Is This Goodbye Employer "Branding". Hello Employer "Reality"?

I've spent years helping companies with their cultures, EVPs and talent engagement. But lately, I've been wondering if we're all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Increasingly, I’m thinking that employer branding as we've traditionally practised it might not survive the next few years. Not because it's unimportant, but because the entire game has changed.

Let’s think about how candidates research companies now. They're not spending 20 minutes on your careers site reading your mission statement. They're asking ChatGPT, "What's it really like to work at [Company X]?"

And their AI isn’t pulling from your brand guidelines. It synthesises Glassdoor reviews, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, news articles, and every other digital footprint your organisation has left. Within seconds, candidates get an aggregated truth that bypasses your carefully crafted narrative entirely.

I tested this last week with a few well-known brands. The AI-generated summaries were often more accurate - and certainly more honest – than anything on the companies' careers pages. Try it yourself with your own organisation. Go on. I dare you.

(Feel free to use the draft prompt I’ve included at the bottom of this post on your own company in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini or CoPilot).

The Transparency Gap

We used to have information asymmetry working in our favour. Candidates relied on what we told them. Now? They can fact-check your claims before they've finished reading your job advert.

You say you have a "culture of innovation"? Cool. People on Reddit are saying your approval process for a £50 expense has 17 stages and requires sign-off from someone's aunt. Guess which version candidates believe?

The gap between brand promise and lived experience has always existed. The difference now is that the gap is searchable, quantifiable, and impossible to hide.

What Actually Survives

This isn't all doom and gloom. Some approaches will not only survive but thrive:

• Increased transparency (that’s legally permissible) - Companies that tell the truth, including the difficult bits, will stand out. "We're brilliant at X, still figuring out Y" is infinitely more credible than generic corporate speak.
• Employee-generated content / employee advocacy - Let your people tell their own stories. Unpolished, unscripted, real. This can't be faked, and AI can't replicate authenticity.
• Culture you can defend - Build workplaces that can withstand scrutiny. If your employer brand can't survive contact with reality, you've got a culture problem, not a branding problem.

The Bottom Line

Employer branding isn't dying. But the version where marketing controls the narrative, where cracks are papered over with pretty campaigns, where we think we can get away with saying one thing and doing another? That's absolutely doomed (And thank fuck for that if it puts those peddlers of fake ‘authenticity’ to rest).

The companies that win won't be the ones with the best employer brand. They'll be the ones where the brand and the reality are actually the same thing.

That's not a branding challenge. That's a transformation challenge. And frankly, it's much more interesting.

So maybe, just maybe, in 2026 we start doing away with employer “branding” and focus more on communicating our employer “reality.”

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Try this prompt on your company to check if you like what you're seeing:

You are a career adviser expert with over 15 years of experience.

Your role is to help me research companies I'm interested in working for to let me know what it's really like working there.

Your deep, thorough research is to go beyond what they include on their career site. This is often manufactured to sell a story that won't always be reflective of what it's really like working for them.

In addition to researching their career site, I also want you to review other sources where companies and their cultures are discussed and shared honestly, transparently and by previous and existing employers.

For example, research all their Glassdoor pages and reviews, and other company culture review platforms. Also include Reddit and other chat forums / platforms famous for people discussing true working life in the companies they work for.

I'm looking for fair reviews that highlight both good and bad things to consider.

Part of your task is to be unbiased in evaluating whether sentiment is, in the main, positive, negative, or neutral.

You are not to tell me what you think I want to hear. You are to report back true, objective findings from your research, rooted in facts you discover, and present them to me as per the insights you establish.

To begin with, what should I consider when thinking about a career at [ENTER COMPANY NAME] head office?