About Us
Employer brand outgrew its own infrastructure.
For ten years, Devin and Matt met over dinner and talked shop. Devin was in-house and Matt was on the agency side, doing the same work from two directions, and they kept noticing the same things missing. Rigor without craft gets you a smart deck and work nobody remembers. Craft without rigor gets you something that looks nice and says little.
Craft that wasn't there. Strategy that wasn't really strategy. Promises that didn't match what people found once they were hired. EVPs that couldn't hold, because external and internal audiences are too different for one proposition to serve. Work treated like arts and crafts when it was the thing deciding whether people trusted the company.
Employer brand needs the rigor of a consultancy, the craft of a consumer-grade agency, and the insight from talent, culture, and purpose, delivered as one service. The demands have outrun the infrastructure most organizations have to meet them.
Devin and Matt started WorkingTheory to make those gaps, which are hard to see, impossible to ignore.
We did this two years ago and got a deck. Why would this be different?
Because that's the most common thing that happens, and it's a design flaw, not bad luck. Strategy work usually ends at the moment it needs to start. We stay through rollout, review the work as your teams actually use it, coach in the moment, and adjust when reality doesn't match the brief. Being right and working are different things. If the last engagement left you holding the bag internally, we understand why that's the first question.
We already run engagement surveys. Why isn't that enough?
Because surveys measure what people are willing to say, and fear inflates the scores. You get clean-looking data pointing at the wrong problems. We use a method built to surface what's true rather than what's safe to report, which is the difference between fixing the issue and watching it come back next quarter.
Can you actually prove ROI, or is this a faith purchase?
Employer brand was never set up to be measured the way a CFO cares about. We measure the Why: what influenced a decision, what people remembered, what moved them, before and after. It won't produce a tidy single number pretending to be science. It will produce evidence a skeptical executive can take seriously, which is usually what you need to walk into that room.
We're in the middle of a rebrand, a RIF, or a leadership change. Wrong time?
Often it's the right time. Those are the moments your employer brand is most exposed and most changeable. The wrong time is when nobody internally has the appetite to act on what we find, because then it becomes a report that sits on a drive.
What is Connected Brand?
The whole arc of working somewhere, mapped as one thing. Attraction, recruitment and selection, onboarding, development, retention and engagement, offboarding and advocacy. Six stages, usually owned in six boxes, with separate owners, separate messages, and separate metrics. Nobody experiences it that way. People notice when the promise at stage one doesn't survive contact with stage three. We align strategy, messaging, creative, and measurement across the arc so every function tells the same story. Mapping your gaps is usually the moment it clicks, because most of them are invisible until the whole wheel is on one page.
Everyone says "strategic" and "high craft." Why believe you?
Fair. Craft is hard to judge from a website, which is exactly why generic work survives in this category. What we'd point to is specificity: whether our thinking about your situation is sharper than what you've heard elsewhere. If a conversation with us isn't more useful than the last three you had, we're not your firm.
We just want great design. Can we hire you for only that?
Yes. It stands alone, and some clients come for exactly that. We'll do better work with strategy underneath it, but we're not going to make you buy a worldview to get a brand you're proud of.
What size companies do you work with?
Size isn't the measure of fit. Goals are. Past clients range from startups to workforces in the hundreds of thousands. After that it's budget and timing. Some of our best clients have been our smallest, because size lets them decide fast and try things. It's always fine to reach out and talk.
How do we get started?
A conversation, not a pitch. We'll want to understand what's going on before we say what we'd do about it. If there's a fit, we'll tell you. If there isn't, we'll tell you that too.
We're just starting to look at this. Where do we begin?
Start with what's actually broken. "We need an employer brand" is rarely the real problem. Roles you can't fill, offers people decline, good people leaving inside eighteen months, a story TA tells that HR doesn't recognize: those are the problems, and they point to different work. Most companies already have more evidence than they think, sitting in exit data and what recruiters hear on calls. You don't need it figured out before you talk to us. The ones who arrive with it figured out are often solving the wrong problem. Bring what's breaking. We'd rather spend the first conversation working out what's going on than confirming a brief someone wrote to get budget approved.