Most employer branding is judged on reach: how many people saw the post, how many followers you gained, how often your name came up. It sounds like growth. Usually it's noise.

Reach measures the wrong thing

Say a hundred thousand people see that you're a great place to work. Sounds good. But if ninety-nine thousand of them would never be a fit, what did you actually buy? Attention from the wrong people costs just as much as attention from the right ones, it just returns nothing.

Reaching more people you never wanted to hire isn't success. It's noise with an invoice.

The question isn't how many people you reach. It's whether the handful of people you actually want believe you're the right place.

The right people, not the most people

Relevance over reach means inverting the effort. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping, you start from the people you want to talk to and work backwards.

• Who would genuinely make this role fly? Not a persona, actual people.
• What do those people already know about you, and what should they believe?
• What message lands with them, not with a general audience?

It's a smaller, sharper game. And it wins, because your reputation gets built exactly where it counts.

What relevance looks like

The best candidates rarely apply. They're working somewhere else, quietly content, not scanning job boards. You don't reach them with a campaign. You reach them with a message that shows you understand who they are, sent under a name they recognise.

Employer branding then isn't a megaphone. It's a reputation that reaches exactly the right people, at the moment it matters. Less reach. Better conversations.