2024 Mid-Year Employer Branding Trends
And just like that, we’re halfway through 2024!
This past December, we predicted six employer branding trends for 2024. Some have already materialized (increase in global storytelling, check), with additional new themes emerging in the first part of the year.
In this post, we’re sharing the five employer brand content trends we’ve seen dominate the first half of 2024 — inspired by our current employee storytelling projects and what we’re hearing as major priorities from our audience of EB, communications, and people leaders.
Trend #1: Strategic Hiring Content
Since 2020, there’s been a lot of pressure on companies to communicate their universal company culture: pandemic response, focus on DEI, navigating return to office, and a “Great Resignation” that created the most candidate-driven job market in living history.
With U.S. job openings at their lowest level in three years, the current “employer’s market” is shifting EB leaders’ focus from general culture messaging to strategic hiring content that highlights key positions and job categories at their company.
Think day in the life videos, team storytelling, and job ads — especially for competitive technology and engineering positions.
This shift to strategic hiring content makes sense. When candidates believe they have fewer options, they are most focused on the specifics of the job they are applying for. While candidates will always be invested in your company culture, strategic hiring content was long overdue for a refresh.
Trend #2: Spotlighting Global Offices
2024 has been a year for global storytelling. A third of our 2024 employee storytelling days have been outside the United States, most notably in global tech hubs: Guadalajara, Dublin, Bengaluru and Tokyo, to name a few.
In the same vein as strategic hiring content, we’re seeing more clients complement their global culture content with location-specific content that supports global hiring efforts. In addition to talking about how company culture is universally experienced around the world, employer brand leaders are leaning into what makes specific offices unique.
We see this strategy coming to life through compilation videos, employee spotlights, and photo libraries for landing pages and career sites. Which brings us to…
Trend #3: Career Site Refresh
2024 has seen a resurgence in career site refreshes. In fact, 60% of our new client work this year has included career site content.
To dig into this trend, we analyzed the career sites of the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list and found that:
- Just 52% of companies on the list had professional employee photos on their career site.
- Only 35% of career sites featured a video created post-pandemic (2022 or more recently).
Refresh needed, indeed! Along with the general shift towards strategic hiring content, it is easy to see why many employer brand leaders are focusing their efforts on refreshing their career sites.
Trend #4: Visual Storytelling
We’ve seen the style of employer brand videos evolve a lot over our decade-plus of uncovering employee stories. So far in 2024, we’re seeing more of an emphasis on visual storytelling to complement the stories being told on-screen.
Current media trends support this shift: on today’s major channels, audiences typically see your story before they can hear it. And as employee storytelling becomes the norm for employer branding content, more compelling visuals are a way to add value and differentiate your brand from the rest.
Some ways we are seeing visual storytelling play out include:
- Talking heads with a twist: wide angle, centered interviews that feel more like a docu-series than a corporate video. Also, walk-and-talk interviews throughout an office.
- Environmental b-roll footage: capturing footage of the surrounding town or city to create a sense of place around the office.
- Planning ahead: identifying key visuals in advance enables you to plan the b-roll that’s relevant to specific storytellers — reserving specialized equipment, getting permits, etc.
- Simple, minimalistic graphics that complement the footage instead of competing with it.
Watch this example from Stellantis to see how the visuals enhance Michelle’s story:
Trend #5: Employee Storytelling is (finally!!) an Always-on Strategy
The final 2024 mid-year trend is that employee storytelling has finally* reached the status of an always-on content strategy. Rather than reacting to employer brand challenges with a one-off storytelling project, companies are recognizing the need for employee storytelling all year long.
We credit this trend to a noticeable shift in how companies are planning their content. We’re already seeing 2025 planning this spring and summer, budgets requested earlier, and an increase in retainer-structured partnerships to allow for more agile content creation.
Employee storytelling’s graduation to an always-on communications strategy is proof of the continued growth of the employer brand industry and bodes well for the space in 2025 and beyond.
What will the rest of 2024 bring?
From global storytelling to career site refreshes, 2024 has already been an exciting year for employee storytelling content. We’re eager to see what the rest of the year has in store.
Do you have trends that you’d add to the list? Email Bernadette Van Gieson at bernadette@storiesincorporated.com to share what trends you’re seeing in employer branding content right now.
*Here at Stories Inc., we have known employee storytelling should be an always-on strategy all along!