New: AstrolabeX, the AI visibility audit for senior tech leaders. Join early access →
All insights
4 min read
The Employer Brand Leaders Forget They Have
70% of employers say candidates have ghosted them; only 19% admit doing the same. The same blind spot shows up in how leaders think their visibility reads to talent.
A survey of 1,027 US hiring professionals by Criteria, reported by State of Brand in October, found that 70% said a candidate had ghosted them. Asked whether they had ever ghosted a candidate, only 19% said yes. Most job seekers would find that second number hard to believe.
The gap isn’t really about ghosting. It’s about how differently organisations see themselves from the outside in. And one of the biggest blind spots sits with senior leaders, who rarely think of their own public presence as part of the employer brand.
Candidates research the people, not just the company
LinkedIn’s own talent research says three in four job seekers consider an employer’s brand before they even apply. For senior and specialist roles, that research goes deeper. A strong engineer considering a move will look up the CTO. A sales leader will look up the CRO and the CEO. They want to know who they’d be working for, how those people think, and whether they’d learn from them.
Brunswick’s Connected Leadership research has found for several years that employees would rather work for a CEO who communicates through digital and social channels, by a wide margin. The reasons employees give are practical: it makes leaders more accessible, keeps people informed and makes them easier to talk to.
What an invisible leader signals
When a candidate looks up a hiring manager and finds a bare profile, they don’t conclude “this person is busy.” They fill the gap with whatever else they can find: Glassdoor reviews, a former employee’s post, a competitor’s VP who writes regularly about the same field.
Meanwhile, a leader who publishes steadily about how their team works, the problems they’re solving and what they’ve learned is doing recruiting work every week without trying. Candidates arrive having already read them, with a sense of the culture and the standard.
The blind spot, in practice
Most leadership teams believe their employer brand is fine because the careers page is polished and the company page posts regularly. Ask candidates and you often hear something else: they couldn’t tell who the leaders were or what they stood for.
It’s the same pattern as the ghosting survey. From inside, everything looks reasonable. From outside, there’s silence where a person should be.
What helps without turning leaders into recruiters
Leaders don’t need to post job ads or “we’re hiring” graphics. The posts that do the most for hiring are rarely about hiring.
How decisions get made. A CTO explaining why the team chose one architecture over another tells engineers more than any culture page.
What the team is learning. Honest lessons from projects, including the ones that went badly, signal a place where people can grow.
Who gets credit. Leaders who name and thank team members publicly show what working for them would feel like.
What they won’t do. Clear standards and boundaries attract people who share them and filter out people who don’t.
Make it part of the leadership program
The most effective way to do this is to treat it as one more lane in a coordinated leadership visibility program rather than a separate employer-brand project. The same monthly conversations that produce content for buyers produce material that candidates read too.
LinkedIn’s research on employee advocacy found that employees’ networks are typically ten times larger than a company page’s followers, and their content gets about twice the engagement. Leaders sit at the centre of those networks.
If your leadership team is invisible to the people you most want to hire, start by looking at your top five leaders the way a senior candidate would. Our Founding Teams program begins with that baseline, and Voice StudioX keeps each leader sounding like themselves.