Summary: Companies routinely put 15 to 70 employer brand promises into market at once — across careers sites, job ads, recruiter scripts, onboarding, and town halls — and a meaningful share have no internal owner and no way to measure whether they’re kept. This piece counts the promises on two real careers pages, shows how many have no one accountable for them, and argues that a broken promise isn’t better than none. It’s the most expensive disinvestment a company can make.

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“Better a broken promise than none at all.” — Mark Twain

Was he right?

Why do so many employer brand promises have no owner?

Because employer brand work routinely generates promises that were never assigned to anyone. A lot of companies are comfortable making promises. Far fewer are set up to keep them, or even to check.

“We invest in your development.” Whose P&L is that on?

“We’re a place where you can be yourself.” Who measures that?

“Opportunity to have an entire career at one company.” What’s the mobility data say?

It is not uncommon to find 15 to 40 active employer brand promises in market at any one time. Careers site, job ads, recruiter scripts, offer letters, onboarding decks, manager talking points, culture team messaging, town halls. A meaningful percentage have no method to monitor them, let alone any read on how people feel about the ones kept and the ones broken.

Do they not matter? Were they never real, just advertising copy no one expected people to remember?

What does it look like when you actually count the promises?

On a single careers site, you find dozens, most of them poetic, ownerless, and unmeasured. Without naming names, here are 20 promises pulled from a few pages of one company’s careers site. The company holds most of the top employer awards you’d recognize.

Mission / aspiration promises (8). These are the broad, narrative-level commitments. Mostly poetic, no obvious owner, hard to measure.

•       “Create the future of healthcare” with us

•       “Together, we’ll discover the solutions of tomorrow”

•       We are at “the forefront of game changing next gen solutions in healthcare”

•       You can “be the change in healthcare we want to see in the world”

•       “A workplace without limits”

•       “Together, we can achieve the impossible”

•       “Make life-enhancing differences to people’s lives”

•       “Start your career with us and develop your skills alongside our ambitious teams”

Operational promises (12). These read like benefit or program claims, ostensibly with an internal owner.

•       Culture of “compassion and belonging”

•       Mental Health: commitment to a healthy workforce, “physically and mentally,” with “benefits, facilities and support programs”

•       Colleague Resource Groups providing “a culture of belonging”

•       Parental Leave: “both parents have equal rights to take time with their newborns”

•       Flexible Working: “we want to work with you and be flexible to your work rhythms and life commitments”

•       Learning & Development: “virtual learning courses, development programs and experiential learning”

•       Total Rewards: programs “designed to develop, empower, and support you at every stage”

•       Growth Mindset: “continuous learning through imagination, curiosity, and collaboration”

•       People First: “we are powered by the people who work for us”

•       Agile: “we work with focus, speed, accountability and nimbleness”

•       Belonging: “people are empowered to create the solutions of tomorrow”

•       Equal Opportunity Employer (legal commitment, but functions as a promise in this context)

Most companies make some version of these same promises. That’s not the problem. The problem is that across the category, the same promises are largely untrue. Which means the people reading them have learned to discount the whole genre.

What happens when the promise is contradicted in public?

It stops being a quiet gap and becomes a documented one. Here’s a second one. Same exercise, different company. This one has been under intense public scrutiny for the past few years. And this is just the Culture page.

Mission / aspiration promises (10)

•       “Make every connection matter”

•       A culture of “high impact, high performance and high reward”

•       A community of “the brightest and most innovative minds in tech”

•       “Passionate, tenacious and adaptable” colleagues with “a strong desire to deliver work that matters”

•       Work that helps “expand human connection in new ways”

•       “Collaborative innovators” who “exchange ideas” and learn “from the best in their field”

•       “Original thinkers” who “value unique ideas that push us to break through what’s possible”

•       “Thoughtful risk-takers” who treat ambiguity “as an opportunity to try something new”

•       “We build and learn faster than anyone else”

•       “We push ourselves to ship things that are not just good, but also awe-inspiring”

The values (each one functions as a promise about how it feels to work there): Move Fast; Focus on Long-Term Impact; Build Awesome Things; Live in the Future; Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues.

Operational promises pulled from adjacent careers pages: “Benefits built for you and your family’s well-being”; Health and Wellness benefits; “30 Days of Recharge” (month-long paid sabbatical every five years, widely promoted as a flagship); Learning and Development programs; Flexibility and remote work options.

20 promises on the culture page and its primary children, before touching benefits subpages, the blog, or recruiter scripts. The full count across the careers surface is likely 45 to 70.

Sixteen of the 20 are aspirational and have no obvious owner. Who owns “thoughtful risk-takers”? Who owns “the brightest minds in tech”? Who owns “we build and learn faster than anyone else” after a workforce reduction sequence that totaled tens of thousands of people across multiple rounds?

This is where the gap gets sharp. The page commits to a culture of “high impact, high performance and high reward.” Within the same window of public time, the company has executed multiple rounds of performance-based separations and characterized those as removing “low performers.” That promise wasn’t broken in whispers. It was inverted in full public view, and the careers page copy has been left untouched.

The page reads like it was written for the 2021 hiring market. The 2024 to 2026 operating posture is something else entirely.

Three lines doing the most damage when stacked together: “High impact, high performance and high reward”; “Thoughtful risk-takers” who treat ambiguity as opportunity; “Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues.”

Read those against the public record of the workforce reductions and the framing that accompanied them. Then ask which role inside the company is accountable for closing the gap, or for retiring the promise.

So was Twain right that a broken promise beats none?

No — in employer brand, a broken promise is the most expensive disinvestment a company can make. Promises are easy. Keeping them is effort. Measuring the gap between what you said and what people lived is arguably the most important part. Without it, how would you ever know where you stand?

The question isn’t whether companies can do this. It’s whether anyone is responsible for it. And whether anyone is counting the cost. Twain was wrong. A broken promise isn’t better than none. It’s the most expensive disinvestment a company can make.