My wife sleeps in on weekends. After I get my son fed, the dog walked, coffee made, a workout in, I often take off on research tangents. To each their own. Last Saturday I spent an ungodly amount of time mapping the hardest, most painful unsolved problems in brand, employer brand, and talent leadership. This is what I do for fun.

The list was long. None of it was surprising if you've been in this world for a while. The EVP that gets read aloud to employees and produces blank stares. The culture that lives in a PowerPoint but nowhere else. The brand work that looks fine and has the emotional weight of a washcloth. The ninety-slide presentation whose recommendation was, essentially, redo everything and humanize it.

A long article should probably have a long list. Here's the shopping list of problems I found:

• Organizations can't articulate what makes them visually distinctive at a level deeper than aesthetics.

• Brand governance at scale is effectively unsolved.

• Brand systems are still built for static use in a world that's anything but.

• Measurement of brand design ROI is still basically made up.

• The ethics of visual culture is a leadership gap.

• The EVP is drifting from lived experience at most organizations, and everyone knows it.

• Internal mobility is broken and nobody has fixed it.

• Skills-based hiring is the right idea with almost no operational infrastructure.

• Culture is owned by nobody and measured by proxy.

• The manager layer is collapsing under contradictory demands.

• Employer brand in the AI-displacement era has no playbook.

• Workforce trust has a structural floor problem.

• The visual and verbal language of employer brand has almost no craft standards.

• The brand-culture connection has no common language across functions.

All of it known. The better question isn't what the problems are. It's what would it take to tackle any of them.

That question is what this piece is about. And after twenty years in this work, the answers keep getting more interesting.

The EVP problem is a value problem

We can't talk about any of this without talking about EVP. Whatever that approach means to you, it was originally intended as a segmented model for creating and communicating value through employment, relative to different career areas. You might not be familiar with the creating value part, and that's probably why it takes so much heat. That part wasn't well understood, or well communicated, in McKinsey's War for Talent article and the book that followed in the late 90s that kicked all of this off. That's not a fault of the concept.

A bus driver, a nurse, and an AI engineer all want to experience value through their employment. Plenty of things they'd all agree create value: compensation, benefits, work they like, people they like working with. But there are a lot more ways to create value than that, and that's where the biggest gap exists between a tool and a strategy.

A sewing machine is a tool. Mastering it is a skill. Making quality clothing is a process of innovation. Making a shirt that millions of people love, buy, and proudly wear is an art. Taken together, that's a strategy with an action plan. Ask any of those customers what the value proposition is and you'll get a bell curve of responses, with the big middle of the curve saying how it makes them feel.

Most EVP work starts by asking employees what they want. The answers come back in the same shape every time. Compensation. Growth. Flexibility. Good colleagues. Every company, every industry, every survey. Which is why most EVPs sound interchangeable and produce the blank stare when they get read aloud. The mastery, the innovation, the action plan, and the art of communicating all got averaged down to indistinguishable. No fault of anyone in particular. A concept that didn't get fully baked.

The straight-talking observation after a couple of decades of this is that people don't really know what they want. They’re way more open to discovering a gem than they can put in words. They know how they want to feel. That distinction matters, because feeling is where the actual differentiation is. A company can't be the best everything, and nobody could really judge that anyway. A company can absolutely be specific about what it feels like to work there, if it's willing to look honestly at the answer and wider than one whiteboard.

A food industry CEO once told me flatly that he was going 100% in-office. I walked through the talent attraction risks. He didn't care. Anyone who didn't want to be together wasn't a fit, period. Move on. No research would have produced that clarity. But because he was honest about it, the work we built on top of it was honest too. And better for it.

Please, for the love of God, stop building messaging around fictional personas

The field borrowed persona work from consumer marketing years ago. The persona itself originated in the fragrance industry, where marketers couldn't figure out how to sell a scent and so invented fictional characters to write to. A clever approach materialized, and fans of Mad Men will recognize it: full backstories, interests, daily routines. All invented.

It's worth asking how useful a fiction is when the subject is a career. Choosing a fragrance is low stakes and reversible. Changing jobs is one of the most identity-laden, financially consequential decisions a person makes. And, for a lot of people today, this is done repeatedly, across a career. The emotional complexity of that decision isn't in the same universe as the perfume that inspired the method.

There are better tools. Career path profiles, for one. Aggregate maps of how real kinds of people wade through career decisions, built on value expectations and experience research rather than invented character. A project manager or a cashier at a specific career stage makes assumptions that aggregate with surprising consistency. The profile captures the assumptions, the fears, the comparisons, the feelings at each decision point. It gives all stakeholders, from creative to culture to internal comms, a real map rather than a fiction.

A healthcare client once shared persona work another partner had made for them. The characters had fun names like "the go-getter," "the world-changer," "the shoulder to cry on." None of it helped understand the reasons healthcare professionals made career decisions. It didn't explain where my client aligned with candidate expectations around functional value or identity value. It provided no insight on the intentionality and emotionality that would connect to anything real internally. It entirely overlooked the importance of storytelling in content strategy. And yes, I had to be the bearer of bad news, because the work couldn't be activated on top of it.

