How to build a global employer brand that actually travels

In this webinar, Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO and Co-Founder of Flexa, sat down with Rob Martin (Airbus), Helen Durkin (Microsoft), Klyde Gamboa (Mondelēz International), and Hope Weatherford (Camunda) to unpack what it really takes to build an employer brand at scale.

This isn’t about polished case studies. It’s a candid conversation on the real challenges, trade-offs, and lessons that come from getting it wrong and right.

So, what does it take to build an employer brand that resonates in Boston, Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Bristol all at the same time?

That’s the question at the heart of this session, as employer brand leaders came together to share practical insights on balancing consistency with authenticity, and knowing when and how to localise.

Key Takeaways

1. Your employer brand already exists. It is the lived experience of your employees, and EVP work is about surfacing and articulating that truth, not inventing it.
2. Consistency at the global level should sit at the purpose and values layer. Localisation happens in how that story is expressed, not in what the core promise is.
3. Blanket language like "flexibility" needs to be handled carefully. Define what it means for each role and audience rather than applying it as a universal claim.
4. Measuring employer brand impact is difficult for everyone. Focus on conversion data, pipeline quality and employee advocacy as indicators, and accept that some impact is long-term and attribution will always be imperfect.
5. Move past assumptions by combining data sources, market reports, AI-assisted research, exit interviews, recruiter feedback and employee surveys, with genuine listening to understand what specific talent pools actually want.

Questions from the audience 

1. What do you do to see if your employer brand resonates equally across different regions and cultures?

Helen: I don’t think your employer brand will ever resonate equally across different regions and cultures, and that’s ok. As long as the core elements of it are consistent. Everyone will value different parts. I think in order to check that there is some level of consistency, it is worth seeing what your employees are saying on various reviews sites as that is your employer brand coming to life, often is its most raw form. The wonders of AI now make it even easier for us as practitioners to aggregate that content and draw out thesmes and any areas where we may need to highlight we have issues back into the business.

1. Klyde was talking about being 'intentional and authentic', what's a good first step to start doing this for companies that have historically had more corporate messaging?

Helen: Focusing on your employees and driving advocacy. Employees are your most credible employer brand ambassadors. Through personal stories, they humanise roles, teams, and culture in ways that go far beyond brand-led claims, while their networks extend reach well beyond paid and owned channels. Candidates exposed to employee content arrive more informed, better aligned, and with stronger intent, and visible leaders and teams help reduce reliance on sourcing and paid media. Over time, sustained employee advocacy builds longterm brand equity and strengthens hiring resilience.

1. Which channels have you found most effective when it comes to building an authentic employer brand, or does it vary for you?

Rob: It varies greatly—we find that some platforms are better known in some markets than others, and some are fairly ubiquitous. The key is to meet the candidates you want to attract where they are. That often does mean managing quite a large portfolio of platforms and tools which can be complicated, the beauty is though that each has a distinct audience and each platform can be tuned to that audience to really show off the meaningful parts of your EVP for that particular audience.

Helen: Similar to Rob the channels vary dependent on the audience we are trying to attract. I think what is instead important is how you focus on driving that employee advocacy because your people have the networks you want to reach and also will be sharing about their experience of working for your brand on the right channels for the audience you are trying to reach. 

1. How do you decide what EVP features/benefits to lead with when it comes to your employer brand messaging?

Rob: We start with what our employees value the most in their experience of working at Airbus, then we’ll look at market preferences. Usually, these EVP features align anyway, which is a great sign that the EVP is where it should be!

Helen: We don’t lead with all EVP features at once. We prioritise based on role, market, and audience insight — using data, recruiter feedback, and local context to decide what will resonate most. The EVP stays consistent, but the emphasis shifts so the message feels relevant, authentic, and credible.

Consistency first, localisation second

All four organisations represented on the panel operate across dozens of countries, and every one of them described the same fundamental tension: how do you maintain a consistent core truth while making your brand feel genuinely relevant in different markets?

The answer, consistently, was to lead with purpose and values at the global level, then let local teams adapt the expression. Airbus, with more than 180 locations worldwide, uses its organisational purpose and values as the connective thread before layering on regional and national nuance. Rob Martin, Employment Marketing Manager at Airbus, described this as asking "What's our purpose as an organisation, what are our values, they're the things that pull all of these 180 sites together."

Microsoft operates similarly. Helen, Recruitment Marketing Lead for EMEA, explained that there is always a "constant truth" in Microsoft's global employer brand around purpose, culture and growth, but how that truth is presented is then tailored depending on the audience and the market.

How to make flexibility work at a global level

One of the most instructive themes of the session was around the word "flexibility," a pillar that appears in almost every company’s EVP, but can mean something entirely different depending on the role.

