“We tried Employer Branding, It didn’t work.” —Here’s why it probably didn’t.
It’s not the campaign. It’s the foundation.
At some point, almost every organization I’ve worked with has said it in some form:
“We tried employer branding… but it didn’t work.”
Sometimes it’s frustration. Sometimes it’s resignation.
Most often, it’s confusion—we did the posts, we wrote the EVP, we refreshed the career page… why didn’t anything change?
Here’s the hard truth:
It’s not that employer branding doesn’t work. It’s that the way we implement it often sets it up to fail.
Where most EB efforts fall apart
Employer branding often gets treated like a communication task—something owned by HR or marketing, launched once, and quietly left behind.
Not because people don’t care.
But because they’re moving fast. Solving urgent problems. And hoping a polished message will fix what’s underneath.
But a great campaign can’t do the heavy lifting on its own—especially when the ground isn’t ready for it.
Here’s where things usually break down:
It’s built in isolation, with little input from the team
It’s launched before internal alignment is in place
It’s handed off with no follow-through
It sounds good, but doesn’t reflect reality
Without ownership, without reinforcement, and without lived consistency, no campaign—no matter how well-crafted—can hold.
What implementation really means
- A brand isn’t built when something is published.
- It’s built when people begin to live it. Repeat it. Share it. Recognize themselves in it.
- Real implementation happens:
- In meetings, when leaders use the language of the brand
- In feedback sessions, when values guide hard conversations
- In onboarding, in rituals, in the way small decisions are made every day
That’s the invisible side of employer branding—and the one that matters most.
An honest story: “We’ve tried everything”
One of the teams I worked with came to me almost reluctantly.
They’d tried everything internally and were frustrated it hadn’t worked.
I was introduced with a line like: “Let’s try this too… maybe she sees something we don’t.”
And it turned out—they were right.
The problem wasn’t in their effort. It was in their structure.
They had grown rapidly, from 50 people to over 200, and hadn’t fully acknowledged the cultural shift that came with that growth.
Their departments had strong intentions—but their goals, values, and language weren’t aligned anymore. And they hadn’t realized just how disconnected the external perception had become.
Through a simple, objective analysis, we surfaced that gap.
What leadership believed the company stood for wasn’t what employees were describing. And it certainly wasn’t how the market perceived them.
We realigned the priorities. Reframed the story.
And the lesson I walked away with was this:
When you feel like you’ve done everything, the next step isn’t to push harder. It’s to see differently.
Sometimes the clearest insights come not from doing more—but from letting someone outside your system reflect it back to you without the filters you’re too close to notice.
Before you say “It didn’t work” — ask differently
If you’ve tried employer branding and feel like it didn’t land, don’t rush to dismiss it.
Take a breath. Look again. Ask better questions.
Was your message built with your people—or simply written for them?
Once launched, did anyone truly own it?
Was leadership aligned before you took the message public?
Did the campaign reflect what your team actually lives day to day?
If the answer to any of these is “not really,” that doesn’t mean you failed.
It means the work is still unfolding.
Not wrong—just unfinished.
A quiet truth
A brand isn’t a deliverable. It’s a behavior.
It shows up in how people make decisions, how they lead, how they listen.
In the trust that builds over time—not through campaigns, but through consistency.
So if employer branding didn’t “work” the first time, maybe it wasn’t the message.
Maybe it was the gap between what was said and what was lived.
That’s not failure. It’s a signal.
A sign that it’s time to go deeper, not louder.
Because the real work of branding isn’t what you launch. It’s how you show up.
If that’s what you want to build, I’d be glad to help you figure out where to start again—this time, differently.
