The whole employer brand industry is watching Silicon Valley’s culture pivots to figure out what they mean. They mean almost nothing — big tech was never the model, just performing culture for a talent market. The real problems are closer to home and far more fixable: HR, marketing, comms, and TA don’t share goals, buyers can’t always evaluate creative, and the ATS has become a black hole. These are alignment problems, not culture problems, and they get solved by connecting the brand, not by watching the 0.01%.

For about a decade, every conference keynote, every employer brand RFP, every internal comms deck opened the same way: culture, culture, culture. Empathy. Belonging. Purpose.

Then the political winds shifted, and suddenly the C-suites that couldn't stop talking about psychological safety are quietly shelving DEI pages and rewriting values statements to be a little less... specific. In some cases, too many, outright erase it all like it never happened.

And the entire HR, People & Culture, and employer brand industry is watching Silicon Valley do it, trying to figure out what it means for them.

I'd argue it means almost nothing. And that watching is the problem.

Big Tech Was Never the Model

Here's the part nobody wants to hear said out loud: the companies that got the most attention for "culture" were often the worst at it. They were performing culture for a talent market. Stock-fueled comp packages, campus perks, and mission statements written by branding agencies, not by anyone who'd actually have to live inside them at 11pm on a Thursday.

When Big Tech pivots to "masculine energy" or tech CEOs start publicly aligning with political power, that's not a culture shift. That's the mask matching a different audience. The underlying operating logic (extract maximum productivity, minimize friction, replace what you can) hasn't changed. If the 2024 election was reversed, big tech would be tripping over themselves trying to out-do each other on culture.

There are over 33 million businesses in the United States. Silicon Valley's headline-grabbers represent a fraction of a fraction of a percent. But somehow, the entire country watches those companies to figure out what "culture" means for everyone else. That's not strategy. That's a spectator sport. By all means, watch, but just watch.

Meanwhile, companies like Trader Joe's and Patagonia have built cultures that actually work. They didn't follow a trend. They connected what they say to what people experience. No manifestos. Just be good, smart and good. It really can be that simple. No $50 million employer brand campaigns. Just alignment between the promise and the reality.

The Real Problems Are Closer to Home

While everyone's doom-scrolling about what big tech's rightward lean means for employer branding, most mid-market and enterprise companies are dealing with much more main street, and much more fixable, problems.

The biggest challenge of them all is HR, Marketing, Corporate Comms, and TA don't share goals. They often don't even share meetings. I've seen organizations where the brand team is running one narrative externally, TA is telling a completely different story to candidates, and internal comms is managing a third reality for existing employees. Nobody planned this. It happened because nobody thought to put these people in a room together with a shared scorecard.

The people buying employer brand work can't always evaluate it, especially across the range of contexts it has to perform in. This one's uncomfortable, but it's important because unless we get that in the open, nothing will improve. TA and HR leaders are brilliant at what they do, but where in that career path is the exposure to design, creative strategy, or brand craft, let alone customer experience and external reputation building? So-so work gets celebrated, and the industry stays quiet about it. If we can't talk about it, we can't build. Derivative campaigns win awards from other derivative campaigns. The bar stays low because there's no standard for what "high" looks like, and niche EB agencies have the same challenge themselves. The expertise needed to connect very different types of goals, audiences, internal realities is no small feat.

The ATS has become a black hole. A company posted on LinkedIn recently that they received over 10,000 applications for a single role. Ten thousand. Even if not the whole picture, everyone has a story like that. And, worse, everyone wants to dump AI on it to filter, but the fundamental question remains: what is anyone actually doing with this? If your talent acquisition strategy produces a pile so large that no human can meaningfully engage with it, you don't have a strategy. You have a bottleneck you've renamed.

These aren't culture problems. They're alignment problems. And they don't get fixed by watching what the .01% of companies that invested over $1 trillion in AI and are fine stepping over the bodies says at an all-hands.

So What Do You Actually Do About It

This is where most thought leadership in our space stops. Diagnose the problem, nod along, move on. Here's what we think the work actually looks like.

Get your functions in the same room with the same goals. Not a kickoff meeting. Not a Slack channel. A recurring, structured alignment between HR, TA, Marketing, and Comms where you map what each team is saying, to whom, and whether those messages would survive a date with each other. Most companies have never done this once. The ones that do it find contradictions in the first hour.

Audit the gap between your external brand and your internal experience. The impulse is to start with an engagement survey. Don't! Engagement surveys measure how people feel about the questions you chose to ask. Instead, put your career site next to your Glassdoor reviews next to your onboarding deck next to your exit interview themes. I'd even go as far as ask the last 50 hires, what was influential to them in their job search and candidacy experience. Look at them together. The distance between those things is the distance your employer brand has to close, or it's just advertising. More data you won't look at in your ATS.

Raise your creative standards, even if it's uncomfortable. If your EVP could belong to any company in your industry with a logo swap, it's not working. If your employer brand campaign looks like the last three you've seen at a conference, it's not working. The fix isn't just hiring a better agency. It's building internal fluency so the people evaluating creative work can tell the difference between "safe" and "effective." Those are almost never the same thing. And if the goal alignment work was done first, all that creative is compounding value. This is win-win-win.

Stop treating your ATS like a strategy. Technology should serve a talent philosophy, not replace one. Before you add another AI filter to the stack, answer the basic question: what kind of relationship are you trying to build with the people who want to work here? If the answer is "none, we just need to process volume," you've identified the problem, and it's not a technology problem.

Connect your brand. This is the steel chain link that runs through all of it. A connected brand is one where the external promise, the internal experience, the candidate journey, the brand marketing promise, and the employee reality are all telling the same true story. Not the same slogan. The same truth. When those things align, you don't need to worry about what Silicon Valley is doing with their culture messaging. You're not performing. You're operating.

Ignore the Noise

Silicon Valley will keep performing whatever the current power structure rewards. That's what they do. They're optimizing for attention, not for the humans inside their buildings and the customers they serve.

You don't have to. Most companies aren't competing with Google for talent. They're competing with the company down the street that figured out how to connect what they say with what they do, and they did it without a single keynote about belonging.

There are 33 million businesses in this country that have nothing to do with big tech's identity crisis. If you're one of them, stop watching the show.

Let's start fixing the wiring.