Rassam Yaghmaei
Group Talent & Engagement Director, Free
Have you ever changed your opinion after actually meeting someone? We all have.
“Oh, I didn’t expect them to be like that.”
“Smarter than I thought.”
“Less impressive than their reputation.”
Organizations work the same way. Every day, candidates form opinions about companies they’ve never met. Through job ads. Through interviews. Through managers. Through silence.
That perception is your employer brand — whether you like it or not. The problem is not that employer branding doesn’t work. It’s that most companies try to control perception without fixing reality. They invest in messages, not behaviors. In branding, not leadership. In campaigns, not culture.
And that’s why Employer Brand is broken. Because it has been reduced to an HR topic, when it is fundamentally a leadership one.
Employer Branding Is No Longer About Attraction. It’s About Alignment.
For years, employer branding was treated as a visibility problem.
If the message was right, if the EVP was well articulated, if the campaign was strong enough, talent would naturally follow. So we invested in slogans, visuals, tone of voice. We refined narratives. We polished language.
Everyone wanted to stand out. Everyone ended up saying the same things.
Purpose.
Impact.
Flexibility.
Inclusive culture.
Learning mindset.
The more companies tried to differentiate, the more they converged. Because differentiation doesn’t come from language. It comes from behavior.
In uncertain times, differentiation starts to feel dangerous. Saying what everyone else says feels safer than exposing what actually makes you different including your constraints, your trade-offs, your tensions. Employer branding slowly drifted from truth toward acceptability. At some point, it stopped asking: “Who are we, really?” and started asking: “What can we say without taking risks?”
We optimized for reassurance rather than clarity.
But, people no longer trust narratives. They read signals. And signals don’t come from campaigns. They come from decisions, priorities, behaviors especially when things get hard. This is the real shift: Employer branding today is less about projecting an image than about exposing alignment.
Manager Brand and Job Brand Now Outweigh Employer Brand
People don’t join companies. They join managers, teams, and roles. You can have a strong employer brand and still lose candidates because:
- the manager doesn’t inspire confidence,
- the role feels hollow or unclear,
- the team lacks credibility.
This is where many organizations get stuck. They keep investing in the “company story” while candidates are trying to understand something much more concrete:
Who will I work with?
What will I actually do?
What will this role do to me?
A Doctolib Story: When a Great Company Isn’t Enough
At Doctolib, we were widely known as a great startup. Strong growth. Strong mission. Strong reputation in the French ecosystem.
And yet, for top tech profiles, we were not top of mind. When senior engineers thought about their next move, they thought of Criteo, Datadog, Algolia; not us. The issue wasn’t the company. It was visibility at the job and manager level.
So we made a deliberate choice: we stopped trying to “sell” Doctolib as a tech employer. Instead, we focused on tech advocacy. We made engineering leaders visible. We let them talk about their real challenges scaling, trade-offs, failures, constraints without scripting or polishing their message. Just signals that we were a place where great tech profiles were also working.
Over time, perception shifted. We didn’t speak louder, but the right people started talking.
Later, I applied the exact same logic on LinkedIn for my TA Team.
Attracting top global recruiters from GAFAM wasn’t about promoting Doctolib as a brand they barely knew in France. It was about making myself and my TA team visible: our thinking, our standards, our results. Again: manager brand and job brand did the work. Employer brand followed.
This is uncomfortable for organizations, because it shifts responsibility. Employer branding can no longer be centralized, packaged, and deployed. It lives in daily management.
Employer Branding Does Not Belong to HR
HR only needs to be obsessed with one thing: shaping decisions, trade-offs, and leadership behaviors in the best interest of people and the business. When that happens, storytelling doesn’t need to be manufactured. It emerges from managers, teams, leaders. Yet many employer branding teams still believe they “work for recruitment.”
Recruitment is necessary. But it is not the destination. Employer branding sits at a rare crossroads:
- marketing, because it carries the human face of the brand,
- leadership and finance, because culture directly impacts execution,
- managers, because they embody the brand whether they intend to or not.
This makes the role both strategic and exposed. The job is not to decorate reality. It’s to translate it.
To listen to internal tensions. To observe external perceptions. To help leadership confront the gap between how the company wants to be seen and how it actually operates. When done seriously, employer branding stops being communication. It becomes an organizational mirror.
Culture Is Not a Statement. It’s a Negotiation Space.
Culture is often described as “who we are.” In practice, it’s closer to what we do especially when facing contradictions:
- ambition vs. resources,
- speed vs. care,
- values vs. incentives.
Culture is not fixed. It is constantly renegotiated through decisions and priorities particularly when conditions tighten. Culture is the only place where:
- the external world speaks (candidates, clients, market),
- the internal reality lives (employees, managers),
- and leadership can be influenced.
Employer Brand isn’t about making culture look good. It’s about using it to tell the truth — and deciding what must change. This is why culture is such a sensitive interface:
- employees experience the truth,
- candidates sense coherence or dissonance,
- leadership is forced to confront its own choices.
Anchored in culture, employer branding becomes a feedback loop. It exposes blind spots. It removes convenient ambiguity.
Letting Go of Control in a World That No Longer Believes Corporate Speech
No one really believes corporate discourse anymore. People trust people. They trust lived experience over polished narratives. Whether companies like it or not, employees already talk. They share what they live, what they feel, what they tolerate.
The only real choice is whether organizations ignore it, fear it, or support it.
A Free Story: From Control to Trust
At Free, we launched an employee advocacy program: iliadvocacy. The goal wasn’t to “align messages.” It was to create a frame:
- volunteering instead of obligation,
- diversity of voices instead of a single storyline,
- support through training, clarity, and trust.
We accepted something essential: letting go of control does not mean chaos. It means acknowledging that employer brand already exists — with or without you. Today, employer branding doesn’t live on career pages or job boards. It lives in the digital traces left by those who work inside the company.
And that’s why Employer Brand does not belong to HR. HR can enable it. Recruitment can amplify it. Communication can support it. But only leadership can make it true.