How to Improve Employer Branding: Diagnose, Then Fix

You already did the work. The careers page got refreshed eighteen months ago. There's an employee value proposition sitting in a slide deck somewhere. The company page posts twice a month, the office photos are current, and someone on the marketing team owns it. And still, the last two searches took five months each, the shortlists keep thinning out at the final stage, and nobody in the room can point to what the employer brand is actually producing.

That's a different question from how to build one. "How to improve employer branding" gets asked by companies that already have something. The trap is that when something underperforms, the obvious move is to add to it. Another video. A new tagline. A third post a week on the company page. Adding is what most companies do, and it's why a second year of effort tends to produce the same result as the first.

I'm Sky Jordan, a consultant at Moriah, a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner. We work with established B2B companies to turn LinkedIn into a business engine, running executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads together as one engine rather than three separate projects. Recruiting is one of the objectives clients bring us, and it's almost always a repair job rather than a build. Something is already running. It isn't working, and nobody has established why.

So this page is a diagnostic first and a fix list second, with the repairs ordered by effort rather than by importance. If you need the definition or the business case, our guide to what employer branding is has it. If you have nothing built yet, start with building an employer branding strategy instead, and if you want the platform mechanics in depth, employer branding on LinkedIn covers those. This page assumes you're past all three and something is broken.

Run the diagnosis before you improve anything

Five tests. All of them can be run this week, most in an hour, none of them need a budget. Do them in order and write down what you find, because the pattern in the answers is what tells you which repair to make first.

Test 1: the ninety-second look-up

Open a private browser window. Search your company name on LinkedIn the way a candidate would. Then look up your CEO, your most senior functional leader, and the hiring manager for the role you can't fill. Ninety seconds per profile, no more. A candidate with other options won't give you much longer.

What you're checking isn't whether the profiles look polished. It's whether a stranger could finish those ninety seconds and say one specific, true thing about what your company is like to work for. Most can't. They find a job title, a company logo, and a last post from 2023.

Test 2: the silent-employee count

Pick your twenty most senior or most visible people. Count how many have posted anything about the work, the industry, or the company in the last ninety days. Not shared a job listing. Posted.

In most established B2B companies the honest answer lands somewhere between zero and two. That number is your employer brand's real distribution capacity, and it's usually the number that explains everything else.

Test 3: the contradiction check

Read your careers page messaging and your last ten employee reviews side by side, on whichever review sites your candidates actually use. Then read the last five posts from your company page.

You're looking for direct contradictions. A careers page promising autonomy against reviews describing micromanagement. A page celebrating growth against reviews describing a hiring freeze. Candidates read both, and when the two disagree they believe the reviews, every time. A contradiction doesn't weaken your messaging by half. It cancels it, and then costs you the credibility of everything else on the page.

Test 4: the applicant-quality check

Look at the last thirty applications for a role you care about. Sort them into three piles: people you'd interview, people you wouldn't, and people who clearly didn't read what the job was.

A large third pile is a targeting problem, not a reputation problem. Your reach is going to the wrong people, and more reach will produce more of the wrong people. A large second pile with an empty first pile means something else: the candidates you want aren't seeing you at all.

Test 5: the drop-off point

Find where your best candidates leave. Before applying, after the first conversation, or at offer.

Each point implicates something different. Losses before applying are a visibility problem. Losses after the first conversation are usually a credibility gap, meaning what they found online and what they met in the room didn't match. Losses at offer stage are a competing-offer problem, which is the one employer branding is genuinely worst at fixing quickly and best at fixing over eighteen months.

What the diagnosis usually says

Five tests, and almost always one of three verdicts.

A visibility problem. Your people are invisible and your employees are silent, so the only version of you a candidate can find is the one you published about yourself. Tests 1 and 2 both come back empty and test 5 shows losses before application. This is the most common verdict by a wide margin, and also the cheapest to fix.

A credibility problem. There's plenty to find and it doesn't hold up. Test 3 surfaces contradictions, test 5 shows losses after the first conversation. Publishing more material makes this worse rather than better, which is the trap most companies walk straight into.

A targeting problem. You're visible, you're credible, and the wrong people are seeing it. Test 4 has a large third pile. No amount of additional content fixes this. It's a distribution question, and the answer is direct.

