Recently, my husband and I stayed for a weekend on an Air Force base in San Antonio for a wedding in the base’s chapel. I’m not gonna lie: I spent a good portion of the weekend thinking that if the zombie apocalypse was ever going to happen, that would have been a good time (for me) for it to go down. I was 36 weeks pregnant at the time, surrounded by well-trained, heavily-armed humans that are scarily well-behaved in front of citizen visitors. My husband Isaiah distracted me from mentally bringing about some sort of flesh-eating end of the world scenario in my mind by creating a whole backstory for a woman we have seen for years in various overused stock photography around the country. She was in the Air Force base hotel’s marketing materials touting their comfortable accommodations for reasonable prices.

Employer branding lives and breathes on the basis that recruiting top talent is much easier for organizations if you can build communities of potential candidates, keep them interested in your company’s vision, and effectively communicate the unique benefits of your corporate culture in a way that is entertaining and informative, even when they aren’t actively looking to change careers.