Everyone talks about AI and ‘what it can do for you’. Not enough people are talking about what it’s doing to you. Particularly in the very human space that is your employer brand.
Put simply, your employer brand is what people think of when they imagine working for you. It’s not how they feel when they actually work for you — that’s called employee experience. But when they tell people who don’t work for you, that becomes your employer brand. (Brands only exist in the minds of people who haven’t used your product or service — they’re an expectation of experience. Once someone’s used your thing, their own knowledge supersedes the expectation you’ve created.)
If you let AI write stuff for you, it’s doing one of two things. It’s either distilling information that you give it into a verbal salad. Or it’s looking at what other companies say and doing its best to copy that. Both of those things take the experience of working for you and degrade it into something digestible but hardly palatable.
What we have now isn’t AI. It’s just a reasonably good search function paired with basic text generation. It takes out the grind, sure — but it destroys the craft. It contains no intuition and no reliability. It just sticks words together in the hope that those words have ‘roughly’ the impact you’re looking for.
Your employer brand is about how you treat humans. The candidate’s experience is already overwhelmingly dictated by machinery. Your applicant tracking systems, your email management systems, your resume reviewing tools — all these play a big part in the candidate experience and very few of them are designed with human delight in mind.
Outsourcing your humanity to a machine just because it’s good at guessing how a mediocre person would react is a bad trade. Whatever time you save by doing this is almost certainly going to be spent undoing the impacts your process inflicts. Your job, as a talent function, is to connect with humans. Don’t let a machine — particularly a machine you don’t feed — impersonate your values. You’re just kicking a big can of dissonance down the road.
When candidates look at your employer brand stuff, they want to know how it feels to work for you. Sure, they’ll translate the rational into the emotional (“Will this flexible work policy give me more time with my family?” is about emotional needs, after all) but they’re looking for things to connect to or recoil from. They’re looking for your personality, your values in action, and your choices. They can’t get that from some cobbled-together text written by a hyped-up search function, mostly used to improve results from other search engines.
Put some humanity in it. You’re talking to humans, after all. And describing a distinctly human experience. Make it worth their time.