Employer brand is not a careers page

The employer-brand industry arrived in Australia with a useful observation and a useless product. The observation: people choose workplaces the way they choose other brands, with incomplete information and a lot of hearsay. The product: a careers page, a values animation, a set of photographs in which diverse staff laugh at a laptop, and a campaign that bids for the same graduates as everyone else. Meanwhile the roster is short, the manager is acting, and someone on a regional site is telling the truth at a barbecue.

You cannot advertise your way out of a workplace. You can tell the truth about one, and make the workplace less expensive to tell the truth about. That is employer brand. The rest is recruitment media.

The barbecue is the channel

Australian hiring still runs on stories told in kitchens. A nurse, a teacher, a warehouse supervisor, a graduate analyst: they will be asked what it is like, and they will not quote the values. They will quote a roster, a tool that does not work, a chief who is never seen, a team that stayed late, a policy that made them small. Those sentences are the brand. Glassdoor and a Facebook mum’s group are just the barbecue at scale.

Before you write a careers proposition, collect the barbecue sentences. Not a survey with a Likert scale. The actual clauses. If you cannot bear to publish the true ones, you do not have an employer-brand problem. You have an employment problem. Spend the campaign money on the roster.

Facts that should be on the page

Pay ranges, for roles that can bear them. The location, including how much of the job is really in the office. The visa reality. The shift pattern. The team size. The manager’s existence. The tools. The things the job is not — not a family, not a lifestyle, not a launching pad unless it is.

Australian candidates have been trained by a decade of bait. “Competitive salary” means you will lose them at offer. “Dynamic” means understaffed. “Fast-paced” means no one has time to train. If your page uses those words, you are speaking the dialect of a market that no longer believes you.

Public-sector and university employers have a particular vice: they sell purpose and hide the casualisation. Purpose is real for many of those jobs. So is the contract. Put both on the page. The people you want can stand the tension. The people you trick will leave, and they will talk.

Managers are the product

A campaign cannot survive a bad first manager. The employer brand of a bank, a supermarket, a hospital network, a council is the quality of the thousand people who do the first Monday. Invest there: time, training, permission to run a team that is not a spreadsheet. This is unfashionable because it does not look like brand. It is the only brand a new hire can audit.

Internal mobility is the second product. If the only way to get a decent job is to leave and come back, you are running a campaign against yourself. The alumni who return are not a compliment. They are a map of your dead ends.

Unions, awards and the unsaid page

A large part of Australian work is awarded, enterprise-bargained, or both. Candidates who have done the job before will ask about the agreement, the overtime, the labour hire, the labour-hire-to-perm story. If the careers page is silent and the recruiter is breezy, the barbecue will fill the silence. Put the industrial reality in writing. It will shrink the wrong applications and honour the right ones.

Health, education, logistics, aged care, the public service: these sectors already have reputations that no film can overwrite. People know the load. What they do not know is whether this hospital, this depot, this campus is slightly less extractive than the last one. That is a local story. National employer brands that flatten every site into one smile will be disproved by the first Facebook group.

Contractors and labour hire are part of the brand whether you put them on the page or not. If a third of the floor is not “staff” in the annual report, they are still telling the barbecue sentence. Write a standard for how they are treated, and assume it will be quoted.

Recruitment marketing, used honestly

There is a place for media. Hard-to-fill technical roles, regional roles, roles people do not know exist. The creative should look like the work. Photograph the depot at 6am, not a loft. Use staff who still work there, and pay them for their time. Do not invent a “day in the life” that skips the part of the day that makes people quit.

Targeting is an ethical problem. If you only advertise in the postcodes that already look like head office, you will keep the workforce you already have. If you advertise everywhere and the workplace only works for one kind of life, you have bought disappointment at scale.

Alumni are a channel whether you have a program or not. People leave, and they talk with the authority of having been inside. A short, unsentimental alumni note — here is how to stay in touch, here is how to come back, here is the reference we will actually give — is cheaper than a campaign that pretends nobody quits. Ghosting alumni is how you fund the hostile barbecue.

Measurement without delusion

Applications are a vanity number if quality and retention are flat. Measure time-to-competence, ninety-day exits, offer-accept by source, and whether staff would repeat the barbecue sentence you hoped for. If a campaign increases volume and also increases early exits, it worked as advertising and failed as brand.

Stop asking people if they “love the brand”. Ask whether the job was as described. That question is an employer-brand metric. It is also a conduct metric. The two have always been the same thing, which is why the film was never going to be enough. A workplace that can answer it without a campaign already has a brand. A workplace that cannot should buy a roster, not a director.