A recruiter called me recently about a senior director of employer brand opening at a well-known technology company. She wasn’t calling to recruit me, she was calling to ask whether I knew anyone that would be a strong fit.

As she walked me through the job description, I started to get more and more frustrated. The role had nothing to do with employer branding, it was a recruitment marketing role ie. content calendars, social media campaigns, careers page management, hiring funnel metrics. A decent recruitment marketing role, perhaps, but not employer branding.

Curious if this was common (I have been out of the field for a while), I spent time reviewing how ‘employer brand’ roles are currently being designed and advertised on LinkedIn and Indeed. The pattern held, almost without exception. Of 17 representative roles I reviewed across companies ranging from early-stage AI start-ups to established enterprise technology firms, roughly 85% of the accountabilities in each role were focused almost exclusively toward attracting and converting candidates. The roles that mentioned employee experience at all, largely defined it as managing length-of-service awards programmes and company swag.

When I shared this observation on LinkedIn, the response from practitioners across the field was immediate and pointed. Dana Noseworthy, senior employer brand and recruitment marketing strategist, put it plainly: “When companies extract recruitment marketing from EB and hire for that subset alone, they are hiring for one component and expecting the full function. The strategic foundation never gets built. So the content does not convert, results do not follow and the discipline gets blamed for it. You cannot market what has not been built.”

Recruitment marketing is not employer branding, and in an era defined by user-generated content and AI-mediated search, the gap between what these roles are designed to do and what organisations actually need is becoming a strategic liability.

Where the field came from – and where it went wrong
History lessons are often very telling. The concept of employer brand was first articulated by Simon Barrow, chairman of People in Business, in the early 1990s. He wanted to draw from his consumer brand management experience at Colgate-Palmolive to affect the workforce around an organisation. Barrow and Tim Ambler of the London Business School gave it academic grounding in 1996 with a foundational paper in the Journal of Brand Management. But it was the dot-com talent war of the late 1990s that drove organisations to begin formally appointing people to manage the function.

By 2001, a Conference Board survey found that 40% of leading North American companies were actively executing employer branding activities. In 2004, Dr John Sullivan – widely regarded as one of the field’s early architects – published his landmark breakdown of the eight elements of a successful employment brand, work that is credited with helping corporate leadership teams recognise they needed a dedicated owner for their efforts.

I know this history not as an observer but as a participant. Between 2001 and 2012, I served as the managing director at Dr John Sullivan & Associates, working with organisations including Starbucks, Wegmans Food Markets, Deloitte, MGM, Marriott, and a sizeable number of the Global 100 on what employment branding actually meant for large, complex enterprises. That work was grounded in a specific and deliberate philosophy, one that I believe is more relevant today than it was when we were developing it.

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