Why Employee Content Is the Beating Heart of Employer Brand

Most organisations are producing employer content with one person, in a silo, under-resourced and disconnected from anyone doing the same work. Meanwhile, the volume of undifferentiated content filling LinkedIn and Instagram is growing — and the bar for standing out has never been higher.

Chris Le'cand-Harwood hosts his own podcast on employer branding and co-founded the Employer Content Club to build a community around the practitioners creating content in-house — because that community, he argues, barely exists at all.

Employee content is the beating heart of talent attraction — not a nice-to-have

• Branded campaign content has its place, but the day-to-day content created with and by employees is what drives real attraction
• TikTok, Instagram Reels, and AI have massively increased content volume; the only differentiator left is authenticity
• Most teams default to "river of me" content — safe, familiar, undifferentiated — because they lack the confidence or community to try anything braver
• The organisations doing it well have built a participation culture, not just rolled out a software platform

The "river of me" problem is a confidence problem, not a creativity one

• People creating employer content in-house are often a one-person function with no colleagues to sense-check ideas against
• Without community, the tendency is to stay in the middle — producing what looks like everyone else's content to avoid standing out badly
• The Employer Content Club was built specifically around this gap: practitioners sharing ideas, being brave, and hearing what actually works
• Imposter syndrome in EB content creation is solved by proximity to people doing the same work, not by strategy documents

Getting employees to participate is the real challenge — and buy-in is cultural, not technical

• Getting stakeholder sign-off and budget is a barrier, but getting employees genuinely engaged is harder
• Not everyone wants to be in front of a camera; the brands doing EGC well have built participation into how the culture works, not as a bolt-on
• The 2025 Employer Content Club event in East London drew a full room despite competing with a major industry event the same day
• The Co-Created autumn series goes deep on exactly this: how organisations started, what buy-in looked like, and what success actually means

AI and the TikTokification of content are changing the competitive equation

• More content is being produced by more organisations, with less friction, than ever before — AI accelerates this further
• The content that still breaks through could not have been generated: a real employee, a real story, a genuine moment
• The competitive advantage is not production quality or posting frequency — it is the willingness to let employees speak in their own voice
• A community of practitioners committed to better employer content raises the standard for everyone

A lot of what Chris describes plays out before a candidate ever reaches an application form. The careers site is where the credibility of that content promise is either confirmed or quietly undermined — whether the job pages feel like they were written by the same people featured in the videos, or by a different organisation entirely.

Listen to the full episode: