How to Build an Employer Brand That Attracts Top Talent

Building an employer brand is one of the most effective ways for growth-stage companies to attract and retain the people they need to scale. Yet most companies either overthink it or underinvest in it entirely. We sat down with Megan Bowen, Chief Operating Officer at Refine Labs, to break down what actually works — from getting started with content to building what Megan calls a “talent destination.”

Megan has built teams at companies like Zocdoc, Grubhub, and Seamless, led operations at Managed By Q through its acquisition by WeWork, and helped scale Refine Labs from six people to a team approaching one hundred. Here’s what she’s learned about employer branding strategy, and what we’ve seen work at SecureVision.

Start With Content Where Your Candidates Already Are

The simplest way to start building an employer brand is also the most overlooked: go where the people you want to hire spend their time and start showing up with content that reflects what it’s actually like to work at your company.

Megan started doing this at Managed By Q when traditional recruiting practices weren’t keeping up with the company’s growth. She began posting on LinkedIn — not job ads, but her point of view on leadership, team building, and the challenges she was solving. That alone started attracting people who shared her mindset and wanted to work on similar problems.

“When you think about building an employer brand, it’s really all about how you can create and curate content that represents what you’re like to work with and what your company is like,” Megan said. “Then how can you start distributing that content where potential people that you want to hire spend their time.”

At SecureVision, we’ve seen the same dynamic. Posting content on LinkedIn and then monitoring who’s engaging with it has been a significant source of hires. When someone relevant engages with the content, we reach out directly. By that point, they’re already familiar with our philosophy and how we operate, so the conversion rate from outreach to interview is remarkably high.

The takeaway: you don’t need a massive budget to start building an employer brand. You need a point of view and a platform where your target candidates already spend their time.

Turn Your Careers Page Into an Employer Branding Hub

One of the biggest missed opportunities in talent acquisition is treating the careers page as a static listing of open roles. Your careers page should function as a living content hub — not a page you build once and forget about.

At SecureVision, we recommend that clients treat the careers page as a content engine. Video content is critical. We advise building out a library of videos and making sure that everything produced for the careers page also gets distributed through other channels. Drop links into outbound sourcing messages, add them to job descriptions, push them out on social media. The content doesn’t help you if candidates never see it.

Megan’s team took this a step further by partnering with a pre-application content platform to build a detailed landing page for a role they were always hiring for. They had people already in the role talk on camera about the day-to-day — the challenges, the good parts, and the bad. They shared salary information upfront. Candidates could review everything before ever entering the interview process.

“Give them all the information before they apply so that when they are entering an interview process, they already know a lot of information,” Megan said. “They’ve self-qualified in many ways and you have a pretty good likelihood at that point whether or not it’s going to be a good fit.”

This approach does double duty: it strengthens your employer brand by demonstrating transparency, and it saves your team time by filtering out candidates who aren’t the right fit before they enter the pipeline.

Balance Peer Content With Executive Content

When building out employer branding content, companies sometimes lean too heavily on executive-produced material. Candidates considering your company want to hear from future peers — they want to understand the specific challenges of the role, what onboarding looks like, what to expect in the first 30 days, how success is measured, and what growth potential looks like.

Megan sees it as two distinct needs that both matter:

Executive content should be aspirational — here’s the vision, here’s the mission, here’s where the company is going. It gets candidates excited about the opportunity.

Peer content should be tactical and practical — here’s what the actual day-to-day looks like so you know you’re not getting a bait and switch. It builds confidence that the reality matches the pitch.

Both are essential to a strong employer branding strategy. Candidates want a vision they can get behind and the confidence that the daily reality matches what they’ve been told.

For companies that are serious about attracting top talent, Megan recommends investing in a dedicated employer branding role earlier than you might think. Refine Labs brought on a Director of Employer Branding to revamp their careers page, produce more content with the team, and find creative new distribution channels. Many companies two or three times their size still don’t have this function built out.

Build a Talent Destination, Not Just a Place to Work

Megan introduced a concept she calls a “talent destination” — a company that goes beyond the baseline of being a decent workplace and becomes somewhere high-performing, ambitious people actively seek out.

