The Moment We Are In

Before diving into solutions, it's worth being clear-eyed about the forces converging right now and the implications for Employer Branding. The old operating model assumed a controllable narrative, a patient candidate, a one-directional funnel, and a clean division of labour between an internal EB team and external partners. All four assumptions have been broken simultaneously.

The discovery layer has been rewritten

Candidates no longer browse a few sources to get a picture of your employer brand, they ask AI and get a synthesised verdict before they ever reach a careers site. As Emily (TruthWorks co-founder and EB Expert) put it:

"We have a rise in AI-driven discoverability. At the same time, we have this accelerating trust recession we're seeing with both candidates and employees. So we both need to build tangible employer brand machine readability but also ensure that candidates believe the source material.”

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is a key discipline: making employer brand content discoverable, citable, and accurately represented in AI-generated responses. Reddit now drives over 40% of AI citations across major models and Glassdoor reviews, job descriptions, employer awards, and CEO thought leadership all feed the model's employer narrative. If an organisation is not actively managing these inputs, the AI will fill the gaps often with stale, inaccurate, or competitor-favouring content.

Trust has structurally shifted

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer recorded an unprecedented global decline in employee trust in employers, the first drop since the study began in 1999, with the global figure falling 3 points year-on-year to 74%. Among candidates, just 24% trust that AI will evaluate them fairly in recruitment (Gartner, 2025), making AI transparency a live employer brand issue, not a future one. Perhaps most damaging for EB credibility: only 19% of staff say their day-to-day work matches their employer's promise, the credibility gap that breaks trust even further.

Internal teams are at a tipping point

Our recent webinar's live polling of Global Employer Brand practitioners in the audience showed a real fracture: 60% of global in-house employer brand leaders reported being given more strategic responsibility but 20% said the opposite, and a further 20% said their ability to influence had actually gotten worse. This isn't a uniform upward trajectory. It's a tipping point for employer branding and emphasises the need to seize the moment with confidence in your value.

So what do these shifts mean for the operating model on which we build our work? 

From campaign to newsroom

Perhaps the most significant structural shift discussed is the collapse of the campaign model as the primary frame for employer brand work.

Bryan Adams (founder of Happydance Career Sites and a TruthWorks EB Expert) was direct about what this means in practice:

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Carole Michaud, Employer Brand Director at Criteo (and seven-year veteran of navigating one of tech's most demanding EB environments), brought this to life from an in-house perspective:

"I've tried the past years to do a yearly content plan and frankly it's collapsing every single time - every three months I'm readjusting, I'm realigning. However, I do have key objectives at the beginning of the year that I'm trying to support through those readjustments."

The shift Emily articulated is from episodic, creative delivery to embedded operating model:

"We move from this idea of employer branding being an episodic creative delivery function - to being more of like an embedded operating model for the business that can react, that has the right skills."

Practically, this looks like a newsroom, not a campaign cycle. A robust EVP framework provides the editorial spine - consistent enough for AI to recognise and amplify, flexible enough to be activated through daily decisions about what gets published, who tells it, and how. Carole's approach is instructive:

"Every single content that comes out needs to support and activate one of my pillars, no matter what. It's not always my primary objective, but this needs to be my red thread for the entire year."

The career site is no longer a simple touchpoint

Bryan, whose work at Happydance is specifically focused on the next generation of career sites, challenged one of EB's most comfortable assumptions. The careers site was never truly the single source of truth, the technology just didn't exist to prove otherwise. Now it does.

"A world-class careers site will listen before talking, offering a much more conversational, engaging experience based on precisely what the visitor cares about, and making sure that you're tailoring that experience to be as relevant as possible." But the more provocative reframe was this: "I think the most valuable thing a careers site can do is actually really work as a powerful filter to prohibit unqualified candidates applying for roles, so we can reduce the overwhelm that so many recruiters are experiencing right now."

This is a meaningful inversion. The careers site as (rigorous) filter, not just as showcase. Especially in a hiring recession environment where candidate scrutiny has intensified. In tighter markets, candidates who are actively looking are using AI to research faster, compare more rigorously, and detect inauthenticity at speed.

The practical implication for GEO is acute: AI-generated answers prioritise earned media, third-party review platforms, structured data, and consistent external signals over polished brand-owned copy. Organisations that have invested genuinely in a clear identity and a healthy culture have a GEO advantage, their digital footprint is consistent and positive. Those that have not cannot compensate with content optimisation alone.

You can't control the narrative so influence the model

When it comes to EB narrative we could never really control it, but there was maybe this unrealistic executive expectation that an EB team could. Now we have evidence to suggest that controlling it at scale is going to be very, very difficult. Emily argued that this actually shifts the EB Leader role and gives us more remit to play as an active influencer of the message.

What your CEO says, what your team leaders say individually are just as important as the theme messages that you have on a careers site. If LLMs and search engines are seeing consistent answers and a consistent voice that's going to show up with credibility and authority and authenticity.

But Bryan also sounded an important caution about the rush to GEO-optimise:

‍"The danger might be we need to unpick and spend time trying to remove those messages that aren't perfectly aligned with the direction of travel of the business. So this double-edged sword of understanding what the employer brand is for, where we're travelling as an organisation, what we want that consistent message to be and then once we've delivered for the technical hygiene of how to tactically appear in LLMs…we should be optimising for humans. Because actually that's what gets rewarded the most."

Carole pointed to the real-time listening opportunity AI opens up:

‍"Get AI to generate your reputation report on what's being said about your company and readjust along the way to be able to counterbalance with long-form posts or anything that you had planned. Being more agile about it."

