Employer Branding Agency
An employer branding agency helps a company develop its employer brand. That means working out a clear and credible profile of you as an employer, one that really fits who you are.
At GRAPEVINE we have been doing exactly that for more than 20 years – for mid-sized companies, for corporations and for the public sector. We handle the analysis, develop the employer value proposition (EVP), design campaigns and career websites and take care of the right media placement.
Our starting point is what your employees say about you. We translate it into an employer brand that shows what sets you apart – and speaks to the right people.
When employers come to us
Companies that contact us usually know what employer branding can do, and they already have a fair amount in place: a career website, job ads running, often an EVP that was developed a few years ago. So the question is rarely “What is employer branding, anyway?” It is more often “Why has what we do stopped working?”
What we won’t do in any of these situations: invent a culture for you that doesn’t exist. Employer brands only work when they match reality and employees recognise themselves in them. That’s why we first get a picture of what defines you as an employer. Only then do we think about how to take it outside.
These are common situations in which we end up working together:
The EVP dates from before a restructuring, a period of strong growth or an acquisition, and it describes a company that no longer exists in that form.
One campaign is supposed to reach different target groups, even though they expect very different things from an employer – and with international growth, at new locations as well.
Career website, trade fair presence, social channels and job ads are all there, but every department uses them differently. What’s missing is the common thread: an employer brand that holds everything together.
A change of agency or a tender is planned, and you need an employer branding agency that offers strategy, creative and media and can show from its references how the three work together.
Employer branding, HR marketing or recruiting – who does what?
In practice the three disciplines are closely linked, and for us good employer marketing comes from how they work together. We ask which positions you want to fill today, and also what you want your employer brand to stand for in the long run. Tenders and budget plans often mix the three up. Yet they answer different questions and pursue different goals:
Employer branding
What do we stand for as an employer?
Typical result
EVP, employer positioning, creative concept, brand manual
Time horizon
6 months to several years
HR marketing
How do we make ourselves visible as an employer?
Typical result
Campaigns, career website, university and apprenticeship marketing, media
Time horizon
3 to 12 months
Recruiting
How do we fill specific positions?
Typical result
Job ads, social recruiting, applicant management
Time horizon
short-term and ongoing
Why the employer brand now decides who applies
The criteria people use to choose an employer are changing – faster than most career pages are updated. According to the Randstad Employer Brand Research 2026, job security is the most important quality of an attractive employer for 58 percent of employees in Germany. It is followed by a pleasant working atmosphere at 54 percent and work-life balance at 52 percent. Salary and benefits come fourth at 50 percent – a year earlier they were still at the top of the list. For the study, 4,331 employees and job seekers in Germany were surveyed in early 2026; worldwide the figure was more than 160,000.
For employers this means: if you keep advertising with fruit baskets and a first-name culture, you miss what matters to employees right now. Job security in particular depends on reliability and trust. If you promise it, you have to be able to prove it – and that’s exactly where our work begins.
Source: Randstad Employer Brand Research 2026, country report Germany. Survey conducted in early 2026, 4,331 respondents in Germany.
58%
Job security
54%
Pleasant
atmosphere
52%
Work-life
balance
From positioning to dashboard
With us, employer branding is teamwork. Strategy, creative, media, social and digital work together on your employer brand. All five disciplines are in-house, so you get everything from one source and don’t have to coordinate any other service providers. Our work is divided into four phases that cover the whole employer branding process – from the first analysis through internal rollout to external communication and ongoing optimisation. This order makes sure employees understand what the new employer brand means for their daily work before we take it outside.
Identify
We analyse, develop the EVP and sharpen the positioning.
Inspire
We translate the strategy into a creative concept and put it into practice.
Empower
We roll out the employer brand internally – with workshops, internal branding and dedicated formats for managers.
Engage
We take the employer brand outside with media campaigns, measure their impact and keep optimising them.
Our five disciplines
Gut feeling becomes a brand with substance. We analyse your starting point as an employer and your competitive environment, and we survey relevant target groups qualitatively and quantitatively. In culture workshops and leadership retreats we bring together the people who shape your company culture. From the results we develop your employer value proposition and the matching brand architecture. We sum up both in a brand document you can keep working with internally and use to brief other partners easily.
- Employer analysis and competitor benchmark
- Employee surveys and target group insights
- Employer value proposition (EVP) and employer positioning
- Candidate persona, candidate journey and candidate experience
Ideas worth seeing and hearing. Central idea, claim, key visual, campaign mechanics: we develop the creative concept and produce it for photo, film, audio, animation, career website and social content. We also develop existing employer branding designs further instead of simply replacing them.
- Creative concept: claim, key visual, campaign mechanics
- Recruiting videos, image films and photo production
- Career website, digital ads, print products, trade fair stands
The right channels for the right reasons. We plan your budget, choose the right channels from out-of-home to programmatic job ads and fine-tune with geotargeting and retargeting. Our advice is independent. That means we have no volume deals or kickback agreements in the back of our minds. We only recommend what really makes sense for your goals.
