiss of me to skip over budgets.
Not only do marketing teams have a much better idea of what a brief should contain, they also have some reference point for what strategy, branding and creative work costs. HR teams often don’t - not because they’re incompetent, but because historically this hasn’t been their territory.
Which sometimes leads to briefs that read like this:
- Ground-up EVP
- Careers site redesign
- Content production
- Multi-market campaign
Budget: $25,000
At which point agencies begin the familiar exercise of quietly removing half the ambition until the project fits the number, rather than doing the sensible thing and politely walking away. Just like the poor brief, poor budgeting is another surefire way to end up with sub-optimal outcomes.
We Can Must All Do Better
None of this is about blaming HR. Employer branding hasn’t had the decades-long runway that traditional marketing has, and many organisations are still figuring out what good looks like, and who should own it.
However, if we’re being completely honest, one of the more persistent challenges in this field is that employer branding often sits inside HR while behaving suspiciously like a marketing discipline (a debate for another day). And a side effect of this can be diminished outcomes.
For now, a few simple improvements would make the process significantly less painful for everyone involved.
- HR teams should focus briefs on outcomes, not activities or tools.
- Both sides should be realistic about budgets.
- If procurement requires multiple bids, don’t run a rigged race.
- And if agencies spend weeks pitching to you, give them feedback.
Agencies, meanwhile, need to resist the path of least resistance. If you want to be seen as a strategic partner, you have to act like one - even when that means asking awkward questions or walking away from an RFP that was never any good to begin with.
The biggest casualty of getting all this wrong is employer branding itself.
Every poorly bought, poorly briefed, and poorly executed project chips away at belief in the discipline. And that’s a shame, because when employer branding is done properly - strategically, thoughtfully, and with clear outcomes in mind - it can save companies millions, transform hiring performance and become a genuine competitive advantage.
But it all starts with the brief. And, apparently, that’s still the hardest part.
Resources
Free download: Employer Branding Brief Templates
If this article raised questions about how to brief your next employer brand project, we have built the tools to help. Two research-grade templates;
- Template A for EVP briefs,
- Template B for creative campaign briefs
Created in partnership with Fathom, the employer branding agency that builds EVPs from evidence rather than assumption.
Fill them in online, save your answers as a PDF, or download the blank print-ready versions.
Takeaways
1. A brief should define a problem, not just a list of activities.
Too many employer branding briefs ask for deliverables like EVP development or campaigns without clearly defining the hiring challenge they are meant to solve.
2. HR teams are often expected to commission marketing work without marketing training.
Employer branding sits inside HR in many organisations, yet the work itself behaves like marketing. This structural mismatch often leads to weak briefs and unclear objectives.
3. Agencies share responsibility for bad outcomes.
When agencies accept vague briefs and simply “sell something,” they contribute to poorly scoped projects and diluted results instead of acting as strategic partners.
4. Procurement processes can create wasted effort.
The requirement for multiple bids often results in agencies investing significant time in RFPs where the winning vendor was already chosen.
5. Professional courtesy matters.
If agencies invest weeks responding to a brief, providing honest feedback to unsuccessful bidders should be the bare minimum.
6. Unrealistic budgets undermine outcomes.
Without a realistic understanding of what branding and creative work costs, projects often get watered down until they deliver little meaningful impact.
7. Better briefs lead to better employer branding.
Clear problem statements, realistic budgets and transparent processes significantly increase the likelihood that employer branding initiatives will deliver real business value.
EBN