Notes for owners · Branding and communication
Employer branding or recruitment advertising: which do you need first?
A decision rule for owners with a small hiring budget: when to pay to reach candidates now, when to fix what they find after they click, and how to tell which problem you have.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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You have a vacancy, a small hiring budget, and two people giving opposite advice. One says pay for adverts. The other says fix your name first. If few people have seen the vacancy, buy advertising. If many have seen it and walked away, or accepted and not joined, fix what they find when they look you up. That is employer branding. Advertising buys attention for one opening. Branding changes what candidates conclude about you for every opening after it.
What each one is
Recruitment advertising is media bought to fill a named role: a job board listing, a post aimed at candidates, a banner at a walk-in drive, a line in the appointments column. It stops when the role is filled.
Employer branding is what a candidate finds when they search for your company: the careers page, how job posts read, what staff say when a friend rings, what the reviews say. It has no end date and works slowly. Neither replaces the other, and you can start with either. Neither fixes a job that is badly paid for the work.
Four numbers from your own last vacancy
You need no software. For your last role, write down:
- How many people saw the post (the board or platform shows this).
- How many applied.
- How many you interviewed.
- How many joined.
Now use your own history for the threshold, not a figure from anywhere else. Think of the last role you filled. How many applications did it take before you found someone you would hire? Call that your usual number. If few people are viewing the post and applications are below your usual number, you have a reach problem. If it gets that many or more and the loss comes later, the problem is with what candidates find.
Read two or three vacancies before you decide, because one role is an anecdote and three start to look like a pattern. One post in a festival fortnight can look like a branding failure when it is just a quiet week for job seekers.
Which row are you in?
Stop at the first row that is true.
| If this is true | The problem is | Start with |
|---|---|---|
| Few views, and applications below your usual number | Reach | Recruitment advertising |
| Plenty of views, almost no applications | The post or the page | Fix the post, then a basic careers page |
| Many applications, mostly wrong people | The post does not say who should apply | Rewrite it, add who should not apply |
| Good people applied, then dropped out after the call | What they hear differs from what they found | Employer branding |
| Offers accepted, people did not join | They checked you after the offer | Employer branding, starting with reviews |
The table is a rule of thumb. A role paying well below the market fails every row, and no spend will hide that.
Two vacancies at one coir unit in Alappuzha
This is an invented unit, not a client. It has two openings at once: twelve workers for spinning and baling, and one production supervisor.
For the twelve workers, the numbers say reach. Few people outside the unit's lane know it is hiring. The cheap answers are a painted board at the junction nearest the unit, a message through the current staff, who know other workers, and a line in the local WhatsApp groups. No careers page is needed. Applications reach the unit's usual number, it hires, and it moves on.
For the supervisor, the numbers say something else. The post gets views and a handful of applications. Two candidates withdraw after a phone call. Both had asked what happens in slow months, when husk supply is short and the spinning lines run fewer shifts, and the owner's answer had been vague.
Buying more listings would have sent the same question to more candidates. The unit instead wrote down its practice for slow months in plain words, including which pay stays fixed and which part does not, and put those lines in the post. Settling that took the owner and a partner a week of argument, and the answer is not one every applicant likes. The next supervisor applicants were few, and two said the slow-month rule put them off, but they had read the answer before they rang. One joined. The reach problem and the trust problem sat on different vacancies in one firm, and the cure for one did nothing for the other.
When advertising first is right
Spend on advertising first when the opening is urgent, the post already says true things about the work and how pay is set, and you are reaching a pool that does not know you. Skip employer branding for roles filled by walk-ins and word of mouth, where candidates judge you by who they know inside.
When employer branding first is right
Start with employer branding when you hire the same kind of person again and again. Start there when your best candidates keep declining at the offer, or when a single bad review is the first thing a search shows. It can also pay for roles where candidates compare several employers, such as sales, design and technical staff.
Fill in the four numbers
Take your last unfilled role and write the four numbers. Then read the post as a stranger, and ask one current employee what they would tell a friend. The employer branding hub links the wider material. If you want help working out which problem you have, employer branding is the service for the trust side, and you can tell us what you need.
