Summary: Every few months someone proves that career sites, job postings, and culture comms all sound alike. The observation is correct and the diagnosis is wrong. The field settled into a straightforward attraction-and-retention to-do list years ago, and companies in the same sector, region, and comp band genuinely are similar, so honest copy converges. There is usually no hidden differentiator the writing failed to notice. Creative does not win candidates on its own; a person weighing two offers is deciding on money, stability, commute, and their read on the hiring manager. The proof runs the other way. Absence is visible: strip out the career site, the job descriptions, any real answer to what it's like to work there, and trust and candidate quality dry up, while putting it all back makes any single piece impossible to isolate. Twenty years of attribution work has not resolved that and will not. Comms is the WD-40 of culture and understanding, and WD-40 evaporates, so the reapplication schedule nobody budgets for is the real cost. What's left as a variable is craft, and applying craft to the same to-do list as everyone else is not a compromise. It's the whole job.

I'll explain.

I've been doing this for a little over twenty years, which means I've watched the same argument get relitigated about 10 times, roughly twice a year. Every few months someone posts a chart/diagram/meme proving that career sites all sound alike, or job postings, or social recruiting ads, or internal culture comms, and everyone nods, clicks like, and nothing happens. Six or so months later, an entirely new season, there's another diagram or panic mode. The observation is fine. Correct. What gets missed is that the field settled into a straightforward EB/EVP to-do list, attraction or retention.

Here's where I'm going with this, so you can decide if it's worth your scroll: the to-do list has been settled for years. What's left to discuss and debate is the craft (a fancier way of saying excellence, professional standards, quality, etc.), and whether it's worth doing all this work well. I think it is, and not for the reason most people say.

Call it the gravity toward a best practice. Or we call it a best-ish practice. We all know what to do, or make, by and large. And if not, easy to Google or LI search. We may not always know how, or why, or where to aim, and that's ok. That's where there's room for creativity and innovation. The task list is decades old. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The content around it hasn't caught up.

What actually changed across three decades of employer brand?

A lot of people lived this arc, and I was lucky to be one of them.

The first decade was a wrecking ball. Nobody knew where this thing lived or who did what. HR wanted it, TA, which was in its infancy as a stand-alone practice, wanted it, marketing thought part of it was theirs, and everyone was experimenting because there was nothing to copy. I entered the field in 2004, saw some gaps and brought corporate/product/consumer/strategic brand development discipline to it, the Siegel & Gale kind of rigor, mixed with a little McKinsey-like few years of consulting applied to recruiting. That was genuinely new at the time. A lot of it worked. Some of it didn't, but nothing was a total bust because a lot was learned.

The second decade was a vacuum cleaner. What worked got picked up and copied. Then copied again, then flattened into a playbook you could buy off a shelf. No complaint there. It's how disciplines mature. It's also the why and how behind 150 career sites reading identically. The playbook won, and the playbook is fine, and everyone runs it. There's no reason not to.

The third decade, the one we're in, is a bridge builder. It's not a new frontier per se. The conditions changed a lot in a short period of time in a way that hasn't happened in a very long time. What we knew about attraction and retention was learned in labor markets that don't fully resemble the ones from a decade, or even 5 years ago. The work of EB, and you can say EVP too within that, is connecting what we figured out to do before remote work, before AI, before the politics became the culture, and not the other way around. What's actually in front of us is not the wrecking ball or vacuum cleaner era.

That leaves us fewer things to try from a structural point of view and call it new. It's gonna be a while before something truly innovative shows up. Of course, the tech people will say that's not true, and that a new platform or tech widget will revolutionize revolutions, but those are always new each week, gone the week after. Same around channels, whether they're really new or just marketed as new-ish.

There's an infinite number of ways to make an employee video, do employee research, create attraction campaigns, but the playbook to do those things, the to-do list, is the same as it has been for a while. That sounds like a loss. It isn't.

Why do all the career sites sound the same?

Let's look at it clear-eyed. Because they're describing similar things accurately. And anything that calls that bad is missing the point to an audience, their context, and the intention.

Easy to see: Two firms in the same sector, same region, same comp band, genuinely are similar. Same benefits, same career paths, same broad claims about growth and collaboration. The differences are real but minor: how a place is organized, what it emphasizes, how decisions move. One is making soap versus soup, not making soap versus cold fusion energy systems that fit into sneakers. They're gonna be very similar.

When everyone's comms converge, the diagnosis is usually "you failed to differentiate." I'd say the copy is honest. There's an assumption underneath the critique that a hidden differentiator exists and the writing failed to notice it. Usually there isn't one, or it's really small and not likely true for the majority. Easy to overlook.

Then what does creative actually do?

If you are responsible for EB or hiring partners for it, then this is important:

Creative doesn't get you candidates. It doesn't drive engagement. It doesn't retain anyone. A candidate weighing two offers is deciding on money, stability, commute, and their read on the hiring manager. Your video didn't enter into it. Nobody has ever read a careers page and thought "unproven." They thought "how's the money, how's the commute, and can I picture the manager."

The inverse is the proof in the pudding. Not having comms and creative pretty much guarantees you don't get top candidates, and it degrades engagement and retention on the way. There's a famous quote from the 1960s about advertising that goes, I know half my ad spend is wasted, but I don't know which half. The same is true in EB. The experiment is to turn it all off, spend 0, do nothing for a year, and measure. Any takers? No, of course not. And that's because something hard to measure doesn't mean its effects are not real. It wasn't built to be measured in the way businesses like to measure things.

That asymmetry is the shape of the impact rather than a gap in the measurement. Absence is visible. Strip out the career site, the job descriptions, any real answer to what it's like to work there, and watch the trust, impact, and quality candidates dry up. Put it all back, and you can't isolate what any single piece bought you. Twenty years of attribution work hasn't resolved that, and it isn't going to.

So why bother?

Because comms and creative aren't decoration on top of the work. They're the WD-40 of it.

Culture, collaboration, teamwork, ingenuity, efficiency: all of that runs on people understanding what a company is trying to do and where they fit in it. That understanding doesn't happen by accident. It happens through comms, made well or made badly. When it's made badly, things seize up in ways nobody traces back to the source. They just say morale is down, or the teams aren't talking, or we can't seem to get anyone good.

Worth noting that WD-40 evaporates. It loosens what's stuck, and then it's gone, which holds here too. One campaign doesn't stick. That's the reapplication schedule nobody budgets for.

Which of these three companies would you want to work for?

Three companies: one with bad comms, one with no comms, one with comms made by someone who clearly thought about the person on the other end.

Which do you want to work for?

You answered that instantly, and so does everyone. Bad and none aren't the same option, though. Silence is neutral. Bad is a message, and people read it accurately.

Nothing has genuinely changed in this field in a decade except the craft. Which is exactly why the craft is the only variable left worth having a discussion about. No need to break any corporate brand guidelines to get there either. Do the design work with distinction and excellence, because nothing else really differentiates. Throw all the ingenuity, artistry, imagination, and chutzpah at it you got. But it's totally ok to be applying that craft towards the exact same things as everyone else. Because there is nothing else. And winning does not mean someone else loses. Not at all. It means you get a gold star. Now go get another.