How employer brands can create social content that excites talent

Many employer brands have forgotten one very important thing: social media is always meant to be entertaining.

Head of Social and Advocacy, Steph’s route into social media started long before employer branding became an industry in its own right. From discovering internet chatrooms as a teenager in the late 90s to building communities on MySpace and later working across consumer brand social media, her career has always centred around one thing: understanding how people connect online.

After years of working across social and employer branding, she believes too many employer brands are overcomplicating content.

As social platforms become more saturated and audiences become increasingly selective with their attention, employer brand teams are facing a growing challenge: how do you create content that people actually want to engage with while still staying strategically grounded?

Most people don’t open TikTok, YouTube or Instagram looking for employer branding content. They open those platforms to be entertained, distracted, informed or connected to culture. That means employer brands are competing for attention in the same space as creators, memes, influencers and entertainment-first brands.

Employer brand content has to earn attention first. Once people are engaged, the employer brand message can naturally sit within it. That way, your brand makes entertaining content ownable, rather than the reverse approach, which attempts to make your employer brand entertaining.

When we approach social content strategies, we look at how candidates are using social media in day-to-day life and develop content ideas that sit comfortably inside of this.

The strongest social content often comes from instinct, from social media managers who are deeply embedded in internet culture themselves. The people running successful accounts are usually consumers of culture first. They understand online behaviour and the way communities interact because they actively participate in those spaces themselves.

That cultural awareness is what allows brands to participate in trends, conversations and online behaviours in ways that feel natural rather than forced.

Steph points to brands like Duolingo as examples of entertainment-led strategy done well. Rather than simply posting language-learning content, the brand built an entire social personality around its owl mascot, leaning into how audiences already perceived the character online.

The strategy wasn’t removed from the entertainment. It began with it. 

For employer brands, that same thinking matters. Candidates don’t engage with content because it perfectly communicates an EVP pillar, but because it feels relevant, entertaining or relatable within the context of the platform they’re using.

One of the biggest problems Steph sees in employer branding today is neglecting to focus on whether content is actually memorable, or even better, shareable. A brand might reach millions of people through a trend-led TikTok or reactive post, but if nobody remembers who created it, has the content really worked?

Chasing trends can generate short-term engagement, but without a clear connection back to the employer brand itself, the impact often disappears as quickly as the trend does. This is particularly common with workplace humour and “worktok” style content. Some brands jump onto trends simply because they’re related to work, rather than because they genuinely connect back to the organisation’s identity or audience.

The audience ends up remembering the joke, but not the company behind it.

That’s why employer brand teams need to think beyond visibility metrics alone, to create a lasting association between the entertainment and the employer brand itself.

Unlike consumer brands, employer brands rarely have access to celebrity influencers or major creator partnerships. But Steph sees that employer brands already have something potentially more powerful: their own people. Audiences are becoming far more influenced by real individuals sharing lived experiences.

That shift is important in employer branding because candidates are making decisions within uncertainty. People want reassurance before making a career move; they want to hear from employees directly to understand what day-to-day life actually looks like and reduce the risk of making the wrong decision.

That’s where employee advocacy becomes incredibly powerful.

Whether it’s employee-generated content, social storytelling or employee takeovers, audiences increasingly want to hear directly from the people doing the work, not just the employer brand team speaking on behalf of the organisation.

A mistake that Steph mentions is that employer brand teams try to treat every platform the same. Every social platform has its own behaviours, expectations and identity shaped by the platform itself, the audience using it, and the type of content people consume there.

Steph describes social platforms as “rented ground”. Brands don’t own the environment they’re entering; they’re participating within spaces created by the platform and its users. That means employer brand content needs to adapt to the culture already existing there. 

The strongest employer brands understand how to flex their identity depending on the platform, while still maintaining a consistent sense of who they are.

As social feeds become more saturated and audiences become increasingly sceptical of certain brand messaging, employer branding needs to move away from overly controlled content and lean into understanding internet culture, platform behaviours and how to create content people genuinely want to spend time with.

That doesn’t mean abandoning strategy. It means building strategy around attention, entertainment and participation rather than trying to force employer brand messaging into spaces where it doesn’t naturally belong.

Because ultimately, social media has always been about people connecting with people. And the employer brands that understand that are far more likely to make a lasting impression.