Why a glossy recruitment campaign can do more harm than good

 

Most employer brand advice says the same thing: sharpen the message, raise the production values, make the culture look better on screen. The evidence says that advice can backfire. 

Where employees feel their employer brand reflects reality, advocacy sits around +63. Where they feel it doesn't, it falls into deeply negative territory. That gap between pitch and day-to-day isn't a minor inconsistency. It's the difference between an employee who recommends you and one who warns people off.

HR researchers have a name for what's happening: a breach of the ‘psychological contract’, the unwritten expectations an employee builds, partly from what a recruitment campaign promised them. Denise Rousseau, who did much of the foundational work on this, found that once someone feels that unwritten agreement has been broken, trust doesn't just dip. It tends to collapse faster than it can be rebuilt.

New joiners meet that gap fastest. They've just compared the recruitment campaign against their first fortnight on the job, and they talk about what they find. A glossy campaign that oversells culture doesn't just fail to attract the right people. It damages retention, because it sets an expectation the organisation then has to live up to, or doesn't.

Employer brand authenticity isn't a nice-to-have layered on top of polish. Polish without truth is a liability with a delay on it, showing up three months later as an exit interview rather than at the point of hire.

Two things worth doing before the next campaign goes live:

• Pressure-test the claims. Pull out lines like ‘collaborative culture’ and check them against what your engagement survey actually says. Would your longest-serving team back the line in your next advert?
• Build in a realistic preview. Give candidates an honest look at the job before they accept it: a short video, a Q&A with the team, a shadow day, including what's hard about it. It's an old idea in recruitment, but the research on realistic job previews still holds up: fewer surprises once someone's in the role tends to mean a stronger sense that the employer was honest from the start.

This is one finding from LHH's talent attraction report. The full report sets out the specific before-and-after language for pressure-testing a claim against your own survey data before a campaign goes live. Read the full report here.