What you Need to Do to Make an Employer Brand Podcast
Amplifying an employer brand organically, using an omni-channel strategy, is a great way to engage a self-selecting audience without advertising. And one of the most effective platforms in employer brand content marketing is podcast.
Podcasts, like the Chezz-produced Life at Sage series, occur in the middle of the marketing funnel, giving interested candidates an opportunity to engage on a deeper level with detailed aspects of an employer brand. These deep dives enable companies to showcase in hyperfocus the lived experiences of their employees, as well as many of the concepts and values that underpin their employer value propositions (EVPs).
Let’s take a look at how to make your own employer brand podcast.
What are employer brand podcasts?
An employer brand podcast describes a digital audio, or audio-video, file that can be streamed or downloaded by an engaged audience of a company’s career-focused content. They are typically arranged in an episodic format as part of a series.
This employer brand podcast definition allows us the broadest possible scope for content creation, which is important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, because—if successful—a podcast series can run over multiple seasons, so it’s important to have broad flexibility of topic themes.
Secondly, because the platforms for podcast hosting are so varied—podcasts can be hosted on search engines like YouTube, on dedicated podcast platforms like Podbean, as native content on social platforms like LinkedIn, or even as embedded audio files within your own careers website.
Thirdly, because whilst 77% of podcasts listened to in 2024 are still audio-only, more and more listeners are choosing to tune into podcasts that also incorporate video.
Finally, because an “engaged audience” allows us to describe both passive and active candidates, existing employees, candidate influencers, and company alumni alike—all of whom an employer brand podcast may be used to target.
Employer brand podcast ideas
When choosing what topics to cover in your employer brand podcast, don’t limit yourself to just one topic. You should give yourself the broadest possible scope, both to keep things interesting for the listener and to make sure you don’t run out of things to say before your podcast really takes off.
Here are a few different broad topics an employer brand podcast series might cover:
- How Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) comes to life at your organisation for different sub-groups of your workforce
- How you live your organisation’s values every day
- Techniques for doing different aspects of different roles (e.g., “selling with integrity” or a “project management masterclass”)
- Strategies for career development (e.g., “empowering female leadership” or “6 communication strategies to get you promoted quicker”)
- Influencer strategies (e.g., “how to parent your children into the right career for them”)
- Job market overviews and comparisons (e.g., “Big box or online retailer—which one is better for your career?”)
- Benefits related podcasts (e.g., “How charitable giving has increased workplace happiness at X company”)
- Micro-targeting passive candidate segments (e.g., “Why it’s a great idea to recruit ex-convicts”)
Coming up with a list of topics for employer brand podcast episodes shouldn’t be an isolated activity, however. In an omni-channel strategy, it’s important to consider content topics holistically, across multiple channels.
This allows you to guide engaged users seamlessly from one platform to another—say from a podcast episode to a blog post to a whitepaper to another podcast episode—all using a network of internal hyperlinks on your site.
The benefit of strategising for topics this way is that you reduce candidate drop-off, grow passion for your employer brand, and nurture candidates’ conversion into live applicants.
Say, for instance, one of your broad topic cluster hubs is around “empowering People of Colour into tech.” You might publish a podcast episode around developing more Black female tech leaders. This may then hyperlink to a whitepaper about how to engage Black schoolgirls with the idea of technology careers from an early age. You might then send out an employer brand email about how a higher percentage of Black females have children than white women, and how this impacts on career development, with links back to both of the other pieces of content.
This approach stops listeners from having nowhere to go, other than to another episode, which may quickly lose their interest (especially if your other podcast episodes target different niche audience interests) and stop them from listening, at which point you’ve lost their engagement.
Treat your podcast ideas strategy as part of a bigger employer brand content marketing strategy and, over time, you’ll develop a rich body of content that targets, engages, and converts every niche audience segment you have in your sights.
Equipment needed for podcasting
Creating a simple podcast is very easy and you don’t need a lot of equipment at all.
The absolute basics you’ll need are:
- 2 x good-quality condenser microphones (such as Rode NT5s, which pick up sound from a distance and “condense” it to listenable levels at a high quality)
- An audio recording device (such as a Zoom H5 battery-powered, handheld recorder) and power supply
- An assortment of microphone stands for various room layouts
- Microphone cables with the correct ins and outs for your recording device and chosen mics
- A soundcard upon which to save your audio files
- A USB cable to transfer the audio to your computer
- Some editing software (such as GarageBand on a Mac)
- Basic design software (such as Canva) to design your podcast avatars
- A chosen publishing platform (such as a YouTube or Podbean account, or your own website)
This will allow you to start podcasting for employer brand in an affordable, fuss-free way so you can deliver content quickly and easily.
However, be aware that the number of podcasts is growing every year (546.7 million in 2024, according to Backlinko), and you’re going to be competing with lots of other employer brands for listeners. So production values are important.
