Employer branding isn’t logos and awards - it’s candidate experience. Learn why sloppy hiring processes can ruin reputation and how to fix it.
You can run fancy employer branding campaigns. You can polish your careers page. You can sponsor every “Best Place to Work” award in town. But if your hiring process sucks, that’s your real brand.
The disconnect nobody talks about
Here’s what most companies don’t realize: developers don’t judge you by your LinkedIn posts or the stock photos on your careers page. They judge you by how you treat them during the recruiting process.
- Did you ghost them after a final interview? That’s your brand.
- Did your process take six weeks with endless hoops? That’s your brand.
- Did you dodge the salary question until the very end? Yep — also your brand.
Developers talk. Reddit threads, Discord servers, daily.dev Squads, Slack groups - they all swap notes. A clunky candidate experience spreads faster than your employer branding budget ever could.
Why this hits harder in tech
Tech candidates, especially developers, are hypersensitive to the hiring experience. Why?
Because they have options. Good engineers aren’t desperate for jobs. They know they’re in demand. So when they run into sloppy processes, they don’t think, “Oh, this is just how recruiting works.” They think, “If this is how they treat candidates, how do they treat employees?”
That’s why one bad interview loop can kill your reputation with an entire talent pool.
The usual excuses (and why they don’t hold up)
I’ve heard them all:
- “We’re moving fast, we can’t reply to every candidate.”
- “The hiring manager is slow with feedback, it’s out of my hands.”
- “Comp is confidential until the final stage.”
Look, developers don’t care about your internal bottlenecks. To them, it all feels like disrespect. And disrespect is the fastest way to lose trust.
Fixing the brand you didn’t know you had
You don’t need a six-figure employer branding campaign. You need to fix the basics:
- Close the loop. Even if it’s a “no,” send the message. Silence is worse than rejection.
- Be transparent. Share comp ranges and role details upfront. It builds trust instantly.
- Cut the hoops. One practical coding test beats three take-homes.
- Move fast. Developers interpret delays as disinterest.
Do these, and your “brand” starts to take care of itself.
The real lesson
Your employer brand isn’t what you say. It’s what candidates experience. And in tech recruiting, the candidate experience is often broken.
At daily.dev, we hear it directly from developers: ghosting, vague processes, endless loops. They’re tired of it. Which is why they gravitate to places that respect their time and give them clarity.
So if you want to win the recruiting game, start with the thing you control right now: stop treating candidate experience as an afterthought. Because it already is your brand.
