Managing an employer brand across 16 markets, three famous delivery brands, foodpanda in APAC, Yemeksepeti in Turkey and foodora in Sweden, Norway, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, and wildly different cultures is no small feat, especially as a team of one. But that's exactly what Evgeniia Pelevina has been doing. The approach she's built is full of insights, all of which are useful to those working in the employer brand space.
As an Employer Branding Lead, Evgeniia oversees employer branding, recruitment marketing, and candidate experience for all three brands, where she’s built a data-led strategy and earned buy-in from the ground up.
We had the chance to speak to her in this Wiser Expert interview, getting some great insights into:
How to introduce a flexible employee value proposition across multiple brands and markets
The data-led method she used to earn stakeholder buy-in across all markets
What employer brand leaders can focus on when resources are tight, expectations are high, and the business needs quick wins
How AI has changed Employer Branding
The transition to employer branding
Evgeniia's path into employer branding wasn't planned. But, looking back, every step made sense. She studied Human Resources at Moscow State University, spending each break trying different HR disciplines. Recruitment, learning and development, and other HR fields. Yet, none of it clicked.
Then her boss introduced her to employer branding and described it simply, “a sweet spot between recruitment and marketing”
She kicked off her employer brand journey at EY and then McKinsey, where the high-performance culture shaped how she thinks about structure and standards. At McKinsey, one of her main KPIs centred on diversifying the talent pipeline, competing not just with other consulting firms but with Google, Apple, and other leading tech brands fighting for exceptional talent.
"At some point, we noticed that we kept receiving the same type of application from the same type of candidate profiles. My goal was to drive diversity through a stronger talent pipeline across different disciplines, universities and regions"
Showing key stakeholders the importance of employer branding
When Evgeniia joined foodora, foodpanda, Yemeksepeti, she started by listening and creating connections.
Over her first two months, she conducted around 150 interviews with Managing Directors, People & Culture teams, Marketing, Branding & PR, and other business stakeholders - across every market she'd be working with. She catalogued everything, building a personal database that went beyond job titles.
"The amount of information was huge, which is why I tried to document everything I could - everything that could help us to collaborate in the future”.
She used customer development methodology; here are some examples of the questions:
What are your biggest challenges when it comes to attracting and retaining talent?
What has worked well in the past, and what hasn’t?
What metrics or outcomes matter most to you when it comes to employer branding?
From your perspective, what should be the three key priorities for our employer branding work this year?
What would success look like by the end of the year? How would you know our work has been effective?
Who else should I be speaking with to get a full picture of the situation?
"You'll be surprised. Everyone has their own opinion about what employer branding should do."
She kept going until the insights began to recur frequently, indicating she'd reached saturation. From there, the themes clustered naturally into four priority areas for her to target, each backed by data.
"I pulled the data that supported these insights, colour-coded a report showing the pain points, and showed it to everyone. This helped me to get everyone onboard"
How to structure an EVP across multiple brands and markets
When you're managing an employer brand across three distinct product brands (each with its own culture, markets, and identity), it’s impossible to create one EVP that works for everyone in this setup. So, how do you get it to work?
Evgeniia's approach is to think of the EVP not as a single statement, but as a modular framework built around employer branding pillars. Each pillar represents a core part of the employer offering, and together they function like a puzzle; different candidates connect with different pieces.
"You have different benefits to offer, and some people might resonate with some of them and other people would choose other ones."
Each of the three brands Evgeniia oversees has its own product identity, culture, and existing employer branding activity. So a one-size-fits-all EVP wouldn't have reflected the reality of how these brands operate. Instead, Evgeniia developed standardised employer brand pillars that could be flexed across brands and markets while maintaining a coherent strategic thread.
“At the end of the day, EVP or Employer Branding Pillars can be very similar from company to company. The difference is mostly how you communicate it and where.”
It's a useful reminder for any employer brand professional working across complex or multi-brand structures: the EVP should be a living framework that adapts to your audiences, not a rigid tagline that tries to speak to everyone at once.
Candidate experience is the biggest quick win for employer branding
With so many possible workstreams, Evgeniia had to make a hard choice about where to focus. Employer branding strategy, recruitment marketing, and external campaigns were all on the table - but the data pointed somewhere more immediate.
"EB is so close to my heart, but I had to understand that the business priority was recruitment marketing and candidate experience."
She mapped the three audiences employer branding typically serves:
A passive talent who might hear about you
Active candidates who are going through the process
Current employees.
