With skills shortages spanning multiple industries and markets, few companies can afford to miss out on talent. With research showing that more than half of job seekers will not apply to a firm after reading negative feedback, the strength of an employer brand is critical. But how can organisations protect themselves, and what is the role of PR in building and protecting their reputation?

Having an optimised employer brand is essential for any firm looking to engage target candidates and secure key skills ahead of its competitors. Several elements contribute to the external perception of a company as an employer, but while to many PR is often more closely associated with maintaining corporate reputations or boosting investor confidence, it can also be applied to help businesses recruit.

Despite economic challenges, the job market remains competitive and employers are facing ongoing and entrenched skills shortages, meaning that every advantage counts when it comes to talent acquisition.

In today’s recruitment world, we often focus on the metrics—time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and turnover rates. These numbers matter, but they don’t tell the full story. What truly drives long-term success in recruitment and talent management is something less tangible: meaningful connections.

In today's competitive job market, in-house recruitment marketing teams face significant challenges. According to our latest report, 73% of these teams have seen budget reductions, while 87% are dealing with increased workloads. As we begin to see signs of optimism on the horizon for the economy, demand on in-house marketing teams is only going to increase. So, what’s in store for 2025 and how can professionals best navigate this landscape?

In what remains a highly competitive job market, creating a positive candidate experience can make all the difference between securing a new candidate, or losing them to a rival. But what elements contribute to this experience, and how can employers optimise their hiring processes?

Ask someone to think about PR and it’s likely their minds would bring up images of glamour, lots of drinking and, if you’re of a certain vintage at least, Absolutely Fabulous. Alas, times have changed. While it would be lovely to spend afternoons schmoozing with journalists in fancy bars, that’s sadly an outdated view of our industry. Most people have a broad understanding of what PR is, but few know how it really works, and why every in-house hiring department looking to boost its hiring should have a specialist agency in place.

We recently looked at the importance of building a strong employer brand – which is particularly key now, before the job market rebounds in the coming months. But what does a good brand look like? We’ve outlined some examples with key takeaways from each.

Authenticity is a key trait for any hiring expert, and it’s becoming increasingly important as a cornerstone of wider external communications strategies. Here’s why it’s become critical for agencies to be more honest with their audiences, and how they can develop their authentic voice.

Despite falling vacancies, skills shortages remain a core issue for businesses. In-house recruitment teams are facing tough competition for the best talent. And as the UK economy and labour market begin to show signs of optimism, no doubt attracting the best people is going to become tougher.

The extent of skills shortages in the UK and indeed globally are well-documented. There’s no denying that companies are increasingly struggling to find the critical skills they need, despite falling vacancies. With green shoots on the horizon for the economy, businesses are understandably focusing on how they can both tackle current resourcing gaps and build talent pools that are sustainable for a fast-growth future. But it’s not going to be easy.

Inhouse hiring teams have a lot on their plate with sourcing, interviewing, vetting and recruiting candidates and the myriad other tasks they deal with on a day-to-day basis, so it’s only natural that some things may get overlooked.

Even the biggest, most successful firms need a strong and well-developed employer brand. You could be a world class employer doing amazing things for your staff, but without this brand in place you will struggle to hire the skills you need and will miss out on talent to your rivals. However, it’s one thing building and developing this brand over time, you also need to consider whether it is still relevant in the drastically different employment world in which we’re now operating. So how do you keep your brand relevant and ensure it is up to speed with the demands and motivators of the modern workforce?

Employee Value Propositions (EVP) have traditionally focused on the workforce as, well, workers, and not much else. However, like so many other areas in the modern employment world, this has changed. But why is the traditional proposition on shaky ground and what must employers to do when adapting their EVP?

The employment market is evolving rapidly, you won’t need us to tell you that. However, businesses that want to win the war for talent need to evolve their employer brand in line with it, rather than risk being left behind. Here’s why it’s so critical to regularly assess where you are carry out an EVP audit.

While not quite as much has shifted post-COVID as many expected during the height of the pandemic, it’s obvious that some areas of life have changed dramatically, perhaps most notably, the employment market.

The importance of having a strong external consumer or customer brand enables your customer base to know that a product they invest in will have a certain level of quality and is obviously recognised as a fairly fundamental part of almost every business, but many firms aren’t aware that they also need a strong brand in order to recruit staff for themselves. But why is an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) so important in the modern world?

Personal branding is something that recruiters are often asked about, but many don't know what it is or how to get started. Personal branding for recruiters is about becoming a known entity within your industry. And it’s about creating a consistent persona across all your different platforms, so your audience knows what to expect from you. One of the key ways you can improve your personal brand is by creating content that builds trust with people who are interested in what you have to say.

Recruitment businesses need three things in order to be successful:

When it comes to personal representation, talent development is as important as image development. Building a brand requires a great image. Building a great image requires having fantastic talent. Recruiting fantastic talent requires putting a great learning and development (L&D) strategy in place from the very beginning. Utilising a great L&D strategy is increasingly becoming the norm in organisations. According to the 2019 L&D Report compiled by findcourses.co.uk, a massive 72% of industry-leading organisations use L&D in their recruitment process. More than half believe that it gives them a competitive advantage, while 39% take L&D even further, using it is a decision-making tool when promoting talent. Why? The numbers speak for themselves. Organisations that use L&D in this way have a 22% lower staff turnover rate, with much higher levels of staff satisfaction with their roles. But how do you put a great L&D strategy together in the first place?

When I’m speaking to new contacts in the recruitment and HR sphere I often find myself being asked during recruitment marketing discussions: “what is employer branding and why does it matter?” (this usually stems from a conversation where I’m explaining what we do here at BlueSky PR that makes us more than just a PR firm!) So, having faced the question again recently, I thought now would be a great time to jot down some useful information.

Unless your organisation is an Instagram or a Snapchat and you’ve developed some as yet unidentified method of apparently creating huge amounts of revenue, it’s pretty clear that people are the key to any business. Your employees and what they know are generally what differentiates you from the competition and as much as you might think your fancy CRM, or the PlayStation you have in the kitchen make your company what it is, it’s actually your employees. This makes winning the war for talent – your own talent – absolutely critical and, as we all know, the race is fast and intense in the recruitment industry. Every firm is battling for the best and brightest in the market with the vast majority using little else but salary and bonus options to attract their next critically important employee. That’s clearly not enough and at a time when many of your rivals are likely promising the world and everything in it to their potential employees, you need to go that extra mile to recruit the talent you want. However, fear not, we’re here to help – PR can make all the difference when it comes to recruiting for your own firm. How?

As recently as a decade ago if you wanted to find out what it was like to work at an organisation you’d have to track down someone who worked there, or hope that the firm had a particularly proactive marketing manager who uploaded information about the employer brand on to the company website. However, times have changed. Now, company information is everywhere and if platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter aren’t enough, then firms also have to contend with portals like Glassdoor, which can give the full ‘warts and all’ story whether the company wanted it or not. Simply paying someone a good salary and expecting them to be happy doesn’t cut it anymore. People want a ‘nice’ employer, particularly at the ‘millennial’ end of the market. In fact, 69% of respondents to a Glassdoor survey revealed that they wouldn’t take a job with a company that had a bad reputation and an impressive 84% would consider leaving their current jobs if offered another role with an organisation that had an excellent corporate reputation.