Most employer brand problems aren't in the messaging
A candidate has two offers on the table – yours and a competitor's. The salary is within a few thousand pounds either way. The job titles are near enough identical. The candidate takes the other one, and when someone asks why, the answer is rarely about salary. It's usually some version of "I just got a better feel for them."
That 'feel' is your employer brand. It's the sum of everything a candidate managed to find out about you before they decided, plus how you treated them while they were finding out. Very little of it comes from the words on your careers page.
For insurance, insurtech and financial services businesses competing over the same small pool of pricing, underwriting, claims tech and data people, that adds up quickly. You're often not being compared against the market. You're being compared against two or three specific companies chasing the same handful of names.
What candidates actually do
Before a first-stage call, most serious candidates have already looked you up. They've read whatever reviews exist. They've found the LinkedIn profiles of three people who left in the last year and worked out how long each of them stayed. They've opened your careers page and formed a view on when it was last updated. They've read the job ad twice and decided whether the person who wrote it understands the role.
That's just due diligence. It's what anyone does before booking a holiday or buying a car. But it changes the question worth asking. Rather than "how do we tell our story", the question becomes "what's currently findable about us, and is any of it true?"
That's where we start.
Four pieces of work, in this order
1. Find out where you stand | Employer Brand Audit
An employer brand audit is the unglamorous part, and the part that changes the most minds. Vermelo look at what's publicly visible: review sites, careers pages, job adverts, your social presence, how your people talk about work when they're not being asked to. Then we look at what's only visible from inside the process. Where applications drop off. How long each stage takes. What candidates say when they withdraw. What your own recent hires say about what nearly put them off.
This usually uncovers two or three specific, fixable things. A four-week gap between application and first response. Job ads written as internal grade descriptions. A careers page saying nothing a competitor couldn't also say.
2. Work out what you're offering | Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Most EVP exercises produce three adjectives and a slide. What you need is a proper answer to why a good pricing analyst would choose you over the business down the road, with specifics behind it you can point at.
Worth being clear on the difference. Your employer brand is the reputation you already have, whether or not anyone is managing it. Your EVP is the deliberate answer to why someone should work for you rather than the business down the road. One is what you say; the other is what people conclude, and a well-written EVP won't repair a brand if the interview process contradicts it.
The test we apply is a simple one. Could your nearest competitor put their logo on your EVP and use it unchanged? "Great culture, exciting growth, people-first" survives that swap in about ten seconds. "You'll own a pricing model end to end within six months, and here are three people who did" doesn't.
The raw material for this comes from your people rather than from us. We run the research, interview across the teams including recent joiners and leavers, and turn what comes back into a messaging framework your hiring managers can actually use in a first conversation.
3. Make it findable | Content
Careers pages that answer what candidates are really asking, including the awkward questions about progression, flexibility and what the first ninety days look like. Job adverts rewritten so they sound like the person they're meant to attract. Employee stories with enough detail in them to be believable. Short video and social content that looks like your business rather than a stock library.
Volume isn't what does the work here. What matters is that when someone goes looking, they find something real, recent and consistent with what they'll hear in interview.
4. Fix the experience | Candidate Experience
You can do all of the above and still lose people at stage three because nobody told them what to expect, the interview ran forty minutes late, or the rejection went out as an unsigned template.
Candidate experience work covers the process itself: how long it takes, who communicates what and when, how interviews are structured, how offers are made, and how rejections are handled. That last one matters more than most businesses think. The candidate you turn down this year is the one you'll want to re-approach in eighteen months, and they talk to their peers in the meantime. We've written before about what a badly handled rejection costs a growing business.
Why this sits inside RPO and advisory
Plenty of firms will sell you an employer brand project. Most are working from the outside, on a brief, with no sight of what happens once the campaign goes live.
When we're running your RPO, embedded or MSP, we're inside the process. We see where candidates go quiet. We hear the real reasons for declines rather than the polite ones. We know which stage is costing you people. That gives the employer brand work a feedback loop, and something to be measured against: offer acceptance, time to hire, and the quality of what's in your pipeline. Those are the measures that matter. Review scores and careers page traffic are worth watching, but they're the symptoms rather than the result. The other useful one is whether people you turned down are willing to talk to you again.
It also works as a standalone talent advisory service if you've got an in-house team and want the diagnosis and the framework rather than the delivery. We do the diagnosis and build the framework; your in-house team delivers it.
Where to start
If you're losing people at offer stage and can't say precisely why, start with the audit. It'll tell you whether you've got a positioning problem, a process problem or a visibility problem. Those need different fixes, and most businesses guess wrong about which one they have.
Employer brand, answered
Because it does most of the deciding before you get a say. Candidates in insurance, insurtech and financial services are usually weighing you against two or three named competitors, not the whole market, and they've formed a view from reviews, LinkedIn and your careers page before the first call. A strong employer brand makes that comparison quicker to win. A weak one shows up as longer time to hire, more declined offers and a pipeline full of people who applied everywhere.
A look at two things: what a candidate can find out about you, and what happens to them once they apply. The first half covers review sites, careers pages, job adverts, social channels and how your people talk about work. The second covers where applications drop off, how long each stage takes, why candidates withdraw and what nearly put your recent hires off. You come out of it with a short list of specific fixes and a clear view of whether your problem is positioning, process or visibility.
Both, and it fails when it's only marketing. Marketing owns the visible layer: the careers page, the content, the tone. Recruitment and hiring managers own what candidates actually experience: response times, interview quality, how offers and rejections are handled. When the two don't match, candidates believe the experience. Whoever owns the project needs the authority to change the process, not just the copy.
Vermelo is a UK talent solutions specialist delivering RPO, Project RPO, MSP, embedded talent (RaaS), total talent and talent advisory & consultancy. Named Best Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Business at the Global Recruiter Awards 2025. Part of the GWV Talent Solutions Group which includes Gerrard White Consulting and FlarePeople.