Start with the talent - Veerle Bens on employer branding that begins with the audience

Most organisations only discover what employer branding is worth at the moment it starts to hurt. Vacancies stay open too long. Scarce candidates pick the competitor. Or the opposite: the pile of applications is enormous and almost nobody in it fits. Only then does the conversation turn to the employer brand, and by that point it is already late.

Veerle Bens, founding partner and Head of Strategy at MonFri, knows that pattern from both sides of the table. She has worked agency side, and client side at bol, Rituals, Air Traffic Control the Netherlands and Booking.com. “Employer branding is a long-term strategy. Sometimes you only notice later: damn, we should have done something about this. And by then you are too late.”

Why does employer branding reach the agenda so late?

Because it only feels urgent once a gap appears. And because the people who have to arrange it rarely get the room to look far ahead. “Employer branding teams are often small, while internally they have to get big things done”, Bens says. “You have to build support, free up budget and explain what you contribute to the business.”

That is exactly why MonFri exists. Bens is building the agency she would have wanted across the table as a client: strategic, data-driven and close to the business, rather than a campaign dreamed up apart from the numbers. The agency is one year old and already works for Picnic, Rituals, Hanab and VluchtelingenWerk, among others.

What changes when you start with the talent instead of yourself?

Almost everything. “A lot of employer branding starts from the organisation: what is our culture, what do we stand for and how do we take that outside?” MonFri reverses that order. “Once the question, the business metrics and the KPIs are sharp, we start with the talent. Who are you looking for? What moves that group? What do they look at, what do they click on, what matters to them? That is what we want to dive into first.”

That happens through research, search data and behavioural data, not through assumptions about what an audience would like to hear. Only then do the other two perspectives come in: who the organisation is as an employer today, and who it wants to be. At the intersection of those three sits the employee value proposition.

What does that look like when you want more women in technical roles?

Different from a classic recruitment campaign. Bens describes a client with exactly that question. “Our research showed that career switchers were not looking at technology at all when they wanted something new. They immediately thought: that is not meant for me, and carried on searching in the fields they already knew.”

That changes the task fundamentally. You do not need a better job ad, because the job ad is never read. “Then you first have to earn attention and let them experience the trade or the sector, instead of immediately asking whether they want to apply.”

So MonFri flipped the sequence. No vacancy up front, but films and stories starring the women already working in technical roles. Strong, honest and above all recognisable. Not a recruitment message, but a reason to keep watching. Anyone who got curious could come and spend time on the job: a day, or two months, for as long as it took to feel whether the work suited them. The decision came only after that.

Which question are you actually solving?

Before anything gets made, MonFri looks at the numbers that already exist. How many applicants come in, and how many of them genuinely fit? Where in the funnel do people drop out? Which profiles are structurally missing? How long does a vacancy stay open, how high is first year turnover? And which number does the work ultimately have to move?

“The question from an organisation is often: we want to attract more talent. But is that really the question?”, Bens says. “Maybe you already have enough applicants and the problem sits in the application flow. Or the process takes too long. You have to know what is actually going on first.”

That baseline defines the assignment and immediately gives you the starting point to prove results later. “If you fix up front which number has to move, afterwards you can show exactly what it delivered.” And sometimes the answer is that no campaign is needed at all. “Not every question calls for a big campaign. Sometimes the answer is a better career platform, a shorter application process or content that stays visible all year.”

Why does an employer brand have to be a filter too?

Because volume on its own tells you nothing. Bens saw it at Rituals: a strong consumer brand attracts candidates effortlessly, but the number of responses says little about the quality of the match. “You want to be a magnet and a filter. You want to attract talent, but the right talent.”

That takes an honest picture of the organisation, including where it chafes. A brand can trigger completely different associations among consumers than the daily reality on the floor. Rituals stands for calm, relaxation and moments for yourself. “But employees end up in a high-performance culture.”

That is precisely the kind of trait that belongs in the employer story. Candidates can then judge for themselves whether it suits them, which raises the odds that the match holds up beyond the first day.

What can AI do in employer branding, and what can it not?

This is where Bens sees the sharpest difference from ordinary marketing. “You buy a product, you take a job home with you. It becomes part of your life.” An employer promise has to be delivered by real colleagues in the end. Creativity helps you earn attention, but the distance to reality must not grow too wide.

That matters more now AI makes it easy to produce content quickly. MonFri uses the technology heavily itself, just not on the substance side. “For scale and speed it is brilliant. You can make variants faster, test more, roll out wider. But an employer story is human work. Why fake someone you could simply film?”

She describes a recent shoot day where employees started sharing their stories spontaneously, before they were even in front of the camera. One woman told how she only found her current trade around the age of forty, and finally found what she was looking for in it. “Those are the stories you want to hear when you are doubting whether a job like that is for you.” That is exactly what no model can produce.

Why does recruitment not stop at the signature?

Because a hire who leaves after ten months is not a hire. Employer branding therefore does not end at the application. Internal ambassador programmes help employees share their own experiences and raise engagement and pride at the same time.

“The candidate journey does not stop at the hire for us”, Bens says. “You recruit in order to keep people.” That also means the first months count in how the work is judged: first year turnover is not an HR figure standing apart from the campaign, but one of the numbers the work is held to.

How does MonFri approach this?

By bringing strategy, creation, content, platforms and media together instead of spreading them across three parties. MonFri sits under one roof with sister agency Wolfstreet, so production connects directly to strategy and distribution. For larger organisations the gain sits mostly in that coherence, Bens argues: the time between signal and adjustment is short. “Based on campaign data we can steer media straight away, make different content or take on another part of the candidate journey.”

Just as important is what happens next towards the organisation itself. MonFri helps build the business case and reports back on the KPIs agreed up front. “As a client I would have loved an agency that also helped build internal support. That together you can show: this is what we are going to do, this is why, and this is what it will mean for your business.” There is more on that approach on our services page and in our article on employer brand strategy.

Curious what this means for your organisation? Call 020 23 38 587 or email hi@mon-fri.com.

This article originally appeared in Dutch on Adformatie: Employer branding: begin bij het talent, niet bij jezelf.