How AI Tools Are Changing Employer Brand & What You Should Do

Something fundamental has shifted in employer brand.

AI tools are no longer just influencing how candidates find jobs. They’re shaping how job seekers evaluate employers, compare job options and decide where they belong, often before they ever visit your careers site. What used to be weeks of job research across open tabs is now happening inside a single AI conversation, pulling from public sources and turning it into guidance that feels like career advice from a trusted peer.

This shift is redefining how AI interprets your employer brand, where algorithms now influence how companies are perceived before candidates even visit a careers site. You’re not only competing for brand awareness and attention, you’re now competing for influence in AI-assisted career decisions.

To help our community get ahead of this change, I hosted an expert webinar with leaders from Built In and Coinbase. We explored how the candidate journey is evolving, why AI search is becoming a decision engine and what talent teams can do to be more intentional about how their company shows up in AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Below, I’ve expanded the Q&A with practical insights and recommendations from the panel to help you adapt your talent attraction strategy for an AI-driven candidate journey.

▶️ Watch the full webinar on demand for the examples and frameworks we shared, plus to download the slides.

Featured speakers:

Maria Christopoulos Katris
Founder and CEO, Built In
Maria leads Built In, a platform focused on helping companies improve their employer reputation and visibility across search and AI. Her work centers on how AI is reshaping the candidate journey and how talent teams can better manage employer brand signals in an AI-first world. Follow Maria on LinkedIn.

Angela Della Peruta
Global Head of Talent Brand and Marketing, Coinbase
Angela leads talent brand and marketing at Coinbase, where her team operates like an external marketing function within the talent organization. She focuses on building a transparent employer brand and using content, media and social channels to shape how candidates perceive the company. Follow Angela on LinkedIn.

Expert Q&A: Employer Brand Visibility in AI Tools

How AI Understands Your Employer Brand

Q: How can we tell which sources LLMs are pulling from for employer brand information?

Maria: For employer brand and reputation, it’s usually career sites, Built In, Indeed, Glassdoor, Reddit, and Blind. Sometimes awards sites show up, and reputable news sources can surface depending on the prompt.

The best way to see this is to start using ChatGPT like a candidate would. Ask where the best companies are for a role or location and see which logos and sources are cited.

Angela:  Anything behind a login, like LinkedIn, generally isn’t discoverable unless the person logs in with their credentials through the AI tool and gives it access to scan. We’ve also seen credible news and media outlets show up. That’s why we partner closely with our comms team. Earned media and leadership features can become powerful third-party validation.

Q: How do you know which questions candidates are asking LLMs?

Maria: We use a blend of signals. First, we use tools that estimate AI search volume and AI-driven query trends.

Second, we mirror real candidate language by looking at common questions and themes on forums like Reddit and Blind. That helps us prioritize the prompts candidates are most likely to ask, using the words they actually use.

Q: Should teams test how their brand shows up in LLMs using incognito mode?

Maria: Yes, incognito mode gives you a more unbiased view, and that’s how our system works at scale. But it’s still complex. Two people in the same location using the same prompt can get different company results.

LLMs only surface a limited number of companies at a time. You can run the same query many times and get different answers. That’s why this is an ongoing effort — you have to keep feeding the system with structured, high-quality content. Quantity and structure both matter.

Where Talent Acquisition Leaders Are Falling Behind

Q: When you talk to teams, where are the biggest gaps between what companies should be doing and what they realistically have time or resources for?

Maria: The biggest gap is that employer brand and TA teams are now expected to manage AI-driven reputation the way marketing teams manage brand reputation — but they’re not trained SEO or GEO experts, and they don’t have the same tools, feedback loops, or budgets.

Many teams are still publishing unstructured content, using vague language, and relying heavily on low-signal surfaces like LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn is a great channel for engagement, but it’s a closed platform, so it’s not driving citations in LLMs. That’s been a big shift.

There are dozens of tools helping marketing teams do this at scale. For TA, there’s really only one built specifically for this. So the gap isn’t just knowledge — it’s infrastructure. Expectations have moved fast, but team size, budgets, and systems haven’t caught up.

How to Strengthen Your AI Employer Brand

Q: When you first saw your employer brand report from Built In, what stood out? How did you use that information as a practitioner?

Angela: A lot of it captured what I expected. Our culture and employee experience are well defined externally — not just on our own channels, but through employee-driven content and media coverage. We’ve worked hard to be transparent, authentic, and consistent.

Some of the areas where we scored lower were things I expected, and I’m comfortable with that. We lead with who we really are so we attract people who will thrive here. If what you say externally doesn’t match the internal experience, you break trust fast, and that leads to issues like early attrition.

Q: How do you use insights from LLM-driven reports in your strategy? What have you actually changed or done?

Angela: I use them more for long-term trends than quick fixes. Brand reputation and trust aren’t built in a day or a month. I take an initial snapshot, then do pulse checks at six months and look year over year to see if we’re moving in the direction we want, showing up the way we intend, and being consistent across channels.

From there, I look at where we want to get stronger and which strengths are true differentiators we should amplify. That directly informs our content strategy. For example, if I know we’re doing four Built In articles a year and want to emphasize our mission more, I make sure that mission shows up consistently in each piece. It’s about reinforcing the same themes over time.

How to Decide What to Improve

Q: Do you leave it up to leadership to decide which employer brand pillars to improve, or do you guide that decision?