- Media planning, media buying and campaign management
- University, apprenticeship and school marketing
- Job ad management and multiposting through the Power People Group
- International rollout through the One Agent Network
Entertainment turns into reach. In a social audit we analyse your existing channels and find out which content is still missing. From that we develop strategies for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, for example, and take over editorial planning and production. We also set up corporate influencer programmes that invite employees to share their own insights.
- Social media content and corporate influencer programmes (organic)
- Social media advertising (paid)
- Social media workshops and training
People in mind, numbers on screen. We build career portals and microsites and optimise them for conversion and user journeys. A dashboard shows you at any time what your measures achieve – not just in the next quarterly report.
- Career website and landing page development including ATS integration and SEO
- HR analytics, dashboards and reporting
How working with us works
Every project is different, and every company starts from a different place. That’s why we don’t use off-the-shelf processes. We still set a clear framework for working together that you can rely on:
You tell us about your situation and your goals. We listen and ask questions. The first conversation is free and non-binding.
Together we look at what you already have: what’s in place, what’s missing and what can realistically be done with your budget?
You receive a proposal that breaks down approach, services, dates and costs – clear and transparent.
One dedicated contact person coordinates all the experts involved. For you that means you always know exactly who to turn to.
We measure what the measures achieve. What works, we expand. What doesn’t work yet, we change.
What clients say
“I value the cooperative and professional way we work together with GRAPEVINE. Trust, reliability and high standards of quality in particular make you a strong, long-term partner.”
AOK
“Every time, I find working together incredibly pleasant and reliable. They bring a clear, structured way of working. It’s a real partnership, and I can always rely on their expertise.”
Evonik
“GRAPEVINE has been our partner for many years. Together we have always found a great solution.”
REWE Group
“Making things possible without fuss: no matter how short the notice, they always find a way. Solution-oriented: even under complicated conditions they are happy to get creative with me, and we find a solution.”
A client from the insurance industry
Facing a specific challenge?
Tell us where you stand right now. We listen, ask the right questions and tell you what we think makes sense.
How long does an employer branding project take?
From strategy to a finished EVP usually takes three to six months. Exactly how long depends on how complex your company is and how deep you want to go: How many target groups do you address? How broad should the competitor analysis be? How many stakeholders need to be involved? The more people on board and the more coordination needed, the more likely it is to take the full six months. Smaller projects are much quicker.
| Phase | Typical duration | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy to EVP | 3 to 6 months | Number of stakeholders and target groups, depth of the competitor analysis |
| Creative and technical implementation | 3 to 6 months | Scope of measures, systems and interfaces, production effort |
| Campaign, measurement and fine-tuning | ongoing | Media budget, number of channels and target groups |
Strategy and creative can overlap, by the way: first preparatory creative work often runs alongside the strategy part. But we only start on the actual design once the content of the EVP is settled. Otherwise we would be working with assumptions that may still change and would have to redo work later.
What does working with an employer branding agency cost?
Employer branding has no catalogue price. We can still derive the costs transparently. We work in modules. That means you only book the building blocks you really need, and before we start you see what each one costs and which services it includes.
How high the costs are depends mainly on the depth of the analysis, the scope of creative work you want and the production effort. With ongoing media support, further factors come in, such as the duration and goal of the campaign, the target groups and the region.
We can also do smaller projects for considerably less: if you already have a clear employer positioning, for example, you don’t need a new analysis, only the creative module. And if you first want to see how we work, you can start with a single module.
What we don’t do: calculate with roughly estimated hours first and renegotiate later. You get a proposal with clearly described modules and fixed costs – and we stick to it.
| Module | Order of magnitude | What the module covers |
|---|---|---|
| Single modules to get started | Four-figure range | Workshop, training, quick competitor check, persona profile |
| Analysis and positioning | Mid five-figure range | Identity survey, market and competitor analysis, attractiveness profile, positioning and EVP |
| Creative concept | Low to mid five-figure range | Claim, two campaign routes, key visuals, headline and copy concept for several target groups |
| Imagery and production | Mid five-figure range | Shoot planning, production day, post-production including third-party costs for photography |
| Moving image | Mid five-figure range and above | Image film or recruiting video with agency and production team |
| Social media content | Four-figure range per package | Concept, production day, assets including one round of feedback |
| Corporate influencer programme | Four-figure range to start; ongoing support on a monthly basis | Selection, training and support of your brand ambassadors |
| Media | Individual, depending on goal, target group and region | Planning, buying and management of the campaign |
How is the budget split between creative and media?
One of the most expensive mistakes in employer marketing is an elaborately produced campaign that nobody sees because there’s no budget left to run it. That’s why we calculate starting from the media budget: the larger the media volume, the smaller the creative share in percentage terms. On the other hand, a key visual costs the same whether it reaches 50,000 or 500,000 people.
These are guide values, not a fixed formula. If you’re developing an existing visual identity further, you need less. If you address many target groups separately, you need more. The principle stays the same: plan budgets so that they cover both – developing a strong idea and then actually making it visible.
