How to keep a global employer story true
Launching a global Employee Value Proposition (EVP) takes skill across regions, functions and formats, to make the message usable, recognisable and real for the people it’s meant for.
We spoke to Sarah Collins, Employer Brand & Attraction Manager at Kubrick, about how she’s kept the story consistent as the business scaled across the UK, US and beyond.
Her path into Employer Brand wasn’t linear - she studied psychology, worked across sectors, and found her way into employee engagement and experience. Then at Kubrick, she took on internal comms, and during lockdown, stepped naturally into external storytelling too.
“No one asked me to own an employer brand, I just started telling the stories that weren’t being told.”
Today, she leads the employer brand and attraction agenda, working closely with HR, delivery, leadership and marketing to connect internal and external messaging, regional nuance, and global consistency.
Turning your EVP into a global narrative that works
When Kubrick started scaling internationally, Sarah’s challenge wasn’t “how do we sound global?” It was: “how do we keep one narrative, without copy-pasting it everywhere?”
Her approach was:
Ensure one headline story
Flex the regional proof points
Always tie back to the same anchor
For Kubrick, that anchor is a clear narrative around unlocking potential and accelerating careers. That doesn’t change; what changes is the evidence you lead with.
In the US, Sarah leans into what’s locally compelling: strong training, hands-on support, access to leading brands, and the high-opportunity feel of building something while the market presence is still growing. The story emphasises momentum, visibility, and the chance to shape what comes next.
In the UK, where Kubrick is more established, the narrative shifts. Alongside high-quality training, support, and access to leading brands, there’s greater emphasis on long-term trajectory, scale, and the credibility that comes with maturity. Global mobility becomes a tangible proof point too, with UK talent having access to opportunities in the US as the business continues to grow.
That’s the difference between a global EVP that’s recognisable and one that’s just repeated.
How to align internal and external employer brand messaging
For Sarah, aligning what candidates hear with what employees experience isn’t optional.
If you message something externally that doesn’t match the lived employee experience, you might win the hire and lose them a month later.
External messages should reflect what’s already happening internally, and internal change should be communicated internally before it becomes external marketing.
This is where Sarah’s dual exposure to internal communications and employer brand makes a real difference. It gives her a clear filter for what does and doesn’t work.
Her test is straightforward:
“Would an employee recognise this message?”
If the answer’s no, it doesn’t go out.
Because today, candidates don’t just rely on career sites or job ads. They check Glassdoor, message employees to find out what’s not being said. They also look for what’s not being said. And if there’s a gap between what you promise and what people experience, it shows up fast.
Why Glassdoor should be part of your employer brand strategy
Sarah treats Glassdoor as a critical candidate insight channel. While it’s an important signal for perception and trust, she’s also clear-eyed about its limitations - recognising that reviews tend to skew towards moments of heightened emotion rather than everyday experience.
So rather than obsessing over individual comments, she looks for themes and trends. Crucially, she treats it as an insight for HR because it often contains the unfiltered truth employees won’t share in a survey.
Her line in the sand is also clear: don’t pressure people for positivity. If a company asks employees for “positive reviews”, that’s a red flag. If you want reviews, you ask for honest ones, and you make it safe to share them. Then you take the feedback seriously and use it.
How to connect HR, Marketing and Comms in employer branding
If you’ve ever watched messaging fall apart mid-rollout, it usually happens for one reason: People weren’t aligned at the start.
Sarah’s practical method for joining the dots across leadership, HR, delivery teams, internal comms and marketing is simple, but it’s not common enough:
Get the right stakeholders together early
Map who’s impacted
Pressure-test the implications for the EVP
Decide messaging owners, channels, and timing
Build toolkits and FAQs so managers can cascade confidently
Agree sign-off routes so internal and external narratives don’t diverge
She’s also clear on why this matters: disjointed messaging isn’t just messy. It creates a negative employee experience fast - because employees hear one message from one team and another message elsewhere, and suddenly nobody trusts anyone.
When it comes to comms, inconsistency is expensive.
Employer brand campaigns that actually boost engagement
Sarah shared a few examples that had a real impact, and none of them relied on gimmicks. What made them work was consistency, visibility, and recognising what people actually value.
1) CEO-led company-wide webinars
When everyone went remote overnight, Sarah introduced monthly all-company webinars led by the CEO and leadership team, with open Q&A. The impact wasn’t just “information sharing” but reassurance, direction, and access.
They’ve continued them since, now quarterly, UK and US together, recorded, and shared with transcripts. The point is consistency and inclusion: people hear directly from leadership, and they get a channel to ask what they actually want to ask.
2) A values-linked recognition programme
This one is smart because it does two jobs at once: it reinforces values and makes recognition specific.
Employees recognise peers, link the behaviour to a core value, and submissions are shared internally so the whole company can see what “great” looks like in practice. That turns values from posters into patterns.
3) Transformational comms that treats employees like adults
Kubrick’s shift towards a more mature data and AI consultancy comes with change: structures, priorities, accountabilities, new offerings.
Sarah’s focus has been making sure employees understand the “why”, the “who owns what”, what’s been delivered, and what’s coming next - using multiple channels (webinars, written updates, toolkits) and anticipating FAQs.
Because motivation doesn’t survive ambiguity, people want to know what change means for them, and they’ll fill the gaps with worst-case assumptions if you don’t explain it clearly.
In summary
A global EVP isn’t proven by how consistent your tagline is.
It’s proven by whether:
The story still holds in different regions
Employees would say the same thing as your careers site
HR, Marketing and Comms can deliver one narrative without tripping over each other
Engagement initiatives build trust, not just noise
Sarah’s approach is a good reminder that the strongest employer brands aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones that are most likely to be backed up in real life.