This is the monitoring muscle employer brand leaders need to build. Not just social listening but AI output auditing, checking quarterly what the models are saying about your brand and where the narrative is drifting.

The employee voice premium

Trust recession economics create a specific dynamic: as branded content becomes more synthetic and uniform, authentic employee voices become proportionally more credible and valuable. Research data bears this out - job postings with visible employee advocacy receive 3x more engagement on LinkedIn.

But the question of how to incentivise that advocacy without corrupting it generated real debate. When asked about TikTok's model of remunerating Starbucks employees for content that generates results, Emily was sceptical:

"I think it's very different advocating for the latest coffee that you've got at Starbucks... and getting a compensation based on that because that is your core job, but when you start talking about monetising the practice of employee advocacy for your company as a place to work, that blurs the line for me.”

Carole shared Criteo's own approach. An employee advocacy programme focused on women in tech, where advocacy participation was built into performance reviews rather than financial reward:

"We created a small group of employee ambassadors that are either female or allies to help us increase the reach and increase the credibility and the trust. We actually included it in their performance review as an objective."

The deeper issue is that many employees are increasingly reluctant to put their personal brand reputation behind an employer they're uncertain about. Emily was candid:

"If you feel like you're going to be laid off next week or you feel like your leaders aren't telling you the truth, then you are going to be much more reluctant to be the face of a brand. I see a lot more employee reluctance to put themselves out there and to risk their personal brand reputation.Trust has to be rebuilt first.”

The Changing Skill Set Required

We got practical on the skills needed to navigate this new operating system. Both practitioners and consultants agreed: the breadth of capability now required for high-performance employer branding is beyond the usual team set up.

Bryan laid out the scope honestly: 

"The amount of skills at the highest level somebody needs to be able to put their hand on quickly is growing such that you need a place, a resource to be able to draw on multiple brains at multiple different times of the year. We now need more commercial acumen, we need more alignment with internal stakeholders and leadership, we need to know how to sell an idea, how to educate it, how to produce a business case to get budget. We then need to manage politics. This is all before we've created a single piece of content."

Carole articulated how she's responding structurally:

"I don't think it would even be legit to be asking for every single skill to be in my team anyway, because as I was saying, it's moving so fast... I need people surrounding me who bring an expertise, might it be internally or externally. I have people in my team that are more generalist - people capable of thinking about a strategy, having this holistic view, understanding who knows the company by heart, the audience by heart, the priorities, the EVP."

Emily named the two capabilities rising fastest to the top:

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Carole made the case for why institutional knowledge is irreplaceable in this model and why internal teams still play a central role in a close collaboration with external support: 

‍"I need the team to know my company by heart and the DNA and the culture - to be able to make that judgment and say, okay, this is spot on, or this is not. You might have the best Expert in the world or the best tool ever. No one will know the company more than you."

The hiring implication is significant: employer brand leaders hiring journalists, editors, and content strategists rather than traditional EB specialists are ahead of the curve. Carole hired a journalist-background team member several years ago specifically to support technical employees in telling authentic stories - a decision that now looks prescient.

Rethinking the client-consultant relationship

The webinar surfaced an important evolution in how in-house teams want to engage external expertise and what consultants and agencies need to change to stay relevant.

Carole was characteristically direct about what she looks for:

"I never believed in telling an agency 'here is the brief and see you in six weeks'. That has never worked for me. I think because every single time I've done that, I was missing something big. I'm very much into co-creation when I work with an external partner."

She also named something that distinguishes high-value from low-value partnerships:

"I do expect as well my partner to kind of do some transfer of knowledge. Being able to open some parts of our minds that were not open before because you consider more broadly and holistically things you discuss with a lot of other different clients. The fresh thinking and open-minded approach that I'm looking for."

Emily connected this directly to TruthWorks' model: the campaign-and-exit consulting relationship is structurally inadequate for clients who need ongoing GEO management, continuous content calibration, and real-time trust monitoring. The new requirement is for consultants who can embed as fractional operating model architects vs brief-takers.

"Our clients are looking for more of an on-demand service, looking to work with one-off individual deep experts or specialists in things like AI and content design or creative direction rather than working with a full team."

Measurement - becoming a trust barometer

When investor due diligence includes AI-generated employer reputation summaries, EB has finally arrived at the C-suite table by necessity.

Carole grounded this in lived experience:

‍"We were having discussions where some investors look at Glassdoor reviews or leverage LLMs to understand the way we were perceived as an employer. That put employer branding right at the heart of the conversation about business viability.”

Emily flagged the board-level framing opportunity:

‍"Producing your own dashboards, your own monitoring around what's being said across multiple platforms about your employer brand, showing the trends, overlaying it with internal data - you have the ability to process a lot of information now very quickly to tell that story. You've got to be a really good storyteller to say, look at the reputation risk to get yourself invited into those conversations."

The closing truth

The webinar closed with the question that hung over everything: what is the future of this function?

Carole and Bryan agreed:

‍"I think we are becoming more strategic. Trust and the judgment this is where we are going to be making a difference. How are you perceived as a trusted source by the people that are your talent target - internally or externally."

Emily added:

‍"I would see your role as trust builders, reputation influencers and managers. I would look at job descriptions similar to things like corporate comms and really start to position yourself in that elevated way, as someone that is actively promoting and protecting the employer brand reputation at scale across a hugely complex ecosystem."

The uncomfortable truth is this: employer brand work has never been more important, more complex, or more difficult to do well. The organisations and practitioners who thrive in the next phase will be those who embrace the operating model shift by levelling up fast with external support.