The Modern Employer Brand Playbook: How In-House EB Managers Build a Measurable System in the AI Era
Paperback
Series: Playbook
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 7 2026
Pages: 340
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
21 chapters. 63 templates. From a 20-year HR practitioner who has rebuilt EB at four companies and 23 consulting engagements. This system works.
Most employer branding is theater.
The career page nobody reads. The Instagram account with 800 followers and four likes per post. The agency-produced manifesto video that 11 people watched. The Great Place to Work certification that costs $15,000 and influences zero hires. The TikTok strategy that took a quarter to launch and stopped after two posts. EB managers know this. CFOs know this. Recruiters know this.
Everyone keeps doing it anyway, because the alternative - saying we don't know if this works - ends careers.
When you don't have the system: you produce a 67-page EVP deck nobody reads, you keep the careers site rebuild as your default first project, you measure follower growth instead of cost per hire, and your CFO cuts your budget the next time the company gets tight.
When you do have the system: your recruiters quote the one-sentence EVP from memory, your ambassador program produces 70+ percent of social engagement, your monthly dashboard fits on one page, and your CFO funds the next year of work in a 14-minute meeting because the numbers defend themselves.
This book is the exact system Mike has used at StarLightMedia, Wargaming, Preply, iDeals, and across 23 consulting engagements between 2018 and 2026.
Here's what you'll learn:
The Theater Test - a four-question filter that separates EB work from EB marketing
The 10-Day Candidate Research Sprint - replaces the 90-day EVP discovery
The One-Sentence EVP - under 30 words, quoted by recruiters from memory
The Hire-Driven Segmentation Matrix - operational priorities, not persona decks
The Single-Interview-to-30-Days-of-Content Pipeline - solves the production bottleneck
The Five-Number CHRO Dashboard - survives a 90-second board pre-read
The CFO-Ready Business Case - gets EB budgets approved on the math
The AI-Search Content Framework - content cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overview
The Joint EX-CX Metric Card - unlocks marketing-side budget pure HR cases cannot
The 90-Day Plan for New EB Leads - day-by-day for your first quarter
63 ready-to-use templates - all inside the book:
Theater-vs-Operations Audit Worksheet
EVP Definition Canvas
CFO-Ready EB Business Case
10-Day Sprint Plan
Candidate Interview Question Bank (28 questions)
One-Sentence EVP Drafting Worksheet
EB Operating Model Canvas
5-Day Content Plan
Single-Interview Asset Map
30-Day Repurposing Calendar
Five-Number Dashboard Template
Source-of-Hire Decoder
EX-CX Touchpoint Map
AI Tool Stack Map
90-Day EB Lead Playbook
No email walls. No resource pages. No broken download links. Every template is on the page.
Other employer brand books on Amazon cost $25-$45 and most are theory-heavy. EB consultants in 2026 charge $250-$600 an hour. A typical agency-led EB engagement runs $40,000-$120,000. A two-day employer brand workshop is $3,500-$6,000. This book costs less than dinner.
Every framework tested across 23 EB engagements at companies between 50 and 50,000 employees in 8 countries. Every template refined through 150,000+ HR students at Mike Pritula Academy.
Stop funding theater. Start running operations.
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