Ep 814: The Science Of Storytelling In Employer Branding

0:00Many employers will say that they're using storytelling in their employer branding activity. Very few of them are actually telling stories at all. There's established science behind how stories persuade, and most employer branding content doesn't come close to applying it. So what does real storytelling look like? And how can it help you attract and retain the right people? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Paradox. You know, I've recently heard some crazy success stories when it comes to hiring with AI. FedEx is sending offers to candidates within 10 minutes. General Motors saved$2 million in recruiting costs in a year.

0:45Chipotle reduced time to hire from 12 days to four. And 7-Eleven is saving their store leaders 40 ,000 hours per week. The craziest thing is all of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology. Paradox. Acquired by Workday in 2025, Paradox pioneered conversational hiring. Whether acting as your ATS or automating the hiring process on top of your existing HCM, Paradox streamlines the entire experience. And if you're a Workday customer, Paradox now operates seamlessly within their talent acquisition suite as the Workday Paradox Canada Experience Agent. Driven by a 24-7 AI assistant, Paradox can handle up to 95 % of the hiring process for deskless hiring teams, or just automate specific, time-consuming tasks like screening, interview scheduling, and onboarding to allow recruiters to focus on recruiting.

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2:13There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine, And of all the ages of history.

2:27Hi there. Welcome to episode 814 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Storytelling might be the most overused word in employer branding. Every company claims to tell stories, yet most of the content being produced sounds the same from one company to the next. and AI is about to make the problem significantly worse by flooding every channel with even more identikit messaging. The science behind how stories work on the human brain is well-established, comprehensive and much harder to apply than most people realise. The employers who understand it are creating content that connects on an emotional level, while everyone else is just adding to the noise.

3:15So what separates real storytelling from content that just claims to be a story? My guest this week is Susanna Rantanen, founder of employer branding agency Amin and author of the book Story Driven Employer Branding. In our conversation, she shares why so much storytelling isn't actually storytelling at all, what the science tells us about how stories persuade and how employers can use them to attract and retain the right people. Hi Susanna and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

3:55With pleasure. So my name is Susanna Randanen and I'm the founder of Emboya Branding Agency in Finland. I'm also the author of Story Driven Emboya Branding and the creator of Magnetic Emboya Branding Method. Fantastic. And just give us a little bit of an insight into your background and how you've got to do what you do now. Yeah, thank you. I initially wanted to be and studied to be working in marketing and communications. Did my university studies in UK, graduated in 2000, moved back to Finland, and quite soon found myself accidentally in an HR role. And that was kind of my bath or bath to the HR world.

4:41Obviously, with this marketing and especially writing background and more like a keen interest to produce whatever I'm doing through words and stories, I quite quickly adopted that to my work also in HR. I did loads of HR, loads of development, loads of leadership training and mentoring them to how to communicate internally and persuade their team members to do a good work. So later on, branding came along. And that for me came from a company where I worked as an HR communication manager. And we were heavily expanding in Europe. This was a Finnish or it's a Finnish company. And I realized that even though that we had been very successful in Finland in hiring and we were really known as one of the best places to work.

5:44And when you started opening new offices in other countries, obviously no one knew anything about us. We were a B2B business, so all that kind of marketing was only targeted at business people, not to candidates or job seekers. Then from that work, I realized I have to start talking about the culture and what I felt that made us special and obviously also to integrate that kind of thinking into those country offices and into their, you know, how they work together and so on. That was like my sort of way into employer branding. Employee branding as a term wasn't really used at the time. It was first invented it like 1996 or something like that.

6:33It was just intrusive. Then after working there, I started my own business, a startup back in 2010. I wanted to develop and provide the market with a recruitment system that would match mine with missions, which meant that matching organizations based on their organizational behavior as in culture with job seekers, personal work behavior, how they like to, how they prefer to work. I did that for about five years and realized that I was way too early on the market and it didn't work out. But during those years, we started also developing employer branding agency, Emine. And this was really focusing on how to create content around those recruitment processes so that employers who are hiring could differentiate themselves based on their workplace culture.

7:39At the time, companies didn't have any blogs. So we literally opened a blog on the blogger platform, called it behind the job scenes and started writing these stories and articles for our clients and promoted that site on Facebook, which was like booting at the time. And it made such a difference. And it really created, as one of our clients at the time said, it created a tsunami among the job seekers because they were able to really understand And what are the differences between, for example, different software developing companies? And about two years, we did that alone. And then the market started to copy it.