Write your verdict down before you read the next section. The fix list is sequenced by effort, but which items you actually need depends on what the diagnosis said.

Fix it in order of effort

This is the part most guides get backwards. They sequence by importance, which puts the hardest, slowest, most expensive work first and pretty much guarantees nothing gets done. Sequence by effort instead. The cheap repairs also happen to be the ones that produce signal fastest, so they buy you the internal credibility to do the expensive ones.

1. Rewrite five leadership profiles (one afternoon)

Your CEO, your two most senior functional leaders, and the hiring managers for the roles you can't fill. Headline, about section, banner, featured section. Four fields, five people, one afternoon with a writer in the room.

It's the highest-return hour in employer branding and almost nobody does it, because it doesn't feel like a project. It's also the only fix that improves the exact surface test 1 measured. A candidate who looks up your CEO and finds a specific, current, credible description of what the company is trying to do has already learned more than your careers page taught them.

2. Answer the reviews that contradict you (a week, low effort)

If test 3 found contradictions, the repair isn't to change the careers page copy. It's to respond publicly, specifically, and without defensiveness to the reviews, and to name what you've changed. Where nothing has changed, change the careers page claim instead of the reviews.

A candidate reading a substantive employer response to criticism learns something a testimonial can never teach them. Unanswered criticism reads as agreement.

3. Put one leader on a real posting cadence (two weeks to set up)

Not five leaders. One, ideally the CEO, publishing one to three posts a week about the business and the industry, consistently, for at least a quarter.

Why one and not five? Consistency is the variable that matters, and five people can't be made consistent at once. Why a person and not the company page? Arithmetic. Content published from a personal profile performs roughly five to ten times better than the same content from a company page. Your company page is a credibility anchor, not a distribution channel. Our guide to executive personal branding covers how that cadence gets built and sustained.

4. Recruit eight employee voices, not eighty

Company-wide advocacy programs fail, reliably, and they fail because they ask a hundred people for a small favor instead of eight people for a real one.

Pick eight employees who already post something, anything, and who'd speak well of the place. Give them a reason to post, a rough idea of what's interesting about their work, and permission. Eight consistent voices beat a hundred names in a program document, and the difference shows up in test 2 within a quarter.

5. Rewrite the careers page from evidence, last

Not first. Last, and from what tests 3 and 4 told you rather than from a workshop.

The reason it comes last is that the careers page is the surface candidates reach after they've already decided you're worth looking at. Fixing it while nothing points to it improves the conversion rate of traffic you don't have. Once the leadership profiles and the posting cadence are producing visits, the page has a job worth optimizing.

6. Go directly to the people you want

If the diagnosis said targeting, this is the fix, and it's the one companies resist hardest because it feels like recruiting rather than branding. It's both. Targeted LinkedIn outreach to the specific people you want, sent from a leader whose profile now says something, is a different conversation than a cold recruiter message from an unknown name.

The channel economics aren't close. Cold email gets roughly one to three percent replies. LinkedIn outreach runs closer to ten to fifteen percent. That gap is why we run about two hundred targeted messages a week for clients rather than waiting for inbound, and why the personal branding runs alongside it rather than after it. Targeted outreach lands on people who look you up before they answer.

7. Add LinkedIn Ads when reach is the constraint

Last, and only when the first six are working. Ads amplify something. If the profiles are thin and the cadence is patchy, paid reach just buys more people a look at the problem you haven't fixed yet.

When the constraint is genuinely that not enough of the right people know you exist, and the underlying material holds up, that's where paid amplification earns its place.

The sequence at a glance

What to stop doing

Improvement is partly subtraction. These four consume real budget and produce almost nothing, and every one of them is a common answer to "we need to improve our employer brand."

• A new tagline. Nobody has ever chosen an employer because of an employer brand tagline. The words weren't the problem.
• A culture video. Expensive, dated within a year, and distrusted on sight. Eight employees posting unpolished observations will outperform it.
• More company-page frequency. Doubling output on the channel that performs worst is probably the most common wasted quarter in this work.
• Awards and badges. Candidates discount them, because they know who pays for most of them.

