Your Company Brand Is Not Your Employer Brand. Now You're a Terrible Place to Work
Brand recognition won't fix your people problems. Read why challenger brands often outperform global giants in attracting and keeping talent.
In boardrooms the world over, a strange assumption continues to thrive: if you have a great product, you must be a great employer. If your brand is globally admired, people must be clamouring to work for you.
Except… they’re not.
The confusion between company brand and employer brand is one of the most common and quietly expensive mistakes businesses make. It’s easy to see why. Branding wins attention. It sells products, drives loyalty, and lands on slides at investor meetings. But when leaders start assuming that brand equity in the marketplace automatically translates into employee engagement and workplace credibility, the gap begins to show.
Internally, it shows up as disengaged staff, poor retention and confused new hires wondering where the culture they were promised has gone. Externally, it shows up on Glassdoor. Or worse, in the talent market, when top candidates politely ignore you.
A strong brand can bring people through the door. But it’s your employer brand that determines whether they stay. And this distinction is no longer a nice-to-know.
Your Brand Equity Isn’t a Talent Magnet Forever
It’s easy for organisations to fall into the trap of brand entitlement. The logic is simple: “We’re well-known. We’re respected. People line up to buy what we sell. Why wouldn’t they want to work here too?”
At first, it seems to work. A strong consumer brand does attract attention. It draws candidates in, fills pipelines, and inflates application numbers. It buys awareness. But awareness is not trust, and it certainly isn’t loyalty. People don’t stay because your product has a high NPS or your ads win awards. They stay for something else entirely.
Here’s what tends to happen. Talented people join because of the brand. It’s a badge, a credibility marker. They feel proud… iinitially. But the excitement fades quickly if the lived experience doesn't match the expectation. If the culture is outdated, the processes rigid, or the leadership unresponsive, the shine wears off. Fast. And when it does, they leave.
The brand halo can only stretch so far. Up close, the cracks show.
A well-known brand may open doors. It may attract the first ‘yes.’ But the employer brand is what earns the second ‘yes’ over time. That’s the one that matters. That’s the one that builds real organisational strength.
Challenger Brands Are Winning the Talent War
Challenger brands don’t have the luxury of assuming their name will do the work for them. They don’t enter the talent market with global logos or legacy prestige. They can’t rely on recognition or reputation. So instead, they rely on something else: actual effort.
They design thoughtful hiring journeys because they know every touchpoint matters. They personalise the employee experience because they can’t afford to be forgettable. They don’t just write value propositions that sound nice. They write ones that feel real, because their future depends on delivering what they promise.
What they lack in name recognition, they make up for in intention. They build identity through action., not advertising. Ironically, it’s this very constraint that becomes their strength. Without brand equity to hide behind, they are forced to define who they are with clarity. They make cultural choices. They explain why someone should work there in grounded, specific terms.
And more often than not, they actually follow through.
Market leaders, by contrast, can end up investing more in protecting the brand than improving the experience. Glossy marketing campaigns and polished EVP decks take priority, while employee feedback gets buried in slide 42 of the quarterly people update. There’s often a sense of preservation rather than progress.
Challenger brands can’t afford that kind of complacency. They have to be better, faster, and more human. Not just to compete, but to survive. That urgency creates clarity, and that clarity attracts people who want to be part of something being built, not something being managed.
It turns out that (really) trying is still a powerful recruitment strategy. Especially when the best candidates can smell spin from a mile away.
The EVP That Sounds Great… and Feels Like a PowerPoint
Almost every company now boasts an Employer Value Proposition (EVP). It’s the corporate version of a dating profile: a pitch about why people should want to spend their working lives with you. Some are a sentence. Others stretch across microsites, slide decks, and global roadshows. All are meant to say the same thing:
"This is who we are. This is why you’ll love it here."
But far too often, the EVP feels more like a PowerPoint than a promise. Written by a committee and polished by consultants, it ends up dripping with pleasant-sounding phrases that mean very little.
"We empower people to thrive."
"We're a family."
"We lead with empathy."
None of it’s false, necessarily. It’s just that, for many employees, it doesn’t land. It doesn’t sound like the place they work. It doesn’t reflect their day-to-day reality. It sounds like something a brand team signed off on, not something lived.
That’s the fundamental problem. The EVP isn’t meant to inspire your board. It’s meant to resonate with your people. If they can’t see themselves in it, then you’ve built a fictional narrative. It might look good in recruitment videos, but it collapses under the weight of experience.
A real EVP should come from the inside out. It’s about putting into words what already exists at the cultural core of the company. The tone, the behaviours, the values that people actually encounter.
Don’t read it in a pitch deck. Read it aloud to a room of employees and watch their reactions. If they nod, you’re close.
Cultural Bias, Brand Worship, and the Asia Disconnect
There’s a deep-rooted cultural premium placed on big-name brands in parts of Asia, including Indonesia. A job at a well-known multinational is a marker of personal success. Something to mention at family gatherings with pride.
In many Asian markets, social mobility is tied closely to perceived credibility. And in the eyes of many candidates, brand recognition often outweighs job content, growth potential, or even the quality of the work environment. A familiar logo carries more weight than a meaningful employee experience.
Candidates will accept roles they’re overqualified for, just to “get the name on the CV.” Employers, aware of this, sometimes stop trying. They lean on their prestige like it’s a long-term strategy. Job postings focus on the brand, not the role. Career websites talk about global reach, not local experience. And the EVP? Generic and disconnected from regional reality.
The result? High attrition. Quiet disengagement. A sense of mismatch between what people expected and what they actually walked into.
This loop continues until someone inside asks the harder question: Are people joining because they believe in our purpose, or because we’re a socially acceptable LinkedIn update?
When companies confront this honestly, they have a chance to shift. They can build employer brands that speak to substance. They can create environments where people stay because they’re growing, not just because they’re seen.
Prestige might open the door. But for many organisations in Asia, the real opportunity lies in what comes after.
It’s tempting to believe that the power of your brand can carry you everywhere. But reputation in the marketplace and reputation as an employer are two very different things. One is built on what you project. The other is built on what you practice.
A strong company brand might draw someone to click "Apply." It might even get them to accept your offer. But it’s the day-to-day culture, not the job ad, that determines whether they regret it.
If your EVP sounds compelling but your teams don’t recognise it...
If your company values are printed on the walls but not reflected in who gets promoted...
If your candidate experience feels more like a gauntlet than a welcome...
Then you have an employer brand problem. And no campaign will cover that up for long.
Customers interact with your brand at arm’s length. Employees live it every day. They see the promises and the practices. And they talk. Internally. Externally.
So yes, your shampoo might win awards. Good for it. But your people aren’t products. If you want to keep them, it’s going to take more than a great logo.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we support companies to build compelling EVPs that reflect the lived essence of the organisation. If you’re interested in hiring and retaining top talent, contact us for our employer value proposition development and audit services.