Most advice on employer branding assumes someone whose job it is: a content calendar, an ambassador programme, a campaign budget. In a company of 40 people, the person doing it often also runs payroll, or hires for their own team, or both. This guide is for that person. If you need the definition first, our glossary entry on employer branding separates the work from the reputation it produces.
One finding frames the rest. The CIPD’s factsheet on employer brand cites its 2024 UK resourcing and talent planning report, in which 81% of respondents had taken action to improve their employer brand in the previous year. Separately, it reports that only 14% of respondents are taking steps to measure the impact. Read together, the two figures suggest that working on an employer brand is common and checking whether it made a difference is rare.
How to choose where to start
Before picking a tactic, list every point where a candidate meets you before they decide: the job ad, the careers page, the confirmation after applying, the interview invitation, the rejection. Each of these already exists and already says something about you. An employer branding strategy for a small team is mostly a decision about which of them to fix first.
Two questions narrow it down. Which touchpoints does every candidate see? At minimum the job ad and the reply to an application. And which can you keep up once the person who set it up is busy elsewhere? A brand that depends on a quarterly video stops the day that person leaves.
Five moves, with employer branding examples
Treat the job ad as the brand
For a company nobody has heard of, the ad is the first impression and often the only one. Bling, a Berlin fintech that was three people when it started hiring at pace, tested small variations in the opening lines and the “what you’ll do” section of its job ads and compared them by the number and quality of applications, as its customer story describes. The story does not say which variants won, so treat it as a method to copy rather than a result.
Pay belongs here too. Under the new EU pay transparency rules, which the European Commission summarised on 5 June 2026, employers will have to give job seekers the starting salary or pay range in the vacancy notice or before the interview, and will no longer be able to ask about pay history. The directive applies through each country’s national law, so check how yours has implemented it. A range in the ad is the cheapest credibility signal available. In Join’s Job Studio, a salary range is pre-filled from market data for the title, location and seniority, and you choose whether it is public on the ad, except in Austria, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania, where a range is required, according to the job creation guide.
Make the careers page editable without a developer
evenito, a Zurich software company, turned its careers page into a fuller picture of the company with images, quotes and video instead of relying on a generic job ad. That is in the evenito story. The detail that matters for a small team is that nobody needs to write code to change it. Join generates the page from your company details (description, mission, and benefits and values picked from a list), and you can add a photo gallery and embedded YouTube videos, as the profile customisation guide explains. Our guide to building a careers page for a small business covers what to put on it.
Write the candidate emails in your own voice
The rejection email is the piece of employer branding most candidates actually receive. evenito customised Join’s automated emails to match its tone of voice, for a more consistent experience at every stage. At dsb, a German renovation consultancy, HR Lead Dana Morouj uses templates for rejections, invitations and status updates, and automated emails with clear next actions keep candidates moving; her view, recorded in the dsb story, is that a structured process is part of how candidates judge the company. In Join, application confirmations and rejections go out from templates you write, and an auto-reject rule can send one when a candidate has waited too long in screening, per the automated emails guide.
Let employees check the claims
The CIPD factsheet defines the employer brand as something perceived by current and potential employees, and suggests starting with workshops, focus groups, surveys and an audit of the candidate journey. For a small company the cheap version is three conversations: show three colleagues the sentences you want to publish and ask which ones are true. Whatever survives is a claim you can stand behind, and raw material for your employee value proposition. The same colleagues are also your most credible recruiters, which is why a simple employee referral scheme belongs in the plan.
Measure one thing
With only 14% of the CIPD’s respondents measuring the impact of their employer brand, tracking even one number is unusual. Pick a single question: where did this quarter’s suitable candidates come from? At dsb, Dana sees exactly where each application came from and uses that to decide where the next campaign budget goes, while the founders use the same data to track conversion rates. If your careers page and referrals bring a larger share of suitable candidates after six months than before, that is a sign the work is helping, though a change in your job board mix over the same months could also explain it.
What most teams get wrong
One mistake is starting with the look. A values poster or a recruiting video is the visible part, so it gets done first, while the reply to candidates stays slow and the rejection never arrives. Every candidate experiences the slow reply. Only some will ever watch the video.
A second is publishing claims nobody has checked. “Flexible working” means one thing to a founder and another to the person on the early shift. A claim tied to a concrete rule (“Fridays from home for office roles”) survives contact with candidates; a vague one becomes the first question in every interview.
A disclosure: three of the five moves above use things Join sells (Job Studio for the job ad, the careers page, candidate emails), so weigh our emphasis on them accordingly. We would give the same advice if we sold none of them: fix the touchpoints every candidate sees before building the ones only some will visit, and keep one number that tells you whether it worked.
The last mistake is treating employer branding as separate from the offer. Pay, benefits and how the first week goes are what people end up describing to others, and the employer brand is largely made of those descriptions. Copy can describe the offer well or badly, but it cannot make up for it.
