What's covered in this blog
If you’ve still got employer brand budget left at the end of the year, you’re already ahead of the game.
The real win now is budgeting that “use it or lose it” money on things that feel low-effort today, but make a huge difference in how you attract, convert, and retain talent over the next 6–12 months. Think frictionless now, compounding value later.
Below are three smart ways to spend your leftover budget that will help you in the future.
Buy better decisions: data and talent insight
If you’re planning any major hiring pushes or employer brand campaigns in the next six to nine months, the most powerful thing you can buy right now is insight into your audiences. Platforms like Wisdom combine bespoke data on your employer brand, competitors, and content, then surface the patterns and answers for you, so you don’t spend weeks wrestling with spreadsheets or digging through dashboards. That means you can show up to your next board meeting with data on which messages resonate, which channels convert, and which segments are worth the money.
Why this matters:
Strong employer brands typically see significantly lower cost per hire, because better‑aligned candidates come to you instead of you chasing them.
Organisations with stronger brands can see up to around 40% more qualified applicants, making every campaign more efficient from the start.
Companies with weaker reputations often have to rely more heavily on incentives and paid media just to maintain hiring volume, which inflates overall recruitment costs.
When you can quantify how your brand is performing and where your spend is working, you’re buying insight; but you’re also buying future budget. Data‑backed business cases are far more compelling when you’re asking for additional investment or headcount next year. It might feel like a sunk cost now, but in six months, you’ll be very happy you “pre-paid” for smarter decisions.
Make your brand visible: a photography and film sprint
If you want your leftover budget to show up in ways everyone can see, a short, focused employee photography and film sprint is one of the highest‑ROI moves you can make. A couple of days on site, capturing your people, spaces and real moments, gives you a refreshed content library you can use all year across every channel.
Strong visuals are not a “nice to have” anymore; candidates are judging you in seconds as they scroll through job boards, LinkedIn and your careers site. Professional photography and employer brand films help them quickly answer the question: “Can I see myself here?”
Why this matters:
Job postings that include video can attract around a third more applications and noticeably higher views than those without.
Candidates who watch a recruiting or culture video are substantially more likely to apply, and culture‑focused video content has been linked to lower turnover in several hiring studies.
Add carousel of pics here
From a couple of days’ shooting, you can walk away with:
Multiple social‑first cutdowns
A versatile library of photography for careers pages, job ads, presentations and internal campaigns.
B‑roll and stills that can be repurposed into content for months.
It’s the opposite of a one‑and‑done spend. You’re effectively building a content bank that supports recruitment marketing, social, internal comms and leadership storytelling for the next 12 months and beyond.
Turn your people into your media: employee advocacy
If your biggest challenge is reach, trust or differentiation, this is where employee advocacy comes in. Your people are your most authentic media channel; the right support just turns them into confident, consistent storytellers.
You can start incredibly small: even using a modest pot to boost a handful of employees’ LinkedIn posts about life at your company, projects, or roles you’re hiring for can dramatically extend visibility with very little extra effort. That alone is often enough to prove the concept internally.
Why this matters:
Content shared by employees earns around 8x more engagement than content shared from brand channels alone.
Employee posts can reach several times further than brand posts because they tap into personal networks, not just corporate followers.
Multiple trust studies have shown that employees are among the most credible voices when talking about what it’s like to work somewhere.
If you have a little more budget left, this is the moment to pilot a proper advocacy programme over three or four months: Identify your natural champions, people who already show up positively online or are respected culture carriers internally. Give them workshops, toolkits and prompts so they can post in ways that feel authentic, not scripted. Support them with community management and simple reporting so you can demonstrate the impact in terms of reach, engagement, applications or referrals.
The benefits go beyond talent attraction. Advocacy builds pride, belonging and engagement, because it signals trust: you trust people to represent the brand, and they feel seen and valued in return. That creates a virtuous circle where engagement, retention and referrals all improve over time.
How to choose where to spend
If you’re stuck between options, match your leftover budget to your biggest pain point:
Need to prove value and defend budget next year? Put the money into data and insight platforms or bespoke research to sharpen your decisions and metrics.
Need to look and feel like a place people actually want to work? Invest in photography and film that make your culture tangible and your roles more desirable.
Need more reach and trust in the market? Pilot an employee advocacy programme that turns a small group of employees into genuine talent influencers.
Whatever you choose, the principle is the same: don’t treat leftover budget as a problem to get rid of. Treat it as a chance to give future‑you more proof, more content and more credible voices than you had this year. That’s the kind of quiet, compounding investment that pays off long after finance closes the books.
