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The importance of employer brand for existing talent

Outbrand co-founder Evylene McKenzie caught up with, Tina Morwani, Global Campaigns Director, to get her take on the importance of employer brand for existing employees.

How important is having a strong employer brand during the onboarding process?

Employer brand matters most the moment people stop interacting with the idea of a company and start experiencing its reality.

Onboarding is often mistaken for administration: systems access, org charts and introductions. In reality, it’s a psychological calibration period. New hires are assessing: How do things actually work here? Who gets listened to? What behaviours are rewarded? What remains unsaid? They’re reading the subtext of every interaction to answer whether they made the right decision.

The strongest employer brands reduce that ambiguity. They help people understand the social contract they’ve entered into, what success looks like, how decisions are made, what support and pressure feels like. And when there’s consistency between those promises and the new hire’s lived experience, employees stop spending energy deciphering the environment and start investing it in contributing to the business.

What part has employer brand played in steering companies through difficult times?

Crisis is the only honest audit of an employer brand. During restructures, market pressure or uncertainty, employees pay less attention to statements and far more attention to behaviour: Who receives information first? How transparent is leadership? Are decisions explained, or simply announced? Does care disappear when outcomes become inconvenient?

The organisations that emerge with trust intact are rarely those that avoid difficult decisions. More often than not, they’re the ones that communicate with enough honesty for people to hold two truths simultaneously: That even if they may not agree with this outcome, they understand how it was reached, and believe the process was principled.

Pressure has a way of stripping organisations back to what was true all along.

What’s the most effective way a company has implemented their employer brand?

The most effective employer brands are difficult to separate from operations. You see them in promotion criteria, feedback processes, conflict resolution, performance expectations and leadership behaviour, not only recruitment campaigns or values statements. What stands out in strong examples is coherence.

I saw elements of this at GitLab, where all aspects of culture were extensively documented and visible. Their handbook is public, and anyone, employee or not, can read about how they make decisions, what they believe and where they’ve gotten it wrong. When the people setting the standard are also held by it, the employer brand stops being something HR stewards and becomes something every decision either reinforces or dismantles.

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