How do you judge creative work

One thing that helps is naming the creative options upfront. The more honest, the better. Do you want incremental improvement, significant improvement, or out-of-our-minds improvement. The question clarifies the expectations of what is to come and gives everyone permission to choose. The answer is often incremental, which is fine if that's what the moment calls for. It's worth noticing, though, when a brief asks for bold and the decisions that follow approve incremental. The gap between what gets requested and what gets chosen is where a lot of the disappointment in this work comes from.

A large retailer told me on a pitch discovery call that they wanted groundbreaking, out-of-the-box ideas the world had never seen. I walked through all the caveats I could think of. Innovation doesn't come with proof of ROI. Groundbreaking means unfamiliar. All of it. If I hadn't heard them say they’re ok with all of that with my own ears, I wouldn't have believed it. They not only wrote it in their communications to me, they confirmed it live. Then they hated everything we did, because it was groundbreaking, out-of-the-box ideas the world had never seen. What they ended up doing was indistinguishable from what they already had. No one besides themselves would notice anything changed. 

The most useful thing a CHRO can do when commissioning this kind of work is get perspective from outside the closed loop. Benchmarking exercises help a tiny, tiny bit. Actual outside perspective from people whose craft was formed in disciplines with different calibration, able to swap hats and see like an audience, that's where real insight lives. That's harder to find than it sounds, and it's probably the single highest-leverage move available for shaping this work better.

Employee research versus employee experience

Surveys built around stated preferences give you a list every competitor can match. What's worth collecting is what people are actually feeling at the decision points that matter. Harder to collect, harder to hear, and where the differentiation lives.

Most briefs in this field are some version of "solve all our problems." That's not a brief. It's a request for someone to figure out what the brief should be, which is a different engagement and worth talking about up front.

A technology powerhouse headquartered far from Silicon Valley came to me for an EB reimagining. They thought their more exurban location was working against them in talent attraction. Because it was one division, albeit the largest, we called it a microbrand. Digging in, I saw a culture like few before it. This is tech, the copy-and-paste industry, too. By changing the protocol for how we learned about culture, we explored how value was created, experienced, and lost. Much of it was counterintuitive to what we thought we knew about tech.

We assumed the cool project mattered most. We learned it was the inspiring boss. We assumed advanced tech was the draw. We learned it was the freedom to choose tools, because that's how people actually built skills. We assumed the zip code was the issue. We learned it was the zip code inside the building. We assumed stock options were the story. We learned it was empathy in total rewards. We assumed innovation was the obstacle. We learned it was the information silos and fiefdoms that made innovation hard to execute. We assumed the next new thing was the pull. We learned it was feeling empowered to solve any problem in new ways.

That much insight infused the work to levels beyond anything coming out of Silicon Valley. And boy did it work.

No one knows whose problem it is, but everyone knows it's not theirs

The work gets better, way better, out of engagements where the CMO, CHRO, and CFO are working from the same outcome framework. Cost of hire is a finance metric and a brand metric and a culture metric simultaneously. When the goals are built around outcomes rather than functions, people stop defending their territory because the territory stops mattering so much.

Engagement scores tell you sentiment. They don't tell you whether the brand you're projecting matches the culture people are actually living. That gap, between what your careers site says and what candidates find when they cross-reference Glassdoor, Blind, and Reddit, is the most important brand metric in this work. If that's not part of your engagement assessment, it should be.

EB helps an entire organization. Why is it usually one department's budget

Most companies treat brand and culture work as a cost buried under general admin or recruiting. That classification determines who owns it, who has authority, and whether it survives a budget cycle. The argument is that this work is closer to a capital investment. A new product line is a capital investment. A technology implementation is a capital investment. A brand and culture system built right does the same thing. Reduces cost of hire, reduces turnover, protects reputation, compounds over years. The reclassification conversation with finance is probably the single most leveraged one a CHRO can have, and it rarely happens. Why not?

Over a period of six months, a client kept complaining about budgeting for important EB work. If I could have done the work pro bono, I would have. They were a great company with great people. But she couldn't ask for more. I asked if she'd ever had a capital investment conversation with her people. Never. I explained the logic. She loved it. A week or so later she asked me to put a business case deck together. A week or so later she asked me to fill in some gaps. A month or two later she called to tell me they were reclassifying the work as a capital investment. It landed so strongly with their CEO and CFO that they apologized to her for not seeing this sooner. The budget didn't increase. It got sized to the value it was expected to build across the enterprise. A budget transformed into investment strategy, and two commas got added.

What if your team is a team of one

It happens. It's not a lost cause. For a small team, the way a movie gets made should inspire. Specialists with different kinds of expertise brought together around one outcome, with layered responsibilities nobody defends individually because everyone is serving the film. The director doesn't do the cinematography. The cinematographer doesn't write the script. The actors don't do the catering. They all serve the same thing. Recruit internally like you would if you were making a movie.

Need outside help? The combined force that actually works on problems like these isn't an agency in the traditional sense. Research discipline, brand strategy, design craft, writing, cultural diagnosis, financial argumentation, all held together by whoever is keeping the whole thing pointed at the outcome.

Where this goes

If any of this is familiar. The Saturday morning realization that the problems are known and the solutions aren't getting built. The ninety-slide presentation that didn't really recommend anything. The EVP that everyone nodded at and nobody believed. The more interesting conversation is about what gets built in response.

The conversations I find most helpful these days start with someone saying, "why can't we solve this?" We can. We have. Do you want to?