What your employer brand is worth depends on which argument you make for it

Summary: There are three arguments available for funding employer brand, and most practitioners only ever make the first one. Coherence is the argument that one story costs less than twelve: real, but an argument about spending less, and the best outcome for a line item that is cheaper is that it survives. Leverage is when other functions use the brand without asking permission, and the numbers (quality of hire, offer acceptance, ramp time) start belonging to them too. Economics is the strongest, because regrettable attrition, first-year turnover, internal mobility, and referral rate are already on somebody's spreadsheet; you are stepping into a conversation finance was going to have anyway. None of it can be cleanly attributed, and pretending otherwise gets you dismantled in ninety seconds. The better ask is to be judged the way corporate brand is judged, since that argument was won long ago. Status is a separate currency from budget and does not move with it. And all three arguments fail if the work looks low craft, because craft tells a CFO what kind of thing they are looking at, and that decides what they will spend.

I have sat in this meeting more times than I can count, on both sides of the table.

Someone who runs employer brand is presenting to someone who controls money or can bestow status. I'll talk more about status later in this piece because it's an important part of recognition. The work is good. There are numbers in it, and the numbers are moving in the right direction: applications up, cost per hire down, time to fill improved. Everyone in the room agrees it is worth doing. Then the budget comes back at exactly what it was last year, and the same thing happens the year after that, and nobody ever has to explain it.

That is the part that makes you crazy. It is never a no. It is a shrug you cannot argue with.

The numbers were real. They were also small, and every one of them was about spending less.

There are three arguments available to you. Coherence, leverage, and economics. Most of us have only ever made the first one.

Why does corporate brand design get funded when employer brand doesn't?

Design systems used to be style guides. Then they were component libraries. Then, somewhere around the point where companies were shipping across a dozen products and forty markets, design leaders started calling them infrastructure, and started getting funded like it.

Last year the Design Executive Council asked design leaders how they pitch their own systems internally. (The study was sponsored by Figma, so read it with that in mind.) Nearly all of them said brand consistency. Nearly all said efficiency and speed. Only a third mentioned revenue, and fewer than half mentioned risk.

So the ceiling is theirs, not their CFO's. The people who know the work best are making the smallest available argument for it and then feeling wounded when it gets treated as overhead.

I read that and felt caught. It is us. It is employer brand, culture, and people experience. It has been us for years.

What is the coherence argument, and why does it cap out?

Most employer brand programs get sold on this one and never leave it.

You promise one story instead of twelve. Fewer vendors saying different things about the same company. Less rework. Campaigns that don't get rebuilt from scratch every time a req opens. The metrics are the ones the ATS hands you: cost per hire, time to fill, application conversion.

It is a real argument, and I have made it a hundred times. But strip it down, and it is an argument about being cheaper, and the very best outcome for a line item that is cheaper is that it survives.

What is the leverage argument, and how do you know you're making it?

Somewhere past coherence, the brand stops being a campaign and turns into something other people use without asking permission. Recruiters pull from it. Hiring managers pull from it. Internal comms pulls from it. It shows up in someone's first week without anyone from your team in the room. My partner Devin DaRif wrote about this recently in his piece, The strongest signal your employer brand is working is in your inbox.

The metrics move with it: quality of hire, offer acceptance, how productive recruiters are, how fast new people get good at the job. What matters is that those numbers now belong to other people too. You are no longer the only one who cares whether this works.

You know you are arguing on the leverage rung if someone outside your team defends the work when you are not in the meeting.

It is a better argument. It is also where most programs stall out, because getting here means the thing has to genuinely work across functions, and that is a political problem more than a creative one.

What is the economics argument, and why is it the strongest one?

The first two arguments ask a company to value something it does not currently measure. This one does the opposite.

Regrettable attrition. First-year turnover. Internal mobility. Referral rate. And the one nobody wants to be held accountable for, which is what it costs you when the experience cannot back up what the brand promised.

The point is not that these numbers are bigger, though they are. It is that they are already on somebody's spreadsheet. You are not asking a CFO to accept a new metric or a new model, which is the request that gets you rolled eyes or shown the door. You are stepping into a conversation that was going to happen without you and handing someone a lever they did not know they had.

You know you are arguing on the economics rung if the finance team was already tracking your numbers before you showed up.

Can you prove any of it?

Not cleanly. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

Attrition has a dozen owners. Comp. Managers. The labor market. The commute policy. Whatever happened in the last reorg. Claim a retention number as yours and a decent CFO will pull it apart in ninety seconds, and honestly, they should.

The better answer is a comparison. Nobody makes the corporate brand prove its contribution to revenue. That argument happened a long time ago; brand won it, and now the question just doesn't come up. Employer brand belongs in that same category. Asking to be judged the way brand is judged is a far stronger position than promising an attribution model you know you cannot deliver.

What about status, not just budget?

I said I would come back to it.

Budget is one currency and status is another, and they do not always move together. Plenty of people in this field have watched a smaller marketing team get the stage, the all-hands mention, the line in the shareholder letter, while the employer brand program that touched every person in the building got a nod in a quarterly update.

I have watched people respond to that by moving. HR into marketing, talent into brand, the same person doing recognizably the same work under a title that carries more weight in the room. I do not blame anyone for it. It is a rational read of where recognition lives, and sometimes where job security lives too.

But it tells you something about the problem. If people are leaving the discipline to be taken seriously rather than changing how the discipline is taken seriously, then the argument has not been made yet. Status is not handed out for importance. It gets handed out for things that look like they matter, which brings me to the part I care about most.

Why does none of it work if the craft is low?

You can win every argument above and still lose, because nobody funds something that embarrasses them or looks too low-end to feel premium. And this includes writing, understanding context, addressing things like emotionality and intentionality, all the stuff that makes something objectively good, and also subjectively good.

I worked on a program at a software company that was flying high at the time. The research was right. Nobody wanted it, because it contradicted what their corporate brand was already saying about them, and it had to survive eight people who agreed on nothing and each needed to feel it was their idea. What shipped was assembled out of their existing brand guide. It made no impact on anything, and it never had a chance to, because by the time anyone saw it, there was nothing in it that looked like it cost something to make.

That is usually how low craft happens. Not from bad taste, but from a process that averages everything until what is left could have come from anywhere.

The corporate brand design systems people had an advantage they rarely bring up. By the time they went after real money, the work was beautiful. The components, the documentation, all of it. The business case landed on top of something people already wanted their name on. CEOs do special presentations to employees and shareholders, go on news shows to talk about it.

A lot of employer brand work never gets close to that. The thinking is sound, and the execution apologizes for itself. Careful frameworks wrapped in stock photography. The CFO is not sitting there evaluating your typography, and neither is the CMO, but the craft is telling them what kind of thing they are looking at, and what kind of thing they think they are looking at decides what they are willing to spend on it, or help defend.

Smart has never once survived on its own. The strategy earns you the meeting. The craft is what makes anyone believe the strategy was worth having.

The rung you argue on is the rung you get funded on.

If you are arguing yours on the wrong rung and want a second read on it, my inbox is open. I do this for a living at WorkingTheory, and I will tell you what I think either way.