How to Get Into Employer Branding

There's no single accredited path into employer branding, and that's the good news, not a caveat. The profession pulls people in from talent acquisition, marketing, communications and HR, and most hiring managers care far more about what you can show than what your degree says. Almost nobody starts their career as an Employer Branding Manager. People pick up EVP, content or campaign work inside a related job, then build outward from there until the job title catches up with what they're already doing.

This guide covers the four most common routes in, the skills worth building regardless of where you start, how to put together evidence of your work when you don't have an "employer branding" job title yet, and what to realistically expect at entry level.

Browse current Employer Branding jobs

The four common routes in

From talent acquisition or recruiting. This is one of the more direct routes in, because you already understand candidate experience, sourcing and what genuinely lands with applicants: the ground-level knowledge that keeps employer brand strategy honest. The gap to close is usually on the content and campaign side. You need to show you can produce or brief material, not just point at what's missing.

From marketing. Marketers usually bring the content, channel and campaign skills employer branding leans on heavily, plus a working knowledge of brand guidelines and analytics. The gap tends to be HR and recruitment fluency: understanding the hiring funnel, candidate psychology, and how EVP work connects to retention as well as attraction, rather than treating it purely as brand perception.

From communications or PR. Comms professionals bring strong storytelling and stakeholder management, and often already handle reputation work, which overlaps directly with managing a company's presence on Glassdoor. What's usually missing is recruitment-specific knowledge and a track record tied to hiring outcomes rather than general media coverage.

From HR generalist or HRBP roles. HR brings deep organisational and employee-experience knowledge, and usually sits closer to leadership than any of the other routes. The gap is visible content and campaign experience, since generalist HR work rarely produces anything portfolio-ready.

Whichever route you're on, Employer Branding News's overview of the discipline is a useful reality check: employer branding is built to be cross-functional, drawing on HR, communications, brand and recruiting all at once. No background is the "correct" one, and hiring managers in this space are used to weighing candidates from mixed backgrounds against each other.

Skills worth building regardless of your starting point

• Content production. Even at strategy level, you'll be judged partly on whether you can write, brief or storyboard something that doesn't read like it came from Legal. Start producing some, even informally.
• Basic funnel and brand-health metrics. You don't need to be an analyst, but you should be able to talk about application quality, offer-acceptance rate or review-platform ratings, not just how many people liked a post.
• Stakeholder management. This job runs on buy-in from people who don't report to you: leadership, hiring managers, employees you're asking to go on camera. Any evidence you can manage that, in any context, is worth having.
• Comfort with review platforms and social channels. Understanding how Glassdoor, Kununu, LinkedIn and similar platforms shape candidate perception is close to table stakes now.

Building evidence when you don't have the job title yet

Most hiring managers want to see work, not a job title. If your current role doesn't formally include employer branding, look for legitimate ways to produce evidence inside it anyway: offer to write careers-page copy, help run a recruitment marketing campaign, take over your team's LinkedIn presence, or contribute to an internal comms project that touches how the company is perceived as an employer.

Adapted to this field, a useful employer branding portfolio typically includes:

• A short professional summary aimed at the move you're making, not a generic career recap
• Two or three concrete work samples: a piece of careers-page copy, a campaign brief, a social content series, an EVP statement you drafted, even from adjacent work
• Any measurable results tied to that work (application volume, engagement, review-platform movement), labelled honestly with what you can and can't take credit for
• Evidence of cross-functional collaboration, since that's how the job actually runs day to day

Keep it tight and specific rather than exhaustive. Two strong, well-explained samples beat a long list of things you were vaguely involved in.

What to expect at entry level

Dedicated entry-level titles do exist (Employer Branding Coordinator, Employer Branding Specialist, Talent Marketing Coordinator and Recruitment Marketing Coordinator all show up), but they're rarer than manager-level openings. Plenty of people do genuine employer branding work for a year or more inside a differently-titled role (recruiter, marketing coordinator, comms assistant) before the job title catches up with what they're actually doing. That's normal, not a sign you've taken a wrong turn.

For a fuller picture of what the work looks like in a dedicated role, see our role guide on what an Employer Branding Manager actually does, and for how the career progresses from there, our career path guide.

Applying for your first role

• Tailor your CV and portfolio to the route you're coming from. Lead with whichever of TA, marketing, comms or HR experience is most relevant to the specific role, not a generic summary
• Point to specific employer branding work you've produced or contributed to, even informally, rather than listing responsibilities
• Be ready to explain why you actually want this move. Hiring managers filter hard for genuine interest over marketing generalists using it as a stepping stone
• Follow specialist coverage of the field (Employer Branding News is a reasonable place to start) so you can talk about current practice in an interview, not just theory

Current Employer Branding jobs

Browse current Employer Branding jobs on People Jobs or create a job alert to hear about new openings, including entry-level and coordinator-level roles, as they're listed.