Passive talent required long-term brand building, a team didn't have the capacity for. Employees feel covered by the People & Culture team. But candidates already interacting with the company, leaving reviews, and shaping reputation, weren't covered by anyone.
She audited the current candidate experience, reviewed processes and data, and built universal candidate guide templates for all three brands that every market can adopt. She launched a peer-to-peer TA community where talent acquisition partners learned from each other, discussed blockers openly and shared their best practices, spotlighting the people with the highest candidate satisfaction scores and helping them present their approaches to the wider team. As part of this, Evgeniia also ran a training where the team unpacked candidate experience metrics together - the how, the why, and the impact. Lots of great questions from the team.
"When needed, I helped TA partners prepare presentations, coached them on public speaking, and helped with storytelling for this peer-2-peer TA community meetings. It's not something an employer brand person usually does, but for elevating candidate experience, it was necessary."
The result was measurable growth in candidate experience scores and, crucially, visible proof in data that employer branding delivers tangible results quickly.
How AI is changing employer branding
Evgeniia also shared her opinion on the most fundamental shift she sees impacting the profession right now: how candidates find and process information about employers.
"A few years ago, candidates primarily relied on social media or review platforms, like Glassdoor, to research companies. Today, they ask AI."
The change is structural. Content on the careers page, a LinkedIn post, a Glassdoor review, a Reddit thread - these used to exist as separate, disconnected signals. Now AI aggregates all of them into a single structured narrative. It pulls in public media coverage, corporate content, marketing campaigns, and employer branding outputs. Recurring themes and patterns are weighted more heavily, transforming individual opinions into analytical insights delivered to candidates in seconds.
"Polished employer brand storytelling alone is no longer enough. Inconsistencies between internal reality and external messaging surface quickly in an AI-shaped information landscape."
Employer branding can no longer operate as a standalone HR function. It must be fully integrated with Brand & Marketing, PR & Corporate Communications to create a cohesive narrative across all channels and content types. This is because AI combines everything from your careers page, an old Glassdoor comment and a fresh PR post.
Making your employer brand shine with small teams and tight budgets
Evgeniia's last piece of advice is aimed at the many employer brand professionals navigating tight budgets and growing expectations.
Listen before you act:
When you join a company, people have already been doing things before you arrive. Don’t just read the onboarding docs; the real insights come from conversations. Use it to learn and build a connection with your stakeholders. Write everything down and build a detailed database of people; don't trust yourself to remember it later.
Speak in numbers:
There are thousands of metrics in Employer branding, but it’s still hard to measure and advocate for employer branding initiatives. It’s strategic, incredible benificial, but usually a long-term investment. Business used to invest in Branding, not Employer Branding. Try to find all available data that can help you to understand where the “pain” is and start from there. Use internal metrics as eNPS, cNPS, offer acceptance rate, attrition rate, Glassdoor score and so on. If someone tells you hiring is a struggle in a particular market, pull the actual numbers. Compare them. Give stakeholders a reference point. Data turns opinions into strategy.
Focus on what's already working:
Rather than chasing new channels, strengthen the ones that are already strong. Referral programmes, for example, can be more than 15% of hires, as a benchmark. If you're below that, there's an opportunity to drive more engagement, educate employees on how to refer well, and promote the programme properly. It's measurable, and it builds the credibility you need to unlock bigger projects later.
Invest in employee advocacy:
Employee advocacy is a low-hanging fruit, especially if you are a team of one. It requires time and a lot of effort, but start small, track the progress and communicate it to the business. Soon, you will get more credibility and a bigger budget.
Key Takeaways for Employer Brand Professionals
Whether you’re managing a global portfolio or building from scratch, Evgeniia’s approach is highly effective: listen first, let the data guide you, and identify the key priority areas. Here’s the process in five key steps:
Listen before you strategise. Conduct stakeholder interviews, document everything, and let the insights shape your priorities, not the other way around.
Let data do the convincing. When you bring numbers to stakeholders, you shift the conversation from opinion to strategy.
Structure your EVP as a flexible framework. Interview your current employees yourself to understand why they work for your company. Frame it as a set of the employer brand pillars that flex across audiences and markets. This will always outperform a single statement trying to speak to everyone.
Start where the impact is most visible. Candidate experience and referral programs could be a good quick win and the fastest way to demonstrate value and build credibility for bigger projects.
