Hiring Tips Series
Importance of Employer Branding
Why top talent chooses you – or doesn’t.
Your employer brand is just as important as your customer brand. Candidates do their research, and what they see online can make or break their decision to apply.
For MSPs and IT service companies in particular, strong employer branding is essential to attracting tech talent that’s increasingly selective, remote-savvy, and growth-oriented. Here’s how to build a modern employer branding strategy that actually works.
What is Employer Branding (and Why Does It Matter)?
Employer Branding is your company’s reputation as a place to work. It’s how you communicate your values, culture, and employee experience to the outside world – through career sites, social media, employee reviews, and your own hiring pages.
The goal? To make your company the place where great people want to work. In 2025, that means showing more than just job descriptions. You need to showcase purpose, flexibility, development opportunities, and trust – the things today’s workforce really cares about.
Think about all the customer-facing news about your company – these will all influence your candidate pool. Does your company have any negative reviews? Does it have little to no online presence? All these will have an affect on your candidates so it’s important for hiring teams to actively work on some type of employer branding if they want to draw in top candidates.
Building an Employer Branding Strategy
Okay, so employer branding is important – now what?
We’ve laid out the 4 main steps to take when building an Employer Branding Strategy.
1. Set a Clear Branding Goal
The first step in building your employer branding strategy is determining your goal. This can be as simple or detailed as you like. Some examples of employer branding strategic goals are:
- Attract more (or higher-quality) candidates
- Increase employee referrals
- Increase your offer acceptance rate
- Retain top performers
- Reduce employee turnover
2. Understand Your Ideal Candidate
The next step in building your employer branding strategy is determining who you are trying to influence. What do your (future) employees value? What motivates them? You may have a large company with a diverse population, so this section can be as broad as the whole organization or as narrow as the specific type of role you are actively recruiting.
Consider these attributes:
- Experience level (entry, mid, senior)
- Job Seeking Style (passive vs. active)
- Demographics
- Location
- Motivators (growth, flexibility, mission)
3. Craft a Strong Value Proposition for Employees
Now that you’ve identified your goals and target employee attributes, the next step in building your employer branding strategy is identifying and building your company’s value proposition.
Here are some typical categories to consider when building a company’s benefits package. Do some research on each of these and conduct employee surveys to find out what key factors are motivating your current employees.
Compensation
1) Salary satisfaction
2) Compensation system
Benefits
1) Paid Holidays
2) Paid Time off
3) Insurance
4) Retirement
Career Growth
1) Skills training
2) Stability
3) Room for advancement
4) Mentorship
5) Evaluation & feedback
Work Environment
1) Office/Workplace Accommodations
2) WFH options
3) Flexibility
Culture
1) Leaders/management
2) Support
3) Trust
4) Collaboration
5) Values
4. Promote Your Employer Brand... Everywhere
Career Sites
Top candidates will research your company, often starting with major job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn – so it’s essential that your profiles on these platforms are complete, branded, and up to date. These sites not only showcase your job postings, but also provide space for company overviews and employee reviews. Regularly monitor and manage this content to ensure your employer brand reflects your true culture and values. If negative reviews exist, address concerns internally and consider encouraging current employees to share updated, honest feedback to give job seekers a more accurate picture.
Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for spreading company information. The company values (which should align with your employer branding), should be found on your company’s social media pages. This is also a great place to advertise job openings.
Work with your marketing department to create custom hiring graphics, or use the images provided by your applicant tracking software – like these:
Careers Page
One of the best places to showcase your employer branding is your company’s Employment page. This area of your company’s website should be a snapshot of everything one should know about employment at your organization.
Company Snapshot
This is where you will tell the story of your company. Be sure to tell it in a way that make people want to work there.
Here is an example of how to layout your company’s snapshot (if you don’t already have one written):
Paragraph 1) Elevator pitch about the company – 2-3 sentences that describe the company and why it’s an amazing place.
Paragraph 2) Company values, mission, and goals – what is the true purpose of the company and what is it striving to achieve. This should be both informative and inspirational. Think passionately!
Paragraph 3) Selling the benefits: Dedicated section to employee benefits and why they should be beating down your door to work there.
Signoff – Make it personal/add the human touch. This passionate and compelling piece should be from someone in senior management if not from the head of the company. Add a quote or sentence about looking forward to engaging with the candidate.
Employee Referrals
Empower your team to spread the word. Encourage them to share openings on LinkedIn and reward referrals. Candidates trust the voice of your current employees more than any marketing copy.
Following these guidelines, your company should be able to build an employer brand strategy that will help attract top candidates. 
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