HR brand strategy
& talent attraction
in Chicago

An employer brand is checked before the first interview and confirmed or demolished during the first month. That makes it the one kind of positioning where the audience has direct access to the truth.

What candidates actually do: read reviews from former employees, look up the people they would work with, ask someone in their network who works there now, and read the job description for signs of a mess. None of that involves the careers page, which is why a careers page full of adjectives is wasted work.

What does get read is process. How many stages, who is in each, how long it takes, whether there is a task and whether it is paid, when a decision comes. Publishing that is unusual enough to be a differentiator, and it costs nothing except the discipline of then following it.

Specifics beat claims everywhere here. How a team decides what to build. What the first month looks like. Who the new person reports to and what they will own. How remote work actually functions when half the team is in one office. A candidate can evaluate those statements. They cannot evaluate a claim about culture.

The gap that does the damage is between the promise and the first month. A careers page describing autonomy, followed by an onboarding with no decisions to make, produces a leaver within the year and a review that outlasts the campaign. So we look at the interview process and the onboarding before writing anything, and where they contradict the intended message we say the message has to change or the process does.

Reviews are worth answering, and the answer is judged on whether it engages the substance. A specific reply to a specific complaint reads as a company that listens. A generic reply reads as a company that has a policy about replies.

What we deliver: the claims we think are defensible, the ones we think will be contradicted, the process description worth publishing, and what needs to change internally before any of it goes out.