How to Build an Employer Branding Strategy
Most HR teams know they should be working on employer branding. The problem is that it’s rarely clear where to start. The concept is easy to grasp — but translating it into a concrete, actionable strategy is another matter entirely.
Gobi Stories is a Norwegian SaaS platform that helps organisations collect, edit, and publish authentic employee videos directly on career pages, job postings, and social media. We work closely with HR and communications teams who are in exactly this position: they understand what employer branding is, but they need a framework to get started.
This guide gives you that framework. We walk through five concrete steps — from uncovering what makes your organisation genuinely unique, to measuring results over time.
Need to take a step back first? Read our article on what employer branding is.
Step 1: Understand Your Current Employer Brand Position
Before you can build a strategy, you need an honest picture of where you’re starting from. An employer branding strategy that isn’t grounded in reality will never be credible — and candidates and employees are good at detecting inauthenticity.
Ask the people who are already inside
The most important data is what employees actually experience. Conduct short interviews or surveys with three groups:
- New hires (1–6 months in): What matched their expectations? What surprised them?
- Long-tenured employees (3+ years): What’s actually keeping them there? What are they prouder of than they expected?
- Recent leavers: What was decisive? What might have made them stay? (Exit interviews are an underused goldmine.)
Don’t look for clever answers. Look for patterns — the words and stories that come up again and again. That’s where your EVP lives.
Map the external impression you’re already creating
Search your organisation on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and social media. Read what people write — not to get defensive, but to understand the gap between the impression you’re leaving and the one you want to create. If people write that leadership is inaccessible, but the company markets itself as “flat and open”, that’s a gap your strategy needs to address.
Step 2: Define Your EVP — Employee Value Proposition
An EVP (Employee Value Proposition) is the core of your employer branding strategy. It’s the answer to the question candidates ask themselves — consciously or not: “What do I get out of working here, and why should I spend my working days here rather than somewhere else?”
What a good EVP is — and isn’t
An EVP is not a marketing slogan. It’s not “We’re a dynamic workplace with exciting challenges”. It’s also not a list of perks (free fruit and flexible remote working are hygiene factors, not differentiators).
A good EVP is specific. It points to something that is genuinely true about the organisation and that few others can say. Some examples of what a strong EVP can be built on:
- Professional growth: “Here you can go from junior to tech lead in three years, and we have the structure that makes it happen”
- Social mission: “The work we do directly shapes how patients experience healthcare”
- Autonomy: “You set your own agenda — and we expect you to”
- Community: “We’re not the biggest, but we’re tight-knit — and people who thrive here rarely look elsewhere”
Formulate the EVP with employees, not for them
The most common mistake is that the EVP is written by leadership and marketing, without enough input from those who actually live it. The result is an EVP that doesn’t feel real inside the organisation — and that employees will contradict in their first conversation with a prospective candidate.
Use the insights from your step 1 interviews to draft EVP candidates. Test them with a sample of employees. Ask: “Does this ring true for you? Would you say this to a friend who was considering applying?”
“A good employer brand should be discovered, not invented. It already exists — in what makes employees satisfied.”
Step 3: Define Your Target Audience
An employer branding strategy that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one. You need to know who you’re talking to — not just what roles you’re recruiting for, but what kinds of people actually thrive in your organisation.
Build candidate personas
A candidate persona is a semi-fictional description of the ideal candidate for a given role or department. It should include:
- Motivation: What drives them? Security, influence, learning, flexibility?
- Information channels: Where do they look for jobs? LinkedIn, job boards, industry channels, networks?
- Concerns: What are they afraid to discover after they’ve accepted?
- Differentiators: What would they accept a slightly lower salary for?
The more concrete the persona, the more targeted your communication. A 28-year-old seeking purpose and development needs different stories than a 45-year-old who prioritises stability and team culture.
Don’t forget internal employer branding
Employer branding isn’t only about attracting new employees — it’s equally about retaining the ones you already have. Internal employer branding means that employees understand and can speak to what makes the organisation unique. This is what turns employees into ambassadors, and the ambassador effect is the most cost-effective recruitment channel there is.
Step 4: Choose Your Channels and Content Formats
An employer branding strategy is incomplete without a distribution plan. A strong EVP and great stories are worthless if nobody sees them. Here are the most important channels and what each does best:
Career page: where decisions get made
The career page is where many candidates make their final decision about whether to apply. It’s your most important owned channel. A career page that converts should:
- Include employee videos from real colleagues across roles and departments
- Show concrete examples of culture and everyday experiences — no stock photos
- Have a clear description of what makes you unique, grounded in your EVP
See our guide on career pages with video for concrete examples and step-by-step advice.
Job postings: the first impression
The job posting is often the very first encounter a candidate has with your organisation as an employer. Include a short employee video in the posting — not a polished brand film, but a real colleague talking about the team they’d be joining. The effect is consistent: more qualified applicants, fewer surprises after hiring. Read our complete guide on video in job postings for a full breakdown of tools and integrations.
LinkedIn and social media: ongoing storytelling
Organic content from employees sharing their own experiences consistently outperforms official company posts in reach. Build a simple routine for publishing content regularly — “a day in the life” videos, behind-the-scenes photos, employee celebrations. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it needs to be real.