8:21And it was time to move forward and think about what branding is. How can you do this outside a recruitment process? because what we realized is that if you only focus on marketing and talking about your culture and your people and so on, doing a recruitment campaign, those are very short. At the time, those were like 30 days, but these days they are like anything from like 7 days to 14 days. Referring to yesterday, it ends. It's not enough time to actually win attention, to make a target audience curious about the opportunity, and then also to get them actually call to action, which means to prepare their application and send it forward.

9:16Most of the times, if you think about, if you have like a 7 to 14 days application period, what is actually the likelihood that the candidates that you really want to attract are going to be looking for a new job during that short period of time? So that was how I started to work with the first versions of the Magnetic Employer Branding method. Cool. And we'll come back to talk about that method in a second. Before we do, though, what are the current challenges are you seeing in employer branding? What is the landscape like at the moment? Yeah, I still feel that it's a lot about how do we get more applications.

9:55And I feel that that leaves a lot of employer brand value on the table. As said, it's too late if you only pop temporarily for a few days for a couple of weeks when you need to hire. And then it's also too little in terms of being remembered, being understood, or becoming trusted, becoming attracted to by the external audience. But I think that one of the main challenges is that we leave a lot on the table when we think that this is only about your external audience. Ever since I became an entrepreneur, we've worked mainly with companies that are going through very fast growth or some kind of a major business transformation due to the times.

10:49And oftentimes it's the internal audience that actually matters to you most more than the external audience. So I feel that that was an important gap to fill. How do we as an organization make sure that the people that we have, that they believe in this change, regardless of the fears, the change they might have, and how do we make sure that they become excited and inspired and empowered about the change? So that's what I feel like the greatest differentiator of what this method brings to companies as opposed to how anyone else's employer branding. So your method's the magnetic employer branding method.

11:37You've also got a book about it. Tell us a little bit more about it. How does it work? I'd love to. So basically, we're talking about an ongoing communication system. So instead of those campaigns, we are constantly building a dialogue internally and externally with pretty much the same content. We can reach both internally and externally because what we've also learned over the years is that employees tend to look for the content that is available on social media by their company or by their peers. So you actually get more impact when you tell them and invite them to do story and share them what's going on externally.

12:23The main thing for me was how can we use social media? This was I first initiated this in 2005. So obviously the social media marketing landscape was very different. I always said that as a former HR person, this was like the gift from the sky for HR and recruiting people who never have a budget for anything. It was, you know, free. And basically the method is about how to attract, retain, and empower the right people through meaning, relevance, emotion, evidence, and story. And the word magnetic, I feel, is impulsion because the goal is not to chase everyone, not to impact everyone, not to persuade everyone, but to create this kind of a strong enough pull and connection that the right people will feel.

13:21like this sounds like a place for someone like me or if I already work there many of our clients have employees who are being headhunted all the time so I tell them that this is also like when they are being headhunted and they're thinking like should I stay or should I go so this work needs to give them the confirmation that I'll pass thank you I'm gonna stay

13:52absolutely and it's always interesting because we talk a lot about storytelling and employer branding and recruitment marketing just every day in fact in business people are always talking about storytelling i think what a lot of people don't ever kind of necessarily realize or really dig into is that there is an established science that sits behind storytelling and persuasion isn't there? I mean, tell us a little bit more about the kind of the scientific basis around this. Yeah, I'm glad you asked because I think this is one of the things that really bugs me. I've been studying this science of storytelling since 2005, 2006.

14:30And the more I've learned about it, the more I understand how actually comprehensive it is, how scientific it is, and how difficult it And then when people keep saying like, oh, we're doing storytelling. And I'm like, no, you're not. So it kind of bugs me. But basically, we as human beings, we were wired to understand stories. And the science of story is older than 2000 years old. So from those caveman times when we used smoke to communicate with each other, literally. And the human brain is wired for stories, remember information in patterns, in structure, through emotions, and social cues. There are many areas in our brain that are impacted based on research.