The key ingredients of a talent destination, as she describes them:

• Psychological safety — a place where you can show up as your true self, express your opinion, and engage in respectful disagreement.
• Flexibility — when and how people work matters less than the outcomes they produce.
• Vision — a compelling, long-term direction that’s different, exciting, and worth being part of.
• Growth — space to be creative, try new things, experiment, learn, and be challenged with clear expectations and accountability.
• Great people — being surrounded by diverse, talented, driven people you can learn from. Ask anyone what they loved about the best place they worked and they’ll say the people.
• Recognition — “The most underutilized phrase in business is ‘thank you,’” Megan said. “A genuine ‘thank you’ goes such a long way and not enough people say that.”

The shift in mindset is this: if you want to attract top talent, stop thinking about building a company and start thinking about building a place where people do the best work of their life.

Create a Feedback Loop That Actually Drives Candidate Experience

Employer branding doesn’t stop at attracting candidates — the experience you deliver through hiring, onboarding, and employment either validates or undermines the brand you’ve built. And the foundation of great experiences is a real feedback loop.

One pattern both of us see consistently: companies say they’re people-first, but they don’t have a real mechanism for hearing from their people. Leaders will ask “how do we figure out what matters?” without ever asking their employees directly. If you ask them, they’ll tell you — they have plenty of feedback.

But collecting feedback is the easy part. Implementing it is where most companies fall short. Sometimes it requires real structural changes. If you say you value work-life balance, you need the processes, capacity planning, and headcount to back that up.

Megan shared a concrete example. After a quarterly engagement survey revealed that the Refine Labs team was feeling overworked, they dug in and realized the problem was how they were assigning accounts — not every customer requires the same level of effort, but they were treating them as if they did. That feedback led to a complete restructuring of customer segmentation and workload balancing. It took about three months to fix, but because they communicated transparently about the plan and kept people updated, the team stayed engaged even during the hard stretch.

The priority order Megan uses as a decision-making lens: people’s success equals customer’s success equals company’s success. Revenue, retention, and growth are byproducts of getting the people and customer experience right — not the other way around.

And when someone gives you hard feedback, the first thing out of your mouth should be “thank you for telling me.” How you respond to feedback is what determines whether people will keep giving it.

Design Candidate-First Experiences From Day One

The final piece of a strong employer branding strategy is applying the same rigor you’d put into a customer journey to the candidate and employee journey. Map it out from before they apply, through the interview process, to the pre-start period, through onboarding and beyond.

Too many companies design interview processes purely around what they need to vet, without thinking about what the experience will be like for the candidate. And onboarding often defaults to overwhelming new hires with information to get them productive immediately, instead of thinking about how to make them feel like they belong.

At Refine Labs, when someone accepts an offer, they receive the company’s Spotify playlist, a culture playbook, a welcome kit, a computer, and some money to set up their home office. The first week is optimized not for productivity, but for making new hires feel by Friday that they made the right choice.

This also means investing in operations and people functions early. At SecureVision, we brought on a VP of ops when we were still a small team because we knew that creating great experiences required the right process foundation. Megan’s experience mirrors this — Chris Walker brought her on as COO when Refine Labs was just six people because he knew operations would be critical to scaling successfully.

Companies that wait too long to build these functions inevitably hit a ceiling and have to pause growth to retroactively figure it out. The bottom line: candidate experience is a competitive advantage that most companies still aren’t investing in. If you’re not hearing candidates proactively tell you that your process felt different and better, keep pushing.

When Employer Branding Needs More Than Content

Building an employer brand takes sustained effort across content, careers pages, onboarding, and candidate experience. For companies scaling quickly, the challenge is often bandwidth — your team knows what to do but does not have the capacity to do it while also keeping up with open requisitions.

This is where an embedded recruiting partner can help. By taking on sourcing, screening, and pipeline management, an embedded partner frees your internal team to invest in the employer branding work that makes every future hire easier.

How SecureVision Can Help

SecureVision partners with growth-stage and enterprise tech companies to build recruiting capacity and improve hiring outcomes. If your team is stretched between filling roles and building your employer brand, contact us to learn how embedded recruiting can help.