Employee videos: the most powerful format
Video communicates what written content never can: facial expressions, tone of voice, energy. An employee speaking in their own words about what they love about their job conveys more credibility in 30 seconds than three paragraphs of text ever could. Short, vertical video in 9:16 format works best — it is the format candidates are accustomed to from social media, and it displays optimally on career pages and in job listings. The practical challenge has traditionally been logistics: coordinating filming across departments and locations doesn’t scale manually.
Gobi Autopilot solves exactly this. You add the names and email addresses of the employees you want video from and set a deadline. Gobi sends personalised invitations with a unique link to each person — employees film directly in the browser with questions displayed as a teleprompter, and the system handles reminders, consent management, and draft approval automatically. From request to publication-ready video, without a film crew or agency.
Step 5: Measure and Optimise Continuously
An employer branding strategy is not something you set up once and leave on autopilot. The market changes, competitors change, and your organisation changes. You need metrics that tell you whether the strategy is working.
Key metrics to track
Recruitment effectiveness:
- Time to hire (TTH) — is it taking less time to fill positions?
- Cost per hire — does it fall as employer brand strengthens?
- Candidate quality — is the proportion of well-matched applicants increasing?
- Offer acceptance rate — are candidates more likely to say yes?
Employee satisfaction and retention:
- eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) — will employees recommend the workplace?
- Turnover rate — is it declining over time?
- Internal mobility — are employees taking on new roles internally rather than leaving?
Content and visibility:
- Career page traffic and time on page
- Engagement on employer branding content on LinkedIn
- Views and clicks on job postings with employee video
Optimise based on data, not instinct
Set up a quarterly review of your most important metrics. Look for patterns: which job postings with employee video convert best? Which employee stories get shared most? Which departments are hardest to recruit into — and what does that say about your EVP communication for those roles?
Employer branding is long-term work, but the data often shows up faster than you’d expect. Career pages with employee video show measurable effects on time on page within weeks — not months.
From Strategy to Action
A strategy is worth nothing until it’s put into practice. Use the list below as a simple employer branding plan for your first three months:
- Week 1–2: Conduct 5–8 internal interviews with new hires and long-tenured employees
- Week 3: Analyse patterns and draft EVP candidates
- Week 4: Test EVP formulations with a sample of employees, choose a direction
- Month 2: Collect the first employee videos (2–4 employees, different roles)
- Month 2–3: Update the career page with videos and content grounded in the EVP
- Month 3+: Roll out to job postings and social media, measure and optimise
Want to see concrete examples from organisations that have done this successfully? Our article on employer branding examples covers what’s possible — with cases from Norwegian organisations across different industries and sizes.
For more practical inspiration from experienced employer branding professionals, see our article on what Norway’s leading employer branding experts recommend.
Common Pitfalls — and How to Avoid Them
Even the best strategies stall on execution. Here are the most typical mistakes and what to do instead:
Pitfall 1: The EVP reflects wishful thinking, not reality Fix: Always ground the EVP in what employees actually say, not in what leadership wants to communicate. Test it internally before launching it externally.
Pitfall 2: Employer branding is treated as a project, not a practice Fix: Set up a regular rhythm for collecting and publishing new content. Even one new employee video per month is better than a big campaign every other year.
Pitfall 3: Focusing only on external communication Fix: Internal and external employer branding are inseparable. Employees who understand and believe in the EVP are your best ambassadors. Invest time in communicating the strategy internally.
Pitfall 4: Too much focus on production quality, too little on authenticity Fix: A slightly shaky handheld video where an employee speaks candidly consistently beats a polished production video on credibility. Candidates know the difference.
Frequently Asked Questions About Employer Branding Strategy
What is an employer branding strategy?
An employer branding strategy is a structured plan for how an organisation will shape and communicate its reputation as an employer. It defines what makes the organisation unique as a workplace (EVP), who it’s speaking to (target audience), what channels and content formats to use, and how to measure results. A good strategy is grounded in what employees actually experience — not in what leadership wishes to say.
How long does it take to build an employer branding strategy?
The first steps — insight gathering and EVP formulation — typically take 4–8 weeks depending on the size of the organisation. The first concrete actions (updated career page, first employee videos) can be rolled out within 2–3 months. An employer branding strategy is never “finished” — it’s an ongoing practice that matures and adjusts over time.
How much does employer branding cost?
Costs vary enormously. The cheapest and often most effective starting point is employee videos collected via a tool like Gobi — requiring minimal investment with high impact. A full strategy process with an external consultant costs more but is rarely necessary to get started. Start simple, measure, and invest more where it works.
What’s the difference between EVP and employer brand?
Employer brand is the total impression an organisation leaves as an employer — the sum of everything said, shown, and experienced. EVP (Employee Value Proposition) is the formulated core of that impression: the deliberate description of what makes the organisation unique for employees. The EVP is the strategic tool you actively use in communication; the employer brand is the result of all that work over time.
Can you work on employer branding without a dedicated team?
Yes. The most effective employer branding initiatives often start with one person owning it strategically and a small set of simple tools. The key is making it easy for employees to contribute — with low barriers to sharing stories. Tools that automate employee video collection (like Gobi Autopilot) make it possible to produce regular content without a dedicated content team.
An employer branding strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be genuine, consistent, and grounded in what actually makes your organisation unique. Start by listening to the people who are already there — and build on what they tell you.
See also our employer branding with video overview for a comprehensive introduction to the topic.
Want to see how Gobi helps organisations do exactly that? See what Gobi does.
