How Do I Trust Thee? Let Me Count the Ways: Why Employer Reputation Scores Miss the Signals Candidates Use

Can you put a number on trust?

Summary: Trust indexes and reputation scores are back in employer brand, and they can help a team make its case for budget. What a score can't show is the signals candidates use to judge whether a job, employer, or team is any good. This article explains WorkingTheory's approach: asking employees the questions job seekers ask themselves, building signal scorecards, and grouping them into career path signal profiles organized in four categories (Occupational, Cultural, Financial, and Organizational). It includes examples from a large health system and Paychex, looks at what the lottery question reveals about why people work, and explains why candidates will accept an ordinary workplace but won't forgive being told it's something it isn't.

Reputation scoring is showing up everywhere in employer brand at the moment: trust indexes and reputation report cards. It isn't the first time. Versions of this came around in the mid 2000s, again in the early 2010s, and again in the 2020s. Truth be told, there were mixed results, but not for lack of trying. If anything, those early efforts to quantify intangibles get some applause. It's a very hard problem.

The appeal of it makes sense. Leaders want a number they can track and report upward, and a score gives them one. If it helps a team get budget or attention, that's worth something.

AND there's a question a score can't answer: what are the signals candidates look for that help them figure out things like what makes a high-quality employer, or job, or project? A score tells you how a company rates. A signal tells you what people look for. By signal, we mean anything a person can see, hear, or check that tells them whether a job, employer, or team is any good. That second part is where we focus, because in all our experience, it's what helps the most.

Candidates don't see the metrics. Recall the last time you were job searching. Did you make a trust index to compare Company A's career site to Company B's?

Reputation is a very murky thing too. There's no clear or perfect version. Most of it is not really reputation in the traditional sense either. It's a brief impression people get and hold until something else captures their attention. People generally don't think about a company's employer brand or EVP all that much, until the moment when they decide whether to apply. It matters a little more if they get called in and start judging fit. By then, whatever they believe about the company was built years earlier, by things the company did or didn't do. A score measured today can't change what a candidate found last week.

What does a candidate trust?

Trust doesn't work as all or nothing. People trust companies in some areas and doubt them in others. It's not fixed either. People can trust a lot, or a little. A candidate might believe the pay is what the posting says and still doubt anything leadership promises about growth.

We saw long ago that people have scorecards with two types of boxes. You could call them intangibles and tangibles. Emotionality is how something feels to the person. Intentionality is how they measure it logically or analytically, and that is no easy thing to do about something like growth potential. And it's not a case of one or the other. The same item gets an emotion grade and an intention one. Take learning opportunities. A company can offer many, so it gets a decent grade on the tangible side for the volume of things offered. But to that person, if none of them fit their goals or needs, it gets a very low grade on the emotional, intangible side. It would translate to, "we like that there's a lot of options, but the options are not that relevant or of high quality individually." Murky is probably an understatement, because of the permutations people can have about such simple things as "do we like something."

We ask job seekers the questions they ask themselves, by way of asking employees, who were once job seekers. People ask themselves a lot of questions, and on the surface, they are very reasonable. Will I like the work? Expected total comp? Am I qualified enough to be invited for an interview? Is this the best fit for me? Does the commute, shift, schedule, location, community work? If I'm in great need of a job, I might be wondering if they hire fast. And so on. There are also questions the unconscious mind asks, like will I feel welcome given that I'm on the quiet side. There's a lot of bias too, and the biggest is the Say/Do gap. People say they want X, but they don't do X when they have the opportunity. This is the famous reason why in consumer advertising, things test phenomenally and then flop. People said they'd buy it, or use it, but then didn't. Why? Context has a whole lot to do with it, but that's a bigger topic than we want to get into here. We will come back to it in another article.

When we have enough of the questions people ask themselves answered, we get what we call a signal scorecard: one person's set of signals and how they grade each one. Group enough scorecards from people in the same career area, and you get a career path signal profile: the signals that matter most to people in that line of work, whatever their tenure, background or experience level. We first explored this type of integrated approach around 2008 or so, when the Great Recession had us gripped in fear and none of the old playbooks made sense (sound familiar?). Nothing about how value was communicated before the Great Recession made sense once it was on, and for a long while after. When we filtered individual signal scorecards by career area, we saw a pattern: the signals people in a career path use to judge whether something is poor, good, or excellent, the whole range. It threaded the emotional and logical lenses together because it removes preferences from the picture. We can want a 2-day workweek; that doesn't mean we believe we'll get it with all the other elements of a 5-day workweek.

The career path signal profile is super versatile. It not only tells us how and why people judge things to be valuable, it helps us understand the trade-offs and compromises underneath career decisions.

