What Employer Branding Means and How to Measure It | Andre Oentoro

Most companies say they care about employer branding. But they have no idea what they are measuring, how much to spend on it or how to tell whether it is working.

Andre Oentoro has spent 15 years helping companies close that gap. He founded BreadnBeyond in 2008 as a graphic design agency, evolved it into an animation and video branding firm, and has spent the better part of a decade producing employer branding campaigns, onboarding videos and recruitment content for companies that want their culture to land with the right people.

In this episode #8 of Xobin Talks, host Amrit Acharya, Co-Founder and COO of Xobin, sits down with Andre to define employer branding properly, establish the metrics that matter, explore where video fits in, set realistic budget expectations and understand what the future of employer marketing looks like.

What Is Employer Branding, Really?

The Definition: Employer branding is the work of creating and promoting a company's identity and reputation as a place to work.

Andre's framing is broader than most. The employer is not always a company. It can be an individual professional, a university research department or a solo founder hiring their first employee. The brand is whatever potential employees, current employees and the wider public perceive about what it is like to work with you.

That perception is active whether you manage it or not. Companies that think they do not have an employer brand simply have an unmanaged one.

Why Identity Is the Hard Part: Defining company identity is where most employer branding efforts stall. It is easy to say "we are innovative" or "we have a great culture." It is much harder to make those claims concrete enough that they are believable and consistent across every touchpoint a candidate encounters.

Andre points to Google and Apple as examples of companies that have solved this. When someone is offered a job at Google, they rarely hesitate. Not because Google pays the most, but because the culture is clearly enough defined that candidates already know whether they belong there before they walk in the door. That clarity is not accidental. It is the product of years of deliberate, consistent employer branding.

What Metrics Should HR Use to Measure Employer Branding?

Employee Satisfaction: The first metric Andre identifies is employee satisfaction. This is measurable through surveys, 360-degree feedback and pulse checks. Satisfaction levels show what the culture is really like, which is the best indicator of your employer brand's future.

A company can publish all the right content about its culture. But if the people inside are not satisfied, that gap will surface in Glassdoor reviews, in referral behavior and in attrition data. Satisfaction is the foundation.

Employee Retention: Retention is the second metric. If employees are consistently leaving within two to three years, that is a signal of misalignment between what the company promises and what it delivers.

The data on this is well established. Companies with strong employer brands reduce turnover by 28% (LinkedIn, Workplace Insight). That reduction is not the result of better pay alone. It is the result of candidates self-selecting based on accurate expectations and of existing employees feeling pride in where they work.

Volume and Quality of Candidates: The third metric is the applicant pipeline: both volume and quality. If the number of applicants for open roles is declining while the industry is stable, something is wrong with the employer brand, not the market.

Andre is careful about this. External factors such as economic conditions, industry trends, and competitor sign-on bonuses can affect application volume. But when the broader environment is stable and applications are still falling, the employer brand is the variable to examine.

Quality matters as much as volume. A strong employer brand attracts candidates who are pre-aligned to the company's culture and values. 72% of recruiting leaders say employer branding has a significant impact on hiring outcomes (Apollo Technical, 2025). The highest-leverage impact is not just getting more applicants. It is getting applicants who are already a good fit before the first interview.

How Does Video Fit Into Employer Branding?

More Than a Hiring Video: The instinctive use of video in employer branding is the recruitment video, which is a polished, two-minute clip showing happy employees and a nice office. Andre's framing goes much further.

Video serves employer branding across the entire employee lifecycle. Recruitment videos attract candidates. Onboarding videos introduce new hires to the culture. Training videos communicate how the company operates and what it values. Every one of these assets is either reinforcing or contradicting the brand the company claims to have.

Social media posts featuring video content drive 48% more engagement from candidates compared to text alone (Market.biz, 2026). That reach advantage makes video the highest-leverage format in employer branding. But the content of the video matters more than the format itself.

Brand Consistency Across Every Asset: Andre makes a point that most companies miss. If a company positions itself as fun, every video it produces must communicate that. Not just the recruitment video. The training video on compliance. The onboarding video for new hires. The LinkedIn post from the HR team.

Consistency does not happen by default. It is designed. Color palette, tone of voice, character design, and pacing all of these elements signal brand identity to viewers whether or not the company intended them to.

One Video Is Not a Campaign: The second point Andre emphasizes is continuity. A single employer branding video does not build a brand. But a consistent campaign over a year or more does.

This is where most employer branding video efforts fail. A company invests in one strong video, posts it, sees initial traction, and then moves on. Six months later, the brand signal has faded. The companies that build genuine employer brand recognition through video are running continuous content on LinkedIn, in onboarding, and in internal communications that all point in the same direction.

What Should the Employer Branding Budget Be?

10% to 40% of the Hiring Budget: Andre's answer is intentionally a range: 10% to 40% of the hiring budget, depending on context.

The lower end is appropriate for companies in stable industries with moderate competition for talent and a reasonably healthy employer brand. The upper end applies to companies in industries with high natural turnover, declining interest from candidates, or a significant brand deficit that needs active repair.

Why This Range Is Defensible: Strong employer branding reduces cost-per-hire by up to 50% (LinkedIn, cited by Apollo Technical). If a company is spending a substantial budget on job ads, agency fees and recruiter time every year, investing 20-30% of that in employer branding to reduce those downstream costs is a straightforward business case.

The challenge is making that case to leadership. HR is frequently positioned as a cost function. Employer branding is often the line item that gets cut first when budgets tighten.

Andre's framing for making the case: employer branding is not a marketing expense. It is a hiring efficiency investment. Every rupee spent on building the brand is a rupee that reduces what needs to be spent on filling roles that the brand should be making easier to fill.

How Should Employer Branding Differ Across Channels?

The Strong Link Between Recruitment and Marketing: Andre's most conceptually useful observation in this episode is that recruitment and marketing are mirror images of each other. Marketing is how a company reaches potential customers. Employer branding is how it reaches potential employees. The coin is the company itself. The two sides face in different directions but come from the same material.

That framing has a practical implication: channel selection in employer branding should follow the same logic as channel selection in marketing. You fish in the right pond. For some talent profiles, that is LinkedIn. For others, it is Glassdoor, GitHub, college campus communities or niche industry forums.

Platform-Specific vs. Consistent Content: The question of whether content should differ by platform is one Andre answers contextually. The brand identity stays consistent. The format, tone and length adapt to what each platform rewards.

A long-form culture story works on LinkedIn. A 15-second behind-the-scenes clip works on short-form platforms. A detailed careers page narrative works for a candidate doing deep research before applying. The same underlying truth about the company's culture is communicated differently depending on where the candidate is in their decision-making process.

Good Culture Self-Propagates: Andre ends with a principle that all of the tactical discussion above depends on. Good culture attracts more good culture. When the right employees are in the building, they create the conditions that attract more people like them. Employer branding accelerates that process. But it cannot substitute for the underlying reality.

No employer branding campaign can survive on false promises for long. Candidates who join because of misleading information often leave within a year. As a result, their Glassdoor reviews can damage the value of the original campaign investment. In employer branding, authenticity is more than an ethical responsibility, it is also a business necessity.

Building an employer brand that attracts the right talent starts with understanding who you are actually hiring. Structured AI interviews and role-specific skill assessments help you identify candidates whose values and capabilities match the culture you are communicating.