We've just found out that The Studio at Symphony Talent in partnership with our clients have been shortlisted seven times at this year's Employer Brand Management Awards:
- Netflix has picked up nominations across Best Communication of the Employer Brand to the External Audience, Best Localization Program, and Best Employer Brand Management from the Technology, Media and Telecommunications Sector.
- Dsm-firmenich has been recognized in Best Communication of the Employer Brand to the Internal Audience, Best Management of the Employer Brand Following a Merger or Acquisition, and Best Employer Brand Management from the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Sector.
- Asahi has made the shortlist for Best Communication of the Employer Brand to a Gen Z Audience.
I'm proud of that. Genuinely. Not because of the number of nominations, but because of what sits behind them. Three completely different briefs, three completely different problems. And yet, sitting with all of them this week, I kept noticing the same threads pulling through.
So rather than talk about the work itself, I wanted to pull out three of those threads and go a bit further into each one. Because I think they say more about where employer branding is heading than any single campaign could.
1. Localizing an EVP isn't just a translation exercise; it’s a sentiment exercise
We talk a lot in this industry about "making the EVP land locally." Usually that means local stories, local language, maybe a color tweak here or there. All of this is of course important but none of it is enough on its own.
The bit that gets missed is sentiment. It’s not about what we say in a market, but how that market already feels about us before we say anything at all. A global employer brand is never experienced the same way everywhere. Directness comes across as confidence in one culture and arrogance in another. A demanding performance culture feels exciting to some audiences and completely off-putting to others. None of that shows up if your research stops at "what do people know about us." You have to get to "what do people feel about us, and why."
That means the research phase has to work harder than a standard set of employee interviews.
You need to understand where the reputation comes from, where the gaps are and what's driving them. Sometimes it's a tone that doesn't travel well from head office. Sometimes it's something in the hiring experience. Sometimes it's simply that you're describing a great place to work using language that means something completely different in that market.
It also means accepting that a single audience segment doesn't exist. The person who's already sold on you needs a completely different message than the person who's skeptical, and a different one again to the person who's actively dismissive. If you treat them the same, you'll only ever speak to the people who were listening anyway.
Once you understand that starting sentiment, market by market, the actual work of localization changes. It's no longer "translate the headline and swap the photography." It's deciding where the global voice needs to soften, where it needs more warmth or more context, and where the underlying claim itself needs reframing before it's even worth translating. That's a genuinely harder job than producing local assets. It's also the only version of localization that changes how people feel, rather than just what language they're reading it in.
If you're short on budget or time, you don't need a full global study to start. Pick your two or three priority markets and run a small, honest pulse in each. Ask a handful of current employees, then ask candidates who looked but didn't apply, or accepted another offer, the same questions. You're looking for where the gap sits between what you think you're saying and what that market is actually hearing.
2. The most underused audience in employer branding is already on the payroll
We default to external activation almost by instinct. We build the EVP, launch the campaign, refresh the careers site and start attracting candidates. All of that matters.
But some of the most powerful employer brand moments I've seen this year haven't been external at all. They've been internal, and they've mattered most in organizations navigating real change – a merger, a restructure, a new strategy – where employees are already tired of a steady stream of communications and are unlikely to take a new proposition at face value.
In those moments, the instinct to do one big, polished, top-down reveal is exactly the wrong instinct. People who are already navigating change don't need another announcement landing on them. They need smaller, easier entry points that build gradually rather than compete for attention all at once. They need a genuine reason to believe the new proposition is real, and that rarely comes from a hero video. It comes from hearing it from someone else in another team or another country. A different part of the business they'd never normally hear from.
That's the real shift. Give people a simple way to contribute their own story, with just enough structure so that nobody's staring at a blank page, and something changes. The proposition stops being a line from leadership and starts being something colleagues are actually saying to each other. It also does something less obvious but arguably more valuable in a merger context specifically: it starts breaking down the silos between legacy organizations, because people are suddenly seeing themselves reflected in stories from parts of the business they've never had a reason to interact with. It’s what makes the difference between an EVP that's understood and one that's actually lived.
If all your employer branding faces outwards, you're missing the audience that spends every day deciding whether it's true.
You don't need a bespoke platform to start either. A town hall, a team huddle or even an existing internal channel can all become opportunities to hear from people. You can make it easy for them to contribute with a prompt, a voice note or a few seconds on camera. The tools matter less than the invitation.
3. Sometimes you have to rip up the recruitment rulebook, without ripping up the brand
The hardest briefs usually aren't about the message. They're about the audience. People who aren't looking for a job, don't read job ads and would never describe what they do every night, or every shift, as a career.
For those audiences, tone of voice is the easy part. The harder work is understanding what will make someone stop and pay attention in the first place. The behavior you're looking for already exists, it just isn't attached to a job title yet. You're trying to help someone recognize themselves in a role they hadn't considered before, and that's a very different creative challenge from writing a job ad.
But getting someone to stop and recognize themselves is only half the job. It doesn't automatically convert into an application. The mechanics matter as much as the message: how fast someone can register interest after they've paused on a piece of content, how many questions stand between curiosity and an application, whether the tone of the process matches the tone of the campaign that got them there in the first place. It's genuinely surprising how little friction it takes to lose someone who was ready to say yes thirty seconds earlier. Watching where people drop off, being honest about it, and being willing to strip a six-question form down to one, matters more than any amount of extra creative polish.
None of this means compromising the brand. The lived experience still has to feel real and true to who the organization actually is. What changes is everything around it: the channels, the format, the speed, the level of friction you're willing to accept. Staying authentic and being willing to throw out the rulebook aren't in tension. They're both required, and usually in that order.
If you want the single highest return use of an hour this week, it's this one. Go through your own application journey with different candidate personas in mind. Count the questions and time the process. Wherever you flinch or lose patience, that's the point most real candidates are quietly dropping off too.
The thread running through all three
Different problems, different clients, different markets. But underneath all of it is the same discipline: actually understanding the human on the other end rather than assuming you already do, and being willing to refine and change your thinking as you learn more.
It comes down to understanding sentiment before you touch the message, bringing people in before you broadcast at them, and looking at how someone actually behaves before you design a process around them.
That's really what we mean when we talk about creative with backbone. Not the version of employer branding that looks brilliant in a deck and falls apart the moment real people, real markets and real recruitment processes get involved. Employer branding that's grounded in research, understands where an audience is starting from, and is built with people rather than simply aimed at them. Work that's been tested against how people actually behave, not how a strategy assumes they will.
That's the backbone running through our shortlisted work, because it's the same backbone we try to build into everything The Studio does. We're incredibly proud of the recognition, but we're even prouder of the thinking behind it.