When we first started looking at signals over preferences, we noticed a pattern take shape. We could organize all the data into four universal categories: Occupational, Cultural, Financial and Organizational. Within each broad area are attributes, the specific signals people use to make their judgments. Some signal a high-quality job, others the opposite. They can even cancel each other out in someone's mind. Together they make up the signal scorecard, formal or not, and all decisions revolve around it. We also noticed that signals have different bias properties than preferences, namely they minimize it.

A claim like "we have a very inclusive culture" is a signal people look for, but it's the company's version, and it's weak. Publishing the actual mix of the workforce by age, gender and ethnicity is a signal with no spin in it. People will still read it through their own biases, but the signal itself is clean.

A career path signal profile is a great unifier. It isn't tied to any background, gender, or ethnicity. It's just the signals people on that career path look for to determine a high-quality opportunity, or employer, or project, or team, and so on.

At times, it helps to have inputs broader than signals, like motivations or inspirations, the kind usually found in a persona's backstory. More often, though, the signals shed light on those areas on their own, without reducing people to a single character the way a persona can.

We wanted to ask physicians what signals a low-quality job opportunity, and our client, a super large health system, was concerned that their practitioners wouldn't answer, but they let us continue. Not only did they answer, they revealed enormous insight. If we had just asked what they like or want, we'd have gotten the same information we could have found simply googling the topic. But asking about the signal side set us on an entirely new course of messaging strategy. And yes, it was really impactful right from the beginning. We knew we were on to something.

It works for hourly roles too. In quick-service restaurants, the signal that stood out was having a manager who cares about your shift, and it outweighed

Paychex is one of the country’s leading HCM companies and we found that nearly all the signals people looked for were often different from what companies usually think people care about most. When we looked at signals over preferences, an entirely different picture emerged. 

It's not innovation messaging; it's not having to fight information silos and fiefdoms to do so.
It's not the cool project; it's the inspiring boss.
It's not the zip code; it's the zip code inside the building. A Silicon Valley address mattered less than people assumed. The stature of the department within the company mattered more.
It's not the quirky perks; it's the empathy a smart and robust total rewards communicates.
It's not the next new thing; it's feeling empowered to solve any problem in new ways.
It's not the advanced tech; it's the freedom to choose tools. That's how tech builds skills.

We don't even try to measure things like Truth or Authenticity. If two people have the exact same job, same offer, and one loves it and one hates it, which one is authentic?

There is no single slogan, pillar or narrative that can connect with an entire workforce, inspire top talent, and keep people engaged.

❌ There is no one true version of what it's like to work here.
❌ There is no uniform experience of culture.
❌ There is no single path to grow and develop.
❌ There are no career promises that hold for everyone.

Signals inside a career path tell us more about value than any other way of getting at it. It's how we can make an EVP effective for an entire company.

What does the lottery question reveal about why people work?

Very few people would keep their current job if they didn't need the income. Most of us enjoy parts of our work, but if we won the lottery, we'd change what we call work quickly. I have asked this question in focus groups for a long time. Lots and lots. It's very, very, very rare that someone would continue in the job they had, or for very long. Maybe they'd try to rough it out, but one false step from a manager, and they'd walk on the spot. Why?

I asked people, would they do nothing, sit on a beach? Almost none said they would. Of course there's the obligatory period of doing nothing for a few weeks or months, but that would be followed by an exploration of purpose and value seeking. Philanthropy, start a knish store, make furniture, invent household products, baking school. A zillion ideas, all not pursued for a zillion reasons, and money is the cited hold-up. This is not an article about overcoming the fear and barriers. Fear is real. I started a company. More than once. I was scared to death each time.

What that means is no one really, truly wants to work for your company, and it isn't any fault of your employer brand or EVP. What people will do is make a trade-off. A job is a trade: time and effort for pay, benefits, friendship, and whatever makes the trade easier to live with. Content that respects that trade is more believable than content that pretends it isn't happening. That content is the signals.

What should a company do when its signals are weak?

When the signals in an area are weak, the first question is why. If the reality is good and candidates can't find proof of it, that's a content problem, and it's fixable. If the reality is weak, content won't help. Saying it louder only widens the gap between what the company claims and what people find. The honest recommendation there is to stop saying it until it's true. If the reality is not made clear, it sets wrong expectations by giving the wrong signals, and that can be fixed. This goes on and on.

Inside of any company there are hidden pockets of value, for lack of a better word. But they are rarely just sitting out in the open. They live in people's heads. In documents underneath a pile of other documents. In files and folders long forgotten. What we have to do is open things up within areas not often opened up, like onboarding, integrations, offboarding, retention, and many others to find the signals within. Every job seeker wishes they could do that kind of digging. Career path signal profiles, now armed with hidden value markers, let us create a powerful EVP strategy that isn't a slogan no one will ever care about. Find value that's hard to see, then make it impossible to ignore.

Candidates will be just fine working for a company that is an ordinary place to work. They won't forgive being told it's something it isn't.