I’ve spent 25 years studying what makes people stay at organizations and what makes them leave. I’ve run certification interviews across thousands of companies. I’ve read the data that comes back from employees when no one from leadership is in the room.
Here’s the pattern I keep seeing, and it is almost universal: the employer brand describes a culture the organization is hoping to have, not the one it actually measured.
That gap is the problem. Not the messaging. Not the careers page design. Not the job description copy. The gap between what leadership believes the culture is and what employees actually report experiencing is what makes most employer brands fail, quietly, over time, in ways that show up as turnover and poor hiring fit and Glassdoor reviews that contradict everything the brand says.
The Sequence Almost Nobody Gets Right
Most organizations build their employer brand like this: decide what story you want to tell, then build the culture to match it. Or worse: tell the story without building anything.
The organizations that consistently attract the right people and keep them do it in the opposite order. They find out what’s actually true about their culture first. They measure it independently, with enough rigor to trust the numbers. They look at what the data shows and ask: where is this coming from? What specific leadership behaviors produced these scores? What can we name, document, and repeat?
Then they build the employer brand from what they found.
That sequence sounds obvious. Almost no one follows it. Because it requires being willing to find out something you might not want to know. It requires treating your employees as a source of truth, not an audience for your messaging. And it requires enough patience to build the story from the evidence rather than building the evidence to match the story.
What the Data Actually Shows
Across more than 1,800 organizations in the Most Loved Workplace® certified database, the companies that score in the top quartile on Alignment of Values (the dimension that measures whether employees believe the organization actually lives what it claims) share one characteristic. The story their employer brand tells came from their culture data, not the other way around.
That’s not a coincidence. Candidates who are hard to attract and harder to keep are reading for exactly that signal. They have been lied to by employer brands before. They know what a polished careers page looks like. What they are looking for is evidence that the culture is what leadership says it is. Evidence that exists somewhere other than the company’s own marketing.
Independent certification is one way to provide that evidence. Verified employee survey data is another. A specific, named leadership practice documented in a public interview is another. The form matters less than the fact that the evidence exists and can be found.
Based on Best Practice Institute research, validated across 1,800+ companies, organizations that build cultures where employees feel genuinely connected see 48% lower turnover and consistently out-innovate their competitors. That result isn’t produced by a better-worded employer brand. It’s produced by the culture the employer brand accurately describes.
Kyndryl, for example, a multinational corporation that designs, builds, and manages infrastructure services, has extended its culture across 90,000 people in 60+ countries. Kyndryl CEO Martin Schroeter promotes The Kyndryl Way as a “restless pursuit of learning and innovation, empathetic in how we show up for each other, and devoted to shared success with our customers and partners.” That “way” works in any location, in any language.
The Honest Version of Culture-First Branding
Culture-first employer branding is not a messaging strategy. It’s an honesty strategy.
You find out what is true about your organization, what employees actually experience, where the culture is strong, where the gap between aspiration and reality is widest. You use that information to fix what needs fixing. You build the story from what remains after that process. And you tell that story in a format that the candidates you want to attract can actually find before they apply.
The organizations doing this well aren’t the ones with the biggest recruiting budgets or the most sophisticated employer brand agencies. They’re the ones that were willing to measure honestly and then lead with what the measurement showed.
In 25 years, I haven’t found a shortcut to that sequence. The measure-first, story-second approach is slower at the start. It is dramatically more durable over time.
This June, the leaders who have done this work at scale will be on stage at the Top Global Most Loved Workplaces® Summit. Not presenting frameworks. Sharing what they actually built, what they measured, and what changed when they stopped leading with the story they wanted to tell and started leading with the one the data showed.
Free for HR leaders.