15:24I mean, research has been done for over like 70 years about this. Those areas that are influenced are, for example, the mirror neurons. So when you identify a person or a situation that you feel relevant to, it's kind of like you're looking at a mirror and seeing yourself. So that makes that situation, that person, that story attractive to you. There are areas, for example, where dopamine is released, which is like a glue. So it memorizes that story in your mind. Many, many areas that I'm not going to go into deeply into that science. But basically, when you actually apply the science of storytelling, it is many, many, many times more impactful as a method of communication than any other form of communication.

16:21So when we list information, such as employer benefits, they may inform people, but they don't connect with them necessarily. They don't make people think about what does that mean to me in my life? How is that relevant? And same goes for any sort of data that obviously businesses communicate a lot. Also, the other thing is that even though we were wired to understand stories, we were not wired to tell stories. So that is actually a skill that we can learn. So I find it really exciting having used storytelling for such a long time to see the difference in how that impacts people, how does that make people feel.

17:09We have so many customer cases where we've written stories, you know, use storytelling to write articles for employee stories, job posts for our clients where they actually start crying because they felt so emotionally connected with that story, with that text. and it's really a powerful way to communicate. And I suppose on that, just give us some examples of employers who are doing this really well. Well, one of our longtime customers, Airbus Defence and Space Finland, part of the Airbus group, but in Finland they don't do planes. We've been working with them now for over three years and every single post on social media is formulated in a way where we position the employee or the job seeker as the hero of the story.

18:12So it's always about a person that we've defined what is that persona like and that is based on their culture, based on the kinds of roles that they have and based on their values and so on. And when you've worked with someone for such a long time and every month you go through the data and you see the impact and the influence, it's just like, I don't even know how to describe it. It's like really gives me the chills, what the impact is. And what I find the most rewarding for us is that when we started this work with them, we asked a lot of employees to participate in this and i would say that the majority is not something i want to do i don't want to be part of anything like that and then when we were able to get a few people in and create those content and stories about them and their experiences and then the other people saw that internally more and more people who had very strongly refused to take part, came back and said, like, oh, it's not what I thought it was.

19:24And you still make sure about me. Something that is always quite hard for companies, a lot of our customers also ask, like, how do you get employees to actually take part and engage in this? They have today so many employees who, without any of our guidance anymore, regularly produce leadership kind of content on LinkedIn and make it visible externally what they do, what they work at, what are they, you know, have a company changed over time. What's the business that they do, even though it's very confidential? I love that example. And what was the impact of AI? on all of this? What are the implications of AI revolution?

20:09I think that AI will change employee branding massively, but not necessarily in the ways that we're now using it. So I think that the obvious impact right now is the productivity question. So AI can help us create content faster, analyze data, repurpose material, personalized communication, support recruitment, marketing. This is all very useful. But I think that the bigger implication is that AI will flood the market with more and more average content. And I think you also saw this when social media came and companies realized that, oh, we can now be our own sort of media and do our own press releases and content and share our news and stuff and all of a sudden you had like poor and really bad stuff on the internet.

21:05So I think we're going to see the same. So there's going to be more posts, more job ads, more content on career pages, more like people first, culture, messages wearing the same kind of cardigan. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think the importance of standing out and connecting with your audience has never been higher. as we're just drowning in slop everywhere, particularly on LinkedIn. Just as a final question, kind of bring this all together for us. What do you think the future looks like for employer branding? I believe that the future of employer branding is much more strategic. It's also all about human to human, and it's very much connected to business transformation.

21:56And with this, I'm not meaning necessarily a transformation like a new strategy or merger and acquisition. But as this environment and this world is moving forward so fast, it requires all of the business to adapt, so transform. So I think that the future of employer branding is connected to that. Also, more and more B2B organizations understand that actually our company brand is our people brand because our people are daily in connection with our clients. And if they actually either build the trust, build the relevance, communicate the results, and put that client on this like a hero position, if they don't do that, then obviously that's going to harm the business.

22:54With that, I think that recruitment function and the campaigns that we do for recruiting, which are still in present, are going to be seen as a different entity as employer branding. And with recruitment, what impacts employer branding is not just the content during the promotional campaign, but the actual candidate experiences and what they talk during the process, especially if they were declined. And what are the initial experiences of what I call the newcomers, so new employees, during those very first weeks, months in the company? So I see that as a larger hole that will influence the employer brand.

23:45Absolutely. Susanna, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me. My thanks to Susanna. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at RecruitingFuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time, and I hope you'll join me.

24:25This is my show.

24:38Thank you.