Just run through some of the world’s most popular podcast series. As you can see and hear, they all have high production values. This suggests that the more professional your podcast sounds (and looks, if you use video), the bigger your audience will be—which is what it’s all about, right?
So, if you don’t have the budget, internal resources, space, or senior stakeholder commitment to create a much higher-end, in-house media division for employer brand than the one described in the above equipment list, then it’s advisable to outsource production to an agency that does have all the best facilities.
A dedicated, high-end podcast studio—such as the Chezz in-house studio—will incorporate many of the following aspects:
- Acoustic sound treatment (such as acoustic curtains, wall panels, and ceiling panels)
- A multi-track mixing console with high-quality preamps and on-board EQ to treat audio both as it comes into the interface and goes out in the mix
- An assortment of high-end microphones, including:
- Ribbon mics (which sound more like your ears than any other mic)
- Cardioid condenser mics (which pick up the sound coming from in front of them while cutting out external sound)
- Dynamic mics (which are designed for dealing with loud sounds at close range)
- Boom mics (for overhead distance recording invisible to a film audience)
- High-quality, multi audio-in (Ai) and audio-out (Ao) interface to allow the greatest mixing possibilities for your audio as it goes into your computer
- Recording industry standard Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), such as ProTools or Logic Pro X
- On-board or outboard effects to treat the sound, such as reverb units, buss compressors, master EQ units, and limiting amplifiers
- Studio lighting system (such as umbrellas, softboxes, light stands, bulbs, and backdrops)
- Full-frame cine cameras (such as Blackmagic Design PYXIS 6Ks)
Whether you choose to go low-end or high-end is really down to your budget and your expectations of the size of audience you want your podcast to deliver.
Finding the right employer brand podcast narrator or host
Choosing the right host or narrator for your employer podcast is essential. 60% of radio listeners say that hosts are the primary reason they choose to tune into audio programming. So, finding a host who engages your audience could be the difference between loyal podcast followers and fast audience drop-off.
A professional podcast host will have journalistic rigour when it comes to conducting interviews, but also a great delivery style on mic and on camera. Alternatively, if you’re creating an audio-only employer brand podcast, a voiceover actor can be hired to narrate podcasts at the post-production stage, using a script to deliver a highly polished end product.
If you decide not to use a professional podcast host and, rather, leverage an employee voice as your narrator, this is a great way of engaging employees and getting them to tune in and share the content with people from outside the organisation—because it comes from a voice they know and love.
Just be aware that—unless they have a specific background in broadcasting—you may lose in journalistic rigour and strategy execution what you gain in employee engagement.
In the long term, it’s about finding what delivers best for your employer brand. It’s a good idea to A/B test podcast episodes with different narrators and see which perform best over time. For example, you could produce a sub-series within the wider series that focuses on a particular niche topic that’s delivered by an employee while using a pro host for the rest of the podcast. Then analyse listeners and see which narrator gets the best engagement.
Hosting, distributing and promoting employer brand podcasts
Podcast hosting and distribution are two different things.
Hosting refers to where the podcast is stored and published in the online space (which typically also allows streaming, so can technically also be considered distribution).
Distribution refers to platforms that do not store audio files but, rather, enable users to tune into the content using the RSS feeds produced by the host platform.
Start with a hosting platform. This is where you will upload your employer brand podcast audio, video, design assets, keyword optimised podcast descriptions (to power search visibility) and transcripts. Popular podcast hosting options include:
- Podbean (the preferred platform used by Chezz as it allows branded pages, video hosting, ad opt-out, simple connectivity to distributors, and easy website embedding)
- Buzzsprout
- Simplecast
- Transistor
- Anchor FM
- YouTube
You can also upload audio directly to your careers website. WordPress.com, for instance, allows uploading of audio into streamable files. Just beware that this may affect loading time of pages on your site, which could have an impact on your SEO.
Distribution is your next goal. The best podcast hosting platforms make this really straightforward. Using Podbean, for example, you can quickly stream a published employer brand podcast straight to Spotify and Apple Music (the world’s two biggest podcast listening platforms). You can even distribute your episodes on YouTube using the “social share” button, which also allows you to push episodes out on other channels such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook.
Finally, once your podcast has been published and distributed, it’s time to get promoting it. Use a combination of topic adjacent blog posts, short clip trailers on social media such as LinkedIn and TikTok (with links), in-platform advertising on Spotify, PR (for reviews and backlinks) and quote carousels on Instagram and LinkedIn.
You can even use traditional advertising such as outdoor or programmatic advertising to drive traffic to your employer brand podcast. This will not only get you traffic from active candidates who are immediately interested in applying for a role with you, but also from passive candidates who are simply excited by the topic advertising—so you can nurture their employer brand engagement and loyalty.
And that’s essentially it. All you need to do now is start planning your chosen way of putting together an employer brand podcast and start rolling out the strategy.