Re-run the diagnosis in ninety days

Not a new dashboard. The same five tests, scored the same way, plus two business numbers: how many candidate conversations started from someone in your company being visible rather than from a job posting, and your offer acceptance rate.

If test 2 moved from one poster to nine, the fix is working, even if the hiring number hasn't moved yet. Employer branding is a lagging measure on a leading activity, and if you only watch the lagging measure you'll cancel the work one month before it produces.

If nothing moved at all, the usual reason isn't that the fixes were wrong. It's that they were done once. A profile rewrite is a repair, a posting cadence is an operation, and a company that treats the second like the first ends up back here in a year.

Why these fixes only compound together

Look back at the fix list and notice that no item works alone.

The rewritten leadership profiles matter because a posting cadence sends people to them. The cadence matters because targeted outreach lands on people who then look the sender up. That outreach matters because it puts the content in front of specific named people rather than whoever the feed happened to serve. Ads matter because there's finally something worth amplifying. Remove any one and the others lose most of their effect. That's the actual reason the first attempt underperformed: it was almost certainly one of these running by itself.

This is the model Moriah runs for established B2B companies, and we don't sell the pieces separately. Personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads run in parallel against one business objective, executed in-house by us, because that's the only configuration in which LinkedIn produces business outcomes. We've watched both failure modes up close: a client publishing good content with nothing activated around it, and a client running targeted outreach with no content behind the name. Neither produces business.

Recruiting is one of the objectives clients bring us. Thought leadership, qualified leads, partnerships, new markets, and visibility to investors are others, and the useful thing about employer branding is that it runs on the same machinery as all of them. The leader whose profile now attracts candidates is the same leader whose profile attracts buyers. Companies that improve their employer brand properly tend to find the rest of it arrived as a side effect, which is a considerably better return than a tagline.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you improve employer branding? Diagnose before you add anything. Run five checks: the look-up test, the silent-employee count, the contradiction check against reviews, the applicant-quality sort, and the drop-off point. Then repair in order of effort, starting with leadership profiles and a consistent posting cadence rather than with the careers page.

What does an underperforming employer brand look like? Long open roles, shortlists that thin at the final stage, applications from people who clearly didn't read the job, and leaders whose profiles tell a candidate nothing specific. The giveaway is usually that almost nobody inside the company has posted about the work in the last three months.

What are employer branding best practices for established B2B companies? Lead with people rather than the company page, because personal profiles reach five to ten times further. Keep claims narrow enough that reviews don't contradict them. Make one leader consistent before making five leaders occasional. Fix the careers page after something is sending traffic to it, not before.

What should we fix first if we can only do one thing? Rewrite the headline, about section, banner, and featured section on five profiles: your CEO, your two most senior functional leaders, and the hiring managers for the roles you can't fill. One afternoon, no budget, and it repairs the exact surface candidates check first.

We refreshed everything a few months ago and nothing moved. Why? Usually because the refresh was a project and employer branding is an operation. A page rewrite and a photo shoot are finished events. Visibility is a cadence. If the posting stopped after the launch, the brand went back to whatever a candidate stumbles onto by default.

Our careers page is good. Why isn't it bringing in candidates? A careers page is a conversion surface, not a discovery surface. Candidates reach it after a person or a post gave them a reason to look. With nothing pointing to it, a better page just converts traffic that never arrives.

How do we handle reviews that contradict our messaging? Respond publicly and specifically, name what has actually changed, and where nothing has changed, correct the claim on your side instead. Candidates believe reviews over careers pages, so an unanswered contradiction cancels your messaging rather than diluting it.

How many employees need to be posting for advocacy to work? Eight consistent voices beat eighty enrolled names. Pick people who already post something and would speak well of the place, give them a reason and permission, and leave the company-wide program alone. Broad advocacy schemes fail because they ask many people for a token effort.

How do we improve employer branding without a bigger budget? The first three repairs on the list cost time rather than money: five profile rewrites, public responses to reviews, and one leader posting one to three times a week. The expensive items, a careers page rebuild and paid amplification, belong after those are working, and are often unnecessary once they are.

Does improving employer branding help anything other than recruiting? Yes, and this is the part that justifies the work to a board. The visibility that attracts candidates is the same visibility that reaches buyers, partners, and investors, because it runs through the same leadership profiles and the same content. One engine, several objectives.