A brand is, quite simply, trust. After all, Steve Jobs himself once said so. And trust is built where people understand one another. This is especially true in Employer Branding, because it’s not about the company’s relationship with customers, but about the company’s relationship with the people who devote their time, energy, and often a part of their identity to it.

Understanding doesn’t happen on its own. It must be actively pursued, whether it involves the relationship with employees and job candidates or the relationship with the company as a client of an Employer Branding agency.

The first step toward understanding is empathy. And in Employer Branding, that’s exactly where every project should begin.

Empathy Is Not Sympathy

Design Thinking is a methodology for solving complex problems. It is based on understanding people before beginning to design solutions. The first step in this process is empathy.

Empathy is like walking in another person’s shoes. It’s about understanding a situation, even if we don’t share that person’s perspective. It is the ability to understand another person’s perspective, even if we don’t necessarily agree with or share it. It is a combination of attentive listening, asking questions, and a willingness to be surprised by answers that don’t fit our original expectations.

Empathy is often confused with sympathy. However, they are two distinct things.

Sympathy means feeling for another person, resonating with their feelings, or perhaps agreeing with them. Empathy means understanding their perspective on the matter, even at the cost of discomfort or disagreement.

A sympathetic consultant agrees with the client: “I understand—a career website makes sense.” An empathetic consultant will ask further: “What exactly do you expect this website to change?” Their goal is not to confirm the request, but to understand the need behind it.

In practice, this means asking a lot of questions, listening actively, and not being afraid to ask uncomfortable questions even when it would be easier to just nod in agreement.

HCEB as a Formula for Understanding

At MenSeek, we’re developing an approach we call Human-Centered Employer Branding. We combine the traditional approach with the design thinking mentioned above. At its core is understanding people, their needs, and their preferences before we begin designing any solutions.

The HCEB concept has three phases.

• Exploration involves understanding the situation and defining the actual problem.
• Creation involves generating ideas and prototyping possible solutions.
• Action involves testing and implementing them.

Empathy is at the very beginning of this process. Without it, it is impossible to define the problem correctly, let alone design a solution that will work.

Two Pairs of Shoes—Two Perspectives

In Employer Branding, we need to walk in two pairs of shoes at once.

The first pair belongs to employees and job candidates. It means listening to how people truly perceive the company as an employer, what concerns they have, what motivates them, and, conversely, what bothers them in their day-to-day experience. Without this understanding, the Employer Brand cannot be built on a realistic foundation, but only on management’s wishes and ideas about how the company would like to be perceived.

The second pair belongs to the client—that is, the company commissioning the project. The client often comes with a specific vision for a solution. They want a career website, a recruitment campaign, or a new communication tool. However, behind this request often lies a different, deeper need that must first be identified.

This skill—asking probing questions and actively listening—is not only important during project implementation. It also plays a role in the phase when we’re still competing for the contract, as well as in how we work with the client to properly define the scope and requirements of the entire project.

There’s Always Something Else Behind the Assignment

When the empathy phase is conducted thoroughly, it often turns out that the company’s real problem is different from how it was originally formulated.

A manufacturing company approached us with a request for a recruitment campaign. It wanted to attract more candidates for production positions. However, during a more in-depth discussion, it became clear that the main problem wasn’t a lack of applicants, but high turnover caused by the behavior of shift supervisors. In this case, recruiting new people would be like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Without fixing the leaks—that is, without addressing the relationship between supervisors and employees—a new campaign would only temporarily mask the growing problem.

A biotechnology company was looking for a new communication tool. It wanted to improve internal communication using a more modern platform. However, it turned out that the problem wasn’t the absence of a suitable tool, but quite the opposite—an excess of them. Different teams were using various communication channels side by side in an uncoordinated manner. In this case, a new tool wouldn’t have solved the problem—it would have made it even worse.

A bank sought support for recruiting IT specialists. It assumed the problem was insufficient recruitment efforts. The real problem, however, lay elsewhere: in an insufficiently thought-out and defined Employer Brand Identity that would clearly communicate the existence of the IT department and the roles of the people within it. Candidates simply did not associate the bank with being an employer of IT professionals. The bank lacked visibility regarding a specific aspect of its Employer Brand—not effort.

The same principle applies in all three cases. The client comes with a solution, not a problem. The purpose of the empathy phase is to step back from the proposed solution and return to the actual cause; only then can the problem be properly defined, and only then should a solution be sought.

Empathy as the Foundation of a Brand

Empathy is not a “soft” value that can be checked off at the start of a project and then set aside. It is a method that determines whether the final solution—whether it’s a comprehensive Employer Brand strategy, the development of a career website, an internal campaign, or the design of an employee evaluation system—will be based on real needs or merely on assumptions.

Formally, empathy is the first step in the HCEB concept. It is part of the Exploration phase, along with problem definition. In reality, however, it accompanies the entire project, from the first interview to the very last detail. And that is precisely why we are able to find not only the right solution, but also a way to truly bring it to life within the company.