Pillar two · The candidate experience

Employer Brand and talent attraction

What does a candidate hear about you before a recruiter ever calls? Usually a career site written by leadership, a few reviews written by people who left, and a recruiter's own version of the pitch.

I build your employer brand as a living system, an EVP that feeds your job descriptions, outreach, sourcing and content, and keeps updating as the business changes.

Book an intro See what the audit covers

The brand candidates meet

The problem

The tools got faster. The story didn't get clearer.

Even with AI everywhere, attracting the right people is still one of the first problems talent leaders name to me. And the recruiter's pitch is different from the next recruiter's.

Employer brand is how your company shows up to candidates, and it's also a toolkit your recruiters use every day to sell roles and source people.

Phase one

The Employer Brand Audit

Two to four weeks depending on your size, and it answers one question honestly. Does the company candidates meet match the company your people actually work at?

Brand footprint

Everywhere your employer brand shows up online. I build the list and you confirm it.

Interviews

Your TA leader, the employer brand or comms owner, your marketing brand owner, current employees, recent hires on why they joined, and recruiters on what they actually say.

Stated against lived

Your EVP and messaging, read against what those people told me.

Personas

Candidate personas for your priority role families.

What you get back

The gap

Where the brand as stated and the brand as lived diverge, and which gaps cost you candidates.

EVP architecture

Your EVP structured so it can feed job descriptions, outreach, sourcing and content, not sit in a slide deck.

Persona set

Who you're trying to reach in each priority role family and what they care about.

Living-system design

How the EVP stays current from the business and flows through the stack you already have.

Brand consistency rules

Nimble on people and culture. Consistent on the visuals and the tie to your corporate or product brand.

One recommended next step

Scoped, so you can say yes or no to it.

Then design and deploy, if you want them

Audit2 to 4 weeks

Designscoped from the readout

Deployyour team runs it

Every phase is scoped on its own. Each readout ends with a proposal for the next step, and you can stop at any gate.

Design

EVP architecture, persona work and the living system wired into your ATS, career site and outreach tools, so the story stays current without a rebrand every two years.

Deploy

I train your employer brand lead to run it, or your recruiters where there's no dedicated role, or I take a fractional employer brand seat while your team grows into it. Proactive Talent has held that seat for Discord and Calendly.

What a clear employer brand did for others

80%more total applications and a 93% rise in female applicantsPostmates

58%more engineering applicationsGoDaddy

53%more applications from developers and engineersFreedom Financial Network

32%more career site traffic and 25% faster time-to-hireTradeshift

Read the case studies →

What this isn't

I don't produce content or video. I design the system that tells your producers, recruiters and hiring managers what to say and where to say it. If you need a production partner, I'll point you to good ones.

Start with the audit

Thirty minutes to find out whether your brand problem is a brand problem, or something upstream of it.

Book an intro

Questions about Employer Brand

What is the Employer Brand Audit?

The Employer Brand Audit is the first phase of Proactive Talent's employer brand work. Over two to four weeks, Matt Staney maps everywhere a company's employer brand shows up, interviews employees, recent hires and recruiters, and compares the EVP as stated with the EVP as lived. The readout includes the gap, an EVP architecture, a persona set and a living-system design.

How long does the Employer Brand Audit take?

Two to four weeks, depending on company size and how many role families and markets are in scope.

What is EVP architecture?

EVP architecture is how Proactive Talent structures an employee value proposition so it can feed job descriptions, recruiter outreach, sourcing and content. It is built as a living system that updates as the business changes, instead of a static messaging document.

Does Proactive Talent produce employer brand content or video?

No. Proactive Talent designs the employer brand system and trains the people who run it. It does not offer content or video production, and Matt Staney refers clients to production partners when they need one.

How does employer brand connect to recruiting operations?

Matt Staney treats employer brand as the candidate experience and recruiting operations as the hiring experience. An Employer Brand Audit often finds that the stack or process blocks the brand, which leads to a Recruiting Operations Audit, and the reverse happens too.

Who does the work?

Matt Staney leads every Employer Brand Audit personally. He built employer brand programs at VMware and SAP SuccessFactors and founded Talent Brand Alliance, a community for employer brand practitioners, in 2012.