Whether you are new to your employer brand role or a seasoned professional, it’s important to understand that your company’s brand as an employer is ever-evolving. Building a sustainable, world-class employer brand that can weather these unexpected challenges is critical.

Sometimes, major external events, such as the pandemic or global economic factors can significantly impact your brand without any changes from the company. Often, it could be changes in internal factors such as benefits, policies, or other working conditions shared externally by current employees.

A strong employer brand typically equates to having a competitive advantage in talent acquisition. Potential talent can find expansive information about a company’s reputation as an employer in a few keystrokes. Much of this information may be provided by current or past employees or simply be experiences posted by candidates during the recruiting process. In fact, a company’s reputation as an employer can have far greater implications, including impacting the corporate or consumer brand. Potential talent can also be a consumer.

Employer Brand Maturity Model

With this immediate access to information, understanding how to build and manage a strong employer brand is crucial, not only for talent acquisition but for all aspects of a company’s success. The first step is to understand the health of your employer brand and the steps required to create a world-class brand that attracts and retains the talent required for business success.

Cliquify is launching a series of blogs dedicated to helping people identify opportunities to strengthen their employer brand while building internal alliances to benefit other areas of the business. To facilitate this, Cliquify has created the Employer Brand Maturity Model, designed to help employer brand practitioners identify their current maturity level and the areas to develop to build a world-class employer brand.

The model outlines four stages of employer brand development:

• Level 1: Foundational: Minimal structure, limited support, fragmented tools, and unclear EVP.
• Level 2: Proficient: Early-stage structure with some strategy and improving relationships, but still inconsistent.
• Level 3: Advanced: Well-established strategy, strong partnerships, aligned budget, integrated tech, and evolving measurement.
• Level 4: World-Class: Fully integrated with business strategy, supported by seamless relationships, optimized tech, continuous refinement, and measurable impact.

This maturity model evaluates employer brand development across six core pillars: strategy, relationships, EVP/Key Narrative, technology, budget, and measurement. Each level signifies progress from foundational to fully integrated, reflecting alignment with business objectives, full resource support, and continuous improvement potential.

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