Navneet Oberoi: Employer Branding Cannot Be Solved Through Communication Alone

As organisations increasingly focus on workplace culture, employee experience and talent retention, employer branding is taking on a broader role in shaping business strategies. In conversation with Navneet Oberoi, Vice President – Employer Branding & Business Strategy at TrueBlue Advisory (TBA), we explore these changing priorities and the evolving role of employer branding in the modern workplace.

1. Gen Z candidates in India read Glassdoor reviews and employee posts on LinkedIn before they apply. What are they looking for there, and why do they trust it over a company's own careers page?

Much of a young candidate's research on an employer in India now happens on these platforms, well before any conversation with a recruiter. What they want to understand is an ordinary working week inside the company. Reviews tell them how managers behave when a deadline is close and whether people who joined three years ago have moved up. On LinkedIn, the career paths of current and former employees give them a better sense of growth than a job description can.

The trust comes from who is speaking. A careers page is the company describing itself, and young candidates read it with that in mind. Specific accounts of daily work, especially when similar patterns appear across independent sources, can carry more weight than broad employer claims.

I would add one caution. Reviews are not a complete picture either, since the people who write them often sit at either end of their experience. Many candidates know this and read for patterns across reviews. For employers, this is also why advocacy has to be volitional. When employees are handed identical posts to publish, candidates notice quickly. The more durable response is experience-led employer branding, where the organisation improves the experience people talk about and leaves the choice of what to share with them.

2. When two offers are close on salary, what usually decides it for a young candidate?

Salary gets an offer onto the shortlist, but once two offers are close, confidence in the hiring manager and clarity about the role can become deciding factors. Young candidates pay close attention to how the interviews felt and whether the person they would report to showed real interest in their development. A capable hiring manager can win a candidate even against a better-known brand.

On the role itself, candidates who can picture the work they will do in the first six months, and the skills they will build doing it, find the decision much easier. Broad statements about growth do little at this point.

Flexibility counts as well, though candidates now ask how it works day to day. A hybrid policy left to each manager's discretion is weighed very differently from one applied consistently across teams. Brand name still matters to some candidates, particularly for a first job, where it can make the next move easier. Once the offers are otherwise close, it tends to matter less than organisations expect.

3. Flexibility and purpose show up in almost every Gen Z survey. Which of these expectations can companies realistically meet, and where do employer brands tend to overpromise?

Flexibility has to work within the realities of each role. For office roles, that may mean clear hybrid arrangements; for frontline roles, it may mean predictable shifts, advance rosters or easier shift swaps. What matters is whether employees can actually use the flexibility promised.

Purpose is where I see employer brands overpromise most often. Careers content tends to describe a broad mission that many employees never connect with in their daily work. An engineer maintaining a payments system needs to see how that work affects customers and the colleagues who depend on it. When an organisation makes that link honestly and specifically, purpose becomes believable. Language the work cannot support is usually found out within the first few weeks.

I would not advise companies to stop talking about purpose. The better starting point is what employees already find worthwhile in the job. An EVP discovered from employees, and tested against what they experience, is much less likely to overreach.

4. A large share of Gen Z hires leave within their first year or two. What goes wrong in that window, and what have you seen organisations change that made people stay?

The first 90 days are an important window for checking whether the experience matches what was promised during recruitment. A manager with little time for a new hire, or a role narrower than the one described, can undo much of the work done during hiring. Disengagement can begin well before an employee formally resigns.

The second point of risk comes towards the end of the first year, when employees begin asking what comes next. If no one has had that conversation with them, an offer from another organisation can start it.

Organisations can address this by treating onboarding as part of the employer brand. Managers can prepare for the first month before the new hire joins, and new employees can be given real work early on. A conversation at the 90-day mark about whether the role matches what was described can surface problems while they can still be fixed. None of this needs a large budget, though it does depend on managers owning the experience they create. Some early exits will happen regardless, and not every one signals a failure. The ones worth attention are those that trace back to a promise the organisation made.

5. Learning and career growth are pitched heavily at the offer stage. How often does what a new hire experiences in year one match what they were told?

I would be careful about putting a number on this without reliable data. The important question is whether the learning and growth promised during hiring are accessible once someone joins.

In most cases the learning budgets and training programmes exist. Access is the problem. A new hire on a delivery-heavy team may find there is no time to use the learning platform, or that their manager does not treat development as part of the role. Career paths described at the offer stage may also depend on openings that never come up.

Organisations can narrow the gap by being specific at the hiring stage. That means describing what people in that role have learned and where they have moved within two or three years, using real internal examples. Where those examples are hard to find, the promise should be reviewed before it reaches candidates.

6. In most companies, employer branding sits with the talent acquisition team and gets attention mainly during hiring season. What has to change for it to reflect what employees go through day to day?

For employer branding to reflect day-to-day experience, ownership has to extend beyond talent acquisition. Recruitment teams communicate the employer brand well, but they do not control the experiences that shape it. Those sit with business leaders, line managers, HR operations and, increasingly, the marketing teams that own the corporate brand. Employer branding cannot be solved through communication alone, so it needs a seat where decisions about policy and manager behaviour are made.

That also requires listening through the year. Engagement surveys, exit interviews, onboarding feedback and review platforms give a steady signal on where the experience falls short of the promise. I would want that signal reaching leadership in quarters when hiring is slow, as well as before a hiring push.

Measurement has to change too. When success is judged by visibility during hiring season, employer branding behaves like a campaign function. Assessing employer branding's contribution to early attrition and retention in critical roles, alongside other business functions, gives leadership a reason to treat it as a standing priority. Talent acquisition still has a central role here, since it is often closest to what candidates hear and how they react.

7. Looking past Gen Z, which shifts in workforce expectations should HR and marketing leaders in India be planning for over the next two to three years?

The change I expect to matter most is that employees now evaluate their employer continuously, and not only when they are looking for a job. Randstad's Employer Brand Research 2026 found that 46% of Indian talent planned to change jobs within the next six months, and 32% had changed employers in the previous six. These findings relate to the Indian respondents surveyed; they should not be read as Gen Z-specific figures. Retention and employer branding can no longer be managed separately, because existing employees are both the most likely to leave and the most credible voices on what the organisation offers.

AI is the next shift, as it becomes a larger part of how candidates research employers. The summaries these tools produce draw on reviews and employee posts, so the actual experience becomes harder to paper over. As roles change, people will also judge employers by whether they help them stay employable through upskilling.

Blue-collar and frontline employer branding also remains a significantly underinvested area, and a large share of India's workforce sits there. Companies in manufacturing and logistics will need to approach these workers with the same seriousness they bring to corporate hiring. That employer brand is shaped by transport, safety, timely wages and how supervisors treat people.

Finally, employer brand and consumer brand will keep converging. How a company treats its people is increasingly visible to its customers, and both feed into a single corporate reputation.