Can employer branding still make sense?

Meaning at work—established as the number one criterion for employees in the post-COVID era and reinforced by numerous “studies”—has fueled a vast number of employer branding campaigns in recent years. A meaning that is clear, stable, and presentable. A meaning that could be formulated once and then deployed, most often anchored in corporate social responsibility and commitment. A simplification that made meaning appear capable of bringing people together around a shared denominator, regardless of role or status.

The work of Romain Bendavid in Voyage à travers le sens, published by the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, invites us to reopen a framework that has been too quickly narrowed. Meaning at work is not singular: it combines direction (the course we set), impression (how it feels), and explanation, judgment, and interpretation (the reasoning that connects values and actions). This plurality of meanings helps explain a paradox: while 79% of employees consider their work useful, loss of meaning remains one of the main reasons executives leave their companies.

Above all, meaning has become highly individualized. The collective ideal of “changing the world” has shifted toward “changing one’s own life.” The report highlights a withdrawal into individual perspectives and a consumer-driven logic of experience: meaning becomes a symbolic product to be consumed, shared, and validated. As internal recognition weakens, efforts are increasingly showcased elsewhere—on social networks, through personal narratives. LinkedIn becomes the stage where individuals construct the coherence of their own journeys. The corporate narrative no longer holds a monopoly over the story of work.

In other words, meaning is no longer an obvious collective horizon. It becomes a situated experience.

The second edition of Havas’ Employee Experience Barometer offers a complementary perspective from another angle. It reveals a significant drop in employee voices on LinkedIn (–14 points in one year), while those of managers and leaders are gaining visibility. The company narrative is increasingly embodied by a few “champion” figures.

The same shift, another symptom: plural meaning, concentrated narrative.

From this point on, asking whether employer branding can still make sense is really asking another question: can employer branding still produce a unifying narrative without misrepresenting what meaning has become?

We, as communicators, have largely contributed to—and sometimes accelerated—the reduction of meaning to what can be easily expressed. By making it formulable, we have stabilized and unified it. And in constantly seeking a common denominator, we have made the gap between promise and fragmented experiences even more visible—a gap that now fuels competing narratives, often more grounded and more ambivalent.

Perhaps the time has come to stop believing that our role is to produce a single, unified meaning, and instead to design narratives that embrace nuance and experience. We can create the conditions for individual perceptions—sometimes divergent—to be heard and to interact. This may well be where true common ground lies.

In other words, the question may no longer be how to “create meaning,” but how far we are willing to let go of the illusion of unity in order to regain accuracy.

Julie Deléaval, member of our collective