You have an employer brand.
You invested in the EVP. You made the career site beautiful. You shot the employee videos. You agonized over the messaging.
And then…
you put it on your career site and hoped people would find it.
That might have worked when people went looking for jobs.
But that's not how discovery works anymore.
Today, people discover restaurants they didn't know existed. Makeup products they didn't know they needed. Hotels they weren't planning to book. Creators they've never heard of.
And increasingly, they discover companies and jobs the same way.
Through an algorithm.
It's competing with everything.
The person you desperately want to hire isn't necessarily sitting on LinkedIn thinking:
"I wonder which companies have a compelling employer value proposition today."
They're watching a video about their favorite football team.
They're looking at vacation ideas.
They're scrolling through recipes.
They're laughing at an otter.
They're doing literally anything except searching for your open role.
And then your content appears.
That's the moment that matters.
Because job discovery happens before job search.
The algorithm doesn't care that your employer brand team spent six months perfecting your EVP.
It cares about signals.
What does this person tend to watch?
What do they engage with?
What makes them stop scrolling?
What have people like them responded to?
What should appear next?
That's the new battlefield for talent attention.
This is where recruitment marketing and employer brand have traditionally had a bit of a weird relationship.
Employer brand creates the story.
Recruitment marketing promotes the opportunity.
The career site houses everything.
But none of those things inherently solve the first problem:
How does someone who isn't looking discover you?
That's a distribution problem.
And distribution is becoming increasingly algorithmic.
Your employer brand may be exactly what someone would want to know about you.
But if it never enters their feed, it might as well not exist.
We have historically measured employer brand through things like awareness, perception and engagement.
Recruitment marketing has focused on clicks, applications and conversions.
Those metrics still matter.
But there's another question we need to start asking:
Are we getting into the discovery layer?
Are people encountering your company before they're actively looking?
Are they seeing your people?
Your culture?
Your opportunities?
Your stories?
Are they encountering you in a context where they weren't expecting to?
Because that's where the magic happens.
And this is exactly why people-powered distribution matters.
An employee, creator or advocate doesn't just distribute a piece of content.
They introduce your company to their audience.
The algorithm already knows something about that audience.
It knows what they watch.
What they like.
What they share.
What keeps them scrolling.
So instead of asking someone to leave the feed and go search for your employer brand, you can meet them inside discovery itself.
It's just the new gatekeeper.
The question isn't whether your employer brand is good enough.
The question is whether it's discoverable enough.
Because the next great candidate might never search for you.
They might just see you.
And that's a very different talent strategy.
Before AI answers, the algorithm decides what people discover.