The Research Is Already Done — What Do You Do With It Next?

Employer brand equity is built over time, not in a campaign

Employer brand equity is built from a long tail of published, credible and specific content that accumulates over time. To have an impact, it cannot just be feel-good content. It needs to be rooted in the lived experiences of your workforce and corroborated across different media types.

The Ahrefs research from 2025 is instructive here: branded mentions and citations of specific claims carry far more weight for AI answer engines than backlinks do. Semrush’s 2026 data corroborates the direction. What this means in practice is that employer brand equity, in this context, is accumulative, not a campaign you run. It is ongoing. It needs to be always-on by design, built through a sustained output of credible, evidence-led content.

Most employer brand teams are not set up to think this way. The reason, I think, is structural: communications and employer brand functions traditionally sit within HR or Talent departments and operate like journalists. They report. Something happens, they cover it and issue a press release. Research arrives; they announce it.

Their instinct is to respond to events, rather than develop a sustained point of view or narrative through an always-on strategy.

Let alone protect and grow it.

From reporting on events to building a sustained narrative

My argument is for employer brand teams to think and behave more like marketing teams: take a dataset, turn it into an insight and build a programme of sustained activity from it. And use whatever data is relevant to help adjacent functions deliver against workforce expectations. They all need a different relationship with research and how they use it. This matters because the research sitting within most employer brand teams is not trivial. The question is how it is used to build an internal and external narrative: specific, searchable and structured around the questions audiences are asking.

To do that, employer brand teams need to mine and work with the uncomfortable truths about their business and understand how they compare with their peers in the areas that matter most to employees in their sector. This content already exists in public, written by your employees. It is the source material that AI systems cite and play back to anyone asking questions because it carries weight through authenticity and consistency of output.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust research makes this point clearly. Employer branding that uses purpose and culture messaging as a substitute for material evidence of fairness has lost much of its leverage with employees. The audiences your employer brand content is meant to reach have absorbed a decade of purpose-led employer brand copy. What moves them now is evidence: specific claims, grounded in data, that speak to real conditions of work and can be tested against their own experience or that of their peers.

Build your content programme on evidence

Externally available evidence and your existing intelligence about your workforce need to be the foundation of your employer brand content programme. This includes sector data on workforce pressures and changes, sentiment findings on what your people value and what they do not, and benchmarks against your named competitors. All of this provides material for a long tail of activity to actively manage, protect and grow your employer brand equity.

This is where our employer brand intelligence capabilities come in, with a pragmatic approach. The research most clients already hold tells a partial story: internal data, structured questions and the official version of what the organisation believes about itself. What is almost always missing is the external layer: what employees say publicly, without being asked, and how that compares with named talent competitors.

When we add that layer, the picture becomes comprehensive and real rather than aspirational. It is no longer a workshop’s best guess at what the EVP should be. It is a connected view of what it is, where it holds up under scrutiny and where it does not.

Practically speaking, employer brand functions need to:

1. Act like marketing functions and use evidence-based data to publish continuously.

2. Identify challenges within the workforce through internal and external data, then build content that addresses these concerns.

3. Understand what questions prospective talent and investors are asking about what working at your business is like, then build the answers.

4. Measure reach and impact by assessing how your employer brand appears in AEO.

The organisations building genuine employer brand equity right now are not the ones with the most sophisticated research programmes. They are the ones with the discipline to publish proactively from it.

Get in touch with IDX to find out more about how we are helping our clients.