Why the truth is the one thing AI can't fake - A conversation with Steve Ward

Why the truth is the one thing AI can't fake - A conversation with Steve Ward

Steve Ward, founder of the Employer Brand Club, joins Chris for a proper journey through a career that started with a painfully shy kid doing teacher impressions in a Nottingham school panto and ended up reshaping how he thinks about branding, recruitment and trust. We go right back to the beginning. A first recruitment job built on fear and cold calling that he came to despise. Three redundancies in a single year. A mentor who spotted his strategic mind. And the hand-drawn A3 CV that flipped a switch and pushed him toward creative, personal outreach over scripted selling. From there it's the founding of Cloud9, the move into social recruiting before anyone took it seriously, and the build of a community-first agency where people were hired to create trust rather than chase placements. The second half gets into where the industry is heading. Steve makes the case that young people have grown up so surrounded by fake, AI-generated content that anything too polished now reads as a warning sign. His answer is to shift from a sell mindset to a trust mindset, show the real story, warts and all, and protect the human voice that AI can't replicate. He shares a story from an AstraZeneca shoot that sums it all up. A brilliant conversation about authenticity, reputation and why the truth is the one thing automation can't fake.

Comfortable conversations don't build great employer brands - A conversation with Emily Firth

Emily Firth, co-founder of The Truth Works. From a decade in advertising to building an award-winning employer brand team at Booking.com, she's now tearing up the agency model with a platform that connects companies directly with verified fractional EB experts. We get into gatekeeping in the industry, why your uncomfortable truths are the gift, and how lean teams can get senior thinking on tap without the six-month retainer.

17 Years shaping the industry - The story of Google Dave Hazlehurst

Dave Hazlehurst spent 17 years at PH Creative, which later became Human Magic, helping build employer brand into the discipline it is today. He's worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet, spoken at LinkedIn Talent Connect, and trained more people in this space than most would care to count. This episode is a proper debrief. Dave recently left the agency world after nearly two decades (who knows for how long), which made for a conversation with very little to protect and a lot worth saying. We cover the origin story — four people in a Liverpool office doing websites for solicitors, a career site pitch at Nationwide that changed everything, and a chance Peroni in a Dublin hotel bar that led to a LinkedIn keynote. Then we get into the stuff that actually matters. Why EVPs are broken by design. Why employer brand is too focused on the outside and not enough on the inside. Why the function needs to stop expressing culture and start driving it. And why AI is quietly making most LinkedIn content look the same. If you've worked in employer brand for five minutes or fifteen years, there's something in this one for you.

Building a brand that connects - With Niall MacMillan

Niall Macmillan has 10+ million followers across social media. You probably know his face. You might not know his name. You definitely know the milk. He's the awkward POV guy. Silent, non-threatening, and somehow one of the most watchable people on the internet. In this episode, Chris sits down with Niall to talk about how a green screen, a glass of milk, and a string of happy accidents built a global audience — and what that means for how companies should think about the people already inside their walls. We get into the power of being relatable over being polished, why your most introverted employee might be your best content asset and Niall's parting advice for any brand that wants to stop being bland... "Reveal the creatures. Let them be your Avengers."

Why Employer Brand has an ROI problem (And what consumer marketing figured out years ago)

Chris is joined by Dylan Lees-Jones, European Recruitment Marketing Manager at Wipro, for a conversation that gets right to the heart of one of employer brand's longest-standing frustrations: why does a function with so much proven impact still have to fight so hard for boardroom credibility? Dylan brings a rare dual perspective - A career that started in consumer and B2B direct marketing before moving into employer brand and he uses it to cut through some of the noise around metrics, measurement, and making the case upwards. They cover a lot of ground, including: * Why now is genuinely a tough time to ask for budget and why having empathy for that pressure actually makes you a more effective EB practitioner * The preparation problem — why so many teams go live on campaigns without agreeing upfront what success actually looks like, and how to fix it * Quality of hire vs vanity metrics — what the board actually cares about, and why chasing volume without defining the right candidate profile creates an attrition cycle nobody wins from * The lifetime value gap — why employer brand is sitting on one of its most powerful commercial arguments and not yet using it, and what consumer marketing figured out decades ago that EB still hasn't fully applied * The halo effect in practice — Dylan shares a real example of switching off radio advertising to prove its value, and what that means for how EB teams should think about attribution * Collaboration as the unsexy answer — why misalignment between EB, TA, HR, and senior leadership is quietly undermining even the best work The episode closes on a genuinely exciting idea: that AI could be the thing that finally makes Employer Brand Lifetime Value measurable and what that would mean for how the C-suite views employer brand investment. If you've ever been in a room trying to explain why your work matters and felt like you were speaking a different language, this one's worth your time.