What is employer branding: a guide for HR and leadership

Employer branding covers everything a company does to show what it is like to work there: the culture, the values, the people, the projects and the career paths.

It speaks to two groups at once. Candidates find out whether they see themselves in the company before they apply. Employees feel recognised, and their story reaches their families, their friends and colleagues in other teams.

It usually brings together three parts of the company: HR, which knows the people and the hiring needs; communications, which knows the channels; and leadership, which sets the direction.

The employer brand is the reputation a company already has as a place to work. Every organisation has one: in conversations between colleagues, in online reviews, in the way former employees talk about the company.

Employer branding is the work done on that brand. Companies identify what is true and valuable about working for them, then say it consistently, on the channels where the people they want to attract spend their time.

The first term names the outcome. The second names the process that builds it, month after month.

EVP stands for Employee Value Proposition. It is the short answer to the question every candidate asks: why would I work here?

An EVP is shaped from the inside, through conversations with employees, managers and the HR team. Once people recognise themselves in it, it becomes the foundation for everything the company says as an employer.

An employer branding campaign gives the EVP a face: concrete stories, told by real people from the company.

For HR, a clear employer brand means candidates who arrive at the interview already knowing how the company works. The conversation starts from common ground.

For employees, it is a form of recognition. Their story is told with care and shown to colleagues, to their families and to the public.

For leadership, the campaign leaves behind material that can be used after publication too: in recruitment, onboarding, presentations and internal events. At Regina Maria, two campaigns created a library of footage that HR still uses today.

Video shows the people, the spaces, the rhythm of a working day and the way colleagues talk to one another. Candidates see the company before they walk through the door.

Employees are the voice that gives the message credibility. Candidates recognise themselves in real people with real roles and can picture their own place in the team.

In NECULA Agency campaigns, employees appear only if they want to. They are prepared beforehand, the shoot is short, and everyone who appears signs an agreement on where and for how long the material is used. If someone changes their mind, their material is removed.

The guide to employer branding video describes the five types of content, with examples.

An employer branding strategy answers four questions: who you want to attract, what you want those people to learn about the company, which stories will show it and which channels will reach them.

The answers come from the inside, from conversations with HR, with managers and with the employees who do the work every day. The strategy then becomes a content calendar, with a publishing rhythm the company can sustain for months.

An employer brand is built through continuity. At Emerson, the 20th anniversary in Cluj became the starting point for a six-month campaign with more than 150 videos.

Below is the structure of a 6-month video employer branding campaign, as NECULA Agency produces it through employer-branding.ro, the agency's employer branding division.

From the company's side, the campaign needs a 30-minute conversation at the start, one round of feedback on the scripts, the shooting days at your offices and one round of feedback on the videos. If you have group-level brand guidelines, the work follows them.

The budget is spread across the 6 consecutive months of the collaboration. The campaign can be funded from the disability fund. NECULA Agency is an Authorised Protected Unit, and the details are in the Funding section.

Results are tracked monthly. In NECULA Agency campaigns, a report shows each month what was published, where, and how many people saw it.

Alongside it, companies usually follow a few indicators of their own: views and engagement on each platform, applications for the target roles, employee referrals and the way candidates talk about the company at interview.

Companies typically agree these indicators at the start, with their recruitment team, and compare them month by month.