Research by Alex Edmans at London Business School found that companies on the "100 Best Companies to Work For" list beat their peers' stock returns by roughly 2% a year from 1984 to 2009.
Your employer brand and your corporate brand are the same positioning told to two audiences with very different needs and motivations. In spite of those different needs, keeping them aligned helps eliminate ambiguity and build trust. When those stories diverge, your leaders, team, candidates, customers and investors all see slightly different versions of your company — eroding confidence over time.
Why should the CEO care about employer brand?
A strong employer brand is a competitive advantage that's hard to replicate. In B2B tech, your people are part of the product: Customers buy the team that implements, serves and renews them as much as the platform or the service. Competitors can match your features and your price, but not a team that believes in what you sell.
Gallup's 2024 meta-analysis of 183,806 business units found that the most engaged teams were 23% more profitable than the least engaged.
And (as I’m sure you know too well), keeping people is cheaper than replacing them. Gallup estimates replacing an employee costs one-half to two times their annual salary, and 52% of people who quit say their manager or company could have kept them. A 2015 LinkedIn study found a strong employer brand can cut cost per hire by up to 50% and turnover by 28%.
Employer brand also touches HR, marketing, sales and operations — only the CEO oversees all four.
What should inform our employer brand?
Your employer brand should be informed by your corporate positioning. If your brand tells customers you're obsessed with service, your culture has to reward service, and customers find out fast when it doesn't. Candidates, customers and investors compare notes. If your careers page and your sales deck describe two different companies, that isn't a recruiting problem — it’s a fragmented brand. And a fragmented brand is a fragile one.
The two should be built in concert. What’s valuable about your company to customers is what your employees are passionate about delivering — so your people should help shape the strategy.
So listen before you write:
Employees across levels, teams and tenure: why they joined, why they stay and what nearly made them leave.
Candidates who declined the job, on their experience with the recruitment and hiring process, and why they said no.
HR, the team that talks to employees every day, from interviews and onboarding to reviews and exit conversations.
Leadership, on what they want the company to become.
If your employees’ perspectives aren’t heard, the employer brand risks being built on what leaders believe the culture is. That's the same inside-out assumption that weakens positioning with customers. In a 2021 Gartner study, 75% of senior leaders said leadership considers employees' perspectives. Only 47% of employees agreed.
What else can a strong employer brand do?
Your corporate brand strategy guides choices about product, process and growth. Your employer brand strategy should guide who you hire and how, how people are onboarded, what gets recognized and rewarded, how people grow, and how you part ways. If it doesn't guide those decisions, it's a careers page, not an employer brand strategy.
One question to ask
Would your newest hire describe you the way your best customer does? If not, you're telling two stories. Tell one everywhere, from the same Brand Truth. See how we connect brand and culture.
FAQ
What's the difference between employer brand and corporate brand?
Employer brand speaks to candidates and employees, corporate brand to customers and investors — because both brand experiences are seen (and talked about) externally, they should come from one core position.
Why should a CEO prioritize employer brand?
Because it determines how quickly you can staff, ramp and retain the people who execute on your strategy, how consistently customers are served, and how the market values you. Those are CEO outcomes, not HR metrics.
How do we build an employer brand strategy?
Start with your corporate positioning. It defines what your company stands for and what customers value. Then listen to employees and HR to learn how that shows up in daily work, where it doesn’t, and why people join and stay. Use what you hear to shape an employer brand that delivers the same promise from the inside, and let it guide decisions across the employee experience.
Who should own employer brand?
The CEO. While HR runs the programs and hears from employees every day, and marketing helps shape how it’s communicated — the employer brand needs someone with the altitude to hold it to the same standard as the corporate brand. Otherwise it drifts into a one-time recruiting campaign.
Sources: Alex Edmans, "Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles?" Journal of Financial Economics, 2011; Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 2024; Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion" (2019); LinkedIn Talent Solutions; 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer; Gartner, six gaps between leader and employee sentiment (2021).