Maria: We guide them. Our recommendation is to start with the pillars where scores are lowest, because weaknesses tend to cascade across multiple areas. For example, if employees are criticizing leaders on review sites, that often affects not just Leadership & Management, but also Work-Life Balance and Company Culture.

In practice, the two most common pillars companies need to improve are Leadership & Management and Compensation & Benefits, because those themes show up most often in negative employee reviews.

Angela: Generally, I first review data across all external channels, internal ATS, and get an understanding of the talent needs of the business. From there I would partner with leaders to confirm alignment and identify anything missing.

As a follow up to that, I also recommend speaking with talent leaders quarterly to understand where growth is happening and what the biggest attraction pain points are by function, level, or geography. With that understanding you should layer in reputation data and your own LLM research to outline strengths and gaps.

From there, I would align focus areas to where the business needs long-term support. For example, if the priority is attracting technical talent in the U.S. and a gap is growth and development opportunities, then that becomes a content focus. I’d build a content plan featuring technical leaders or team members who have been promoted or moved internally and make sure there is a mention of that experience in each article. Then as each article is published, I’d amplify that content through employee sharing and candidate outreach so the message shows up consistently across different channels and audiences.

How Recruitment Marketing Teams Can Do More With Limited Resources

Q: You’ve worked as a team of one. How did you approach Recruitment Marketing content with such limited resources?

Angela: Everything you or others create should be multi-purpose. If you’re a team of one, one piece of content should go everywhere. Put it on LinkedIn, have employees share it, post it on Reddit or X if that’s where your audience is, and use it in candidate emails and outreach. The goal is consistent storytelling across every touchpoint. 

The 2nd thing is to lean into cross-functional partnerships. You can’t do everything and you don’t need to always create things from scratch. If you have a comms team, social team, events team and/or brand team you should create a strong partnership with them. Leverage the work they are already doing and find opportunities to infuse talent messaging.

The more you create and put into the market, the more opportunities people have to learn about you. That increases your influence. Nothing should live in just one place.

Managing Employer Brand Reputation in the AI Era

Q: With everything changing, how do you balance managing employee reviews versus investing in content and third-party presence?

Angela: This might be the opposite of what people expect, but I focus on what we can control. Review sites are a candidate touchpoint, and you should keep a pulse on them, but you’ll usually get more value by investing in telling your story at scale.

Not everyone will have a great experience, and there’s no guarantee that asking for reviews will meaningfully shift your ratings unless you have huge volume. Meanwhile, candidates and AI tools are pulling from many sources. So my recommendation is to flood the market with authentic, consistent content across different channels and mediums.

Employee ambassador programs are incredibly high value because people trust people. Get employees sharing their experiences on social, Reddit, or wherever your audience is. Layer in third-party content like earned media, podcasts, blogs, and platforms like Built In. Lists and roundup articles are great for discoverability.

You can shift your reputation and visibility this way, but consistency is key. Once you turn the engine on, don’t turn it off. Even if it’s just once a quarter, it compounds over time.

If You Only Do One Thing Next

Q: If a practitioner could take only one step in the next 90 days to improve how AI sees their employer brand, what would you recommend?

Maria: Build a small set of optimized employer FAQs that clearly answer the core questions candidates are already asking AI about your company.

That one step pushes teams to see how AI assistants currently describe them as an employer, identify which strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs are being surfaced, and turn internal materials like handbooks, benefits documents, and career frameworks into clear, structured answers.

Those FAQs should be published on your own site and a trusted third-party site, where the information can be validated by the models. That’s the starting point. The impact grows when those same messages show up consistently across credible third-party sources, giving AI more independent confirmation and more places to retrieve the information.

Key Recommendations to Improve How AI Sees Your Employer Brand

Finally, we each shared practical steps teams can take now to improve how AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity interpret and present their employer brand.

Maria’s Recommendations

• Start by seeing what AI sees: Check how tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini describe your company today. Look at which employer brand pillars are strong and which ones are missing or weak.
• Strengthen the pillars that matter most: Focus on the themes tied to your business priorities — like leadership, growth, or stability — and reinforce them in clear, structured content AI can easily reference.
• Measure, learn, repeat: Your AI reputation evolves. Track changes over time, notice which content shifts perception, and keep reinforcing your strongest narratives across multiple platforms.

Angela’s Recommendations

• Own your narrative — it’s being told either way: Every company already has a story in AI tools. Be intentional about the reputation you want and use AI to spot the gaps between how you’re seen and how you want to be seen.
• Don’t keep employer brand in a talent silo: Your messaging should show up everywhere — PR, leadership interviews, product and partnership content, third-party platforms, and social channels your candidates actually use.
• Think like your candidates: Candidates are researching you the same way you research other companies. Every touchpoint — media, content, events, social, reviews — is a moment to build credibility and trust that AI will later reflect.

Lori’s Recommendations

• Make AI monitoring part of your routine: Prompt AI tools regularly and track how your employer brand is described over time.
• Build credibility beyond your own site: Show up on trusted third-party platforms AI can cite, not just your careers page.
• Remember what’s changed: Employer brand isn’t just about awareness anymore — it now influences how AI recommends companies and how candidates decide where to apply.

AI isn’t coming to employer brand — it’s already here. The good news is you have more influence than you might think. By being intentional about your messaging, where it shows up and how consistently it’s reinforced, you can shape how AI represents your company to future candidates. To dive deeper into the insights and examples Maria and Angela shared, watch the full webinar on demand and get practical ideas for adapting your talent attraction strategy in an AI-driven world.