For a software engineer working from home, flexibility might mean hybrid working. For a manufacturing operative on a shift pattern, it might mean the ability to leave early for a school pick-up without questions being asked. For Camunda, a fully remote company operating across time zones, it means something different again.

Rob from Airbus captured the challenge plainly: "We don't talk about flexibility as a blanket thing. We push that down to a more localised level." Microsoft made a similar pivot during their recent EVP refresh, choosing not to explicitly call out hybrid working after recognising that it was inadvertently excluding their data centre workforce. The lesson is that pillar-level language needs to be broad enough to hold across roles, even if what it looks like in practice varies significantly.

Testing, iterating and measuring what you can

Every panellist acknowledged that measuring the impact of employer brand activity is genuinely difficult, and that anyone struggling with attribution is not alone.

Helen described her process at Microsoft as A/B testing across paid and organic social channels, sanity-checking messaging with local TA and HR teams, and tracking pipeline conversion data. Given that she is a team of one covering more than 60 countries, she is focused on prioritisation: "I focus where we've got the largest amount of hiring, where we've got the priority roles and skills."

Klyde spoke about bringing local business unit representatives into the process early, both to gather sentiment quickly and to ensure campaigns are vouched for internally before going external. Rob pointed to one of his most telling indicators of EVP success: "When your employees write on LinkedIn or Glassdoor and you read those reviews, it's as if they've read the EVP playbook. You know then that you've got your EVP right." 

Hope encouraged practitioners to think about talent acquisition and employer brand as a single product and to work backwards from measurable outcomes. "When you can have some data that reflects the work that you're doing, that's when you start really being able to balance the metrics."

Understanding what talent really wants and how to attract them

The panel also addressed how to understand what specific talent pools actually want, rather than assuming. The consensus was a combination of structured data sources and straightforward listening.

Rob described building a dedicated AI tool that aggregates industry reports and market data, including Flexa data, to quickly surface insights when approaching a new hiring challenge. Helen described using AI to analyse Glassdoor and Blind reviews for a specific market in minutes, then presenting those themes back to the business as an attraction strategy. The panel also touched on how data can be misleading. 

Molly shares how Flexa's own data offered one illustration of why assumptions can mislead. Research into women in senior tech leadership found that ‘pawternity leave’ significantly overindexed as a priority, while part-time and job-share options, often assumed to be key draws, actually underindexed at that seniority level.

The takeaway across all four organisations was the same: listen more than you assume, and let data, however imperfect, inform where you focus.

What mindset shift should parents focus on in 2026?

The closing question was a good one: if parents take away just one mindset shift from this conversation, what should it be?

Nahdia's answer was simple and worth holding onto. Stop trying to steer children towards a specific outcome, whether that is a particular university, a job title, or a career path. Instead, build the foundations that will serve them across many different careers, in a world that we genuinely cannot predict yet. Curiosity over certainty. Resilience over perfection.

Sandra brought it back to something even closer to home. Before we think about what our kids need to change, we need to look at ourselves first. Our willingness to model curiosity, sit with uncertainty, and keep the moral compass pointing in the right direction is what will shape how our children approach all of this.

Questions to spark a conversation with your children at the dinner table

You do not need to have all the answers to start a good conversation about AI with your children. The panellists shared a few questions they have tried at home.

"If you could teach a robot one thing about being a human, what would it be and why?"
This came from Louisa, who used AI to generate dinner table questions and then tried them on her own children. She noted how well it connected to everything the panel had been discussing about what makes us distinctly human.

"What is something you have seen AI get wrong recently, and how did you know it was wrong?"
Nahdia's suggestion, and a neat way to build critical thinking without it feeling like a lesson. It also opens up a conversation about the importance of questioning AI outputs rather than taking them at face value.

"If you had an AI assistant, what would you want it to do for you? And what would you always want to do yourself?"
Sandra's question, tried and tested at her own dinner table. Her son's answer was that he would never ask AI to be his friend, because he can hug his real friends. Simple, and quietly profound.

Key Takeaways

1. Watch the language you use. Talking about what children can do with AI, rather than what AI might do to them, makes a real difference to how they feel about it.
2. The most future-proof skills are human ones. Empathy, ethical judgment, contextual creativity, and resilience are genuinely hard to automate and increasingly valued by employers.
3. You do not need to be an AI expert. Asking questions like "how do you know that is true?" and "what has been left out?" at the dinner table is already building the critical thinking skills that will matter.
4. Access is an equity issue. Free resources exist, including the SAP Young Thinkers programme and Airbus school materials, but reaching the young people who need them most will require deliberate effort.
5. Prepare them for a journey, not a destination. The goal is not to optimise for one outcome but to build adaptable, curious, resilient young people who can keep learning as the world changes around them.