Sophie Taylor
I spoke to a tech company recently about one of the biggest challenges facing Scottish businesses: attracting talented people.
I expected to hear about an increasingly bleak landscape where competition for certain skills is fierce, young people are leaving for bigger British cities – or going overseas – and levels of skilled migration into Scotland remain insufficient.
That might be the reality for many firms, but this particular business reported a healthy pipeline of brilliant candidates.
Even more interesting – for a communications professional, at least – is the fact that the company in question doesn’t run recruitment campaigns or invest in targeted talent attraction strategies.
What it does have, though, are happy employees. People who love coming to work every day.
As a result, it has a core group of passionate advocates for the firm. Not ‘official spokespeople’, carefully media trained to say the right things, but rank-and-file staffers who are telling their stories – and the company’s – in their own words.
It brought to mind something I’d read in the latest RepTrak global 100 list, which highlighted the changing nature of how reputations are formed. Specifically, the finding that what you do holds much greater weight in the world today than what you say.
Increasingly, an organisation’s reputation is a direct reflection of its internal culture and ethics – based on the likes of fairness, flexibility, and opportunity. It may sound obvious, but it hasn’t always been the case.
For decades, organisations have invested in their corporate reputation principally through top-down broadcasting to their target audiences. Advertising and marketing campaigns designed to gain visibility in the right places and project a certain image, values, or brand story. Press releases that frame the company’s narrative and repeat key messages. Websites carefully curated to present the best face of the firm.
Communication and behaviour have always been connected. But for the first time in a decade, RepTrak’s report suggests the latter outweighs the former.
In a saturated online environment, audiences are demanding authenticity and accountability. They are looking at the evidence to make their own minds up about the brands they want to engage with. Younger generations have different priorities and expectations, favouring where real experiences match up to promises.
They trust accounts from their networks and peers. They watch ‘story times’ or ‘a day in the life at [insert company name]’ from creators. They read what employees have to say on online platforms, or ask AI to interpret and summarise it all.
Consider the marketing executive who approached us to help improve his firm’s reputation. “We’re getting hammered on Glassdoor, so we need some positive PR.” They had correctly identified the need to do something, but failed to understand it was actions, not words, that would improve their standing.
Reputation is no longer something you can control from the top with the right messaging. It is being co-created in spaces you can’t own.
BrewDog offers another case study. It spent a lot of time and money building its ‘punk culture’ through marketing and storytelling, priding itself on being a great place to work. It lived by the BrewDog “charter” – a series of commandments which included “without us, we are nothing”.
But this image was built like a house of cards and it came crashing down when some 300 employees signed an open letter accusing the company of a culture of fear. The BBC then revealed a series of claims that the CEO had engaged in inappropriate behaviour towards female staff, and that Brewdog violated import laws and fabricated many of its marketing stories.
The best advisers are helping organisations decide what actions to take before magnifying them with the right strategy.
A communications plan holds real value when it amplifies behaviour that already exists – reaching audiences who haven’t yet formed an opinion with real, tangible proof points to highlight.
This is particularly important for organisations looking to expand in fast-paced sectors, which can’t rely on osmosis alone to draw interest from beyond the talent pool in their immediate vicinity.
From clean energy to aerospace, life sciences and digital – a strong reputation is a huge advantage in the competition for candidates with the skills firms need to thrive.
But reputational risk lurks in the gap between what you say and what you do. And the bigger the gap, the greater the risk.