Employer branding people talk about
Three examples of our work, from a public employer to a family business:
Deutsche Bundesbank – “Work of special value”. New employer positioning and a cross-media campaign: the one-month out-of-home and DOOH campaign generated around 9 million views at ten locations, played out on more than 700 digital screens. View case →
Griesson – de Beukelaer – “Gehen Sie uns auf den Keks”. Employer brand and a humorous campaign for the family business: staff turnover and willingness to switch jobs went down, and recruiters received applications that came in specifically because of the campaign. View case →
City of Munich – “Wir pflegen”. Nursing recruitment campaign across social media, display and search engine marketing: more than 7 million impressions and around 70,000 clicks along the candidate journey. View case →
How to spot a good employer branding agency
The market is hard to navigate, and almost every agency promises the same thing. These seven points help you compare, whether or not you end up choosing us:
A good agency surveys your employees and analyses the competition before proposing a positioning. If an agency delivers the claim in the first meeting, it hasn’t done its homework.
If positioning, creative and media are not with the same provider, you need clear responsibilities and good handovers. Otherwise you end up paying for the extra coordination.
Ask to see cases with numbers: applications, time to hire, reach. “Award-winning” on its own says nothing about impact.
Ask directly about volume deals and kickback agreements. Recommendations should be based on which channel makes the most sense for your goal – not on where the agency earns the most.
KPIs are defined before the start, not after the fact. A dashboard with current figures gives you a more reliable overview of campaign success than a quarterly report.
A good agency will also tell you when the planned employer positioning doesn’t match the culture you actually live. Otherwise you produce a campaign your own employees don’t recognise themselves in.
Public employers, mid-sized companies and corporations work differently – in budgets, approval processes and tone. So make sure the agency brings the relevant expertise.
- Which people from the pitch will actually work on our project later?
- Where do your insights about our target group come from?
- Which KPIs do you suggest, and when will we see them?
- What would you advise us against?
Why employers work with us
GRAPEVINE means the office grapevine, and that’s exactly where our work begins: with what people really say about an employer. Analytical in strategy, bold in creative, effective in media, data-driven and AI-supported. The result we want to be measured by: employer branding that inspires and delivers measurable results.
And there’s what stands behind us: if we can’t offer something ourselves, we still have a strong network to draw on. As a brand of the Power People Group we have access to job ad multiposting, recruiting solutions and HR consulting, without you having to brief a second agency. Through the One Agent Network, the largest worldwide network of independent employer branding agencies, we run campaigns internationally in the local language.
20+
Years
of experience
300+
Campaigns
delivered
25.000+
Positions
filled
50%
International
corporations
40%
Mid-sized
companies
10%
Public
sector
How we work is described by five principles, our 5 Ps
Partnership
We stand by you when there’s headwind too, not just until the next pitch.
Personal
You are advised by your dedicated contact person, and behind every technical solution there is a real person you can reach.
Pragmatic
We work with individual solutions that keep your goal and budget in view. Strategic, but not overthought.
Professional
Offering advice as equals, directly from the people who know your project – and being a reliable partner you can work with for years.
Progressive
We break new ground, step by step, and use trends, tools and AI where they bring a real advantage.
Two locations, one team
Which colleagues work on your project depends on the task, not the postcode. With us you get the closeness of a regional agency and the reach of the Power People Group, whose brands together serve more than 7,000 clients.
Employer branding agency in Munich
Our Munich team is based in Schwabing. From here we work for employers in Munich, across southern Germany and as far as Hamburg, from family businesses to corporations. We come on site for workshops and shoots; everything else also works digitally.
Grapevine München GmbH
Tengstraße 9
80798 Munich
hello@grapevine-muenchen.de
+49 89 588 0317-70
Employer branding agency in Wiesbaden
Our second location is in Wiesbaden, a few minutes from Frankfurt. From there we work for employers in the Rhine-Main region and across Germany.
Grapevine Frankfurt GmbH
Kasteler Straße 22-24
65203 Wiesbaden
hello@grapevine-frankfurt.de
+49 611 711880
Award-winning work, literally
We know that awards don’t replace results. They show how independent juries have rated our work. A selection:
2025 Nomination: Film & Video category for “Die Klönmacher:innen – Vielfalt in Szene gesetzt” with the City of Cologne
2020 3rd place: HR Service Provider of the Year
2025 Bronze: Content Marketing category for “Real People. Real Stories. Real Impact” with Evonik Industries
2025 Social Media for Apprentices category, nominated by Allianz Deutschland
2024 Social Media Germany and Social Media for Apprentices categories, nominated by Allianz Deutschland
2022 1st place: Talent Intelligence category for the Employer Brand Cockpit with Evonik Industries
2026 Bronze: LinkedIn Talent Channel Partner
2026 Google Partner
Ready when you are:
What do you say?
Tell us where you stand as an employer – we’ll tell you straight what we think is feasible. No obligation and no fuss.
FAQs about our employer branding agency
An employer branding agency develops and communicates a company’s employer brand. This includes analysis and employee surveys, developing the employer value proposition (EVP), the creative concept with claim and key visuals, and putting it all into practice on the career website, in campaigns and on social media. Many agencies, ours included, also take care of media planning, reporting, workshops and training. In German, employer branding is often also called Arbeitgebermarketing.
Plan in three blocks: strategy, creative and media. As a rule of thumb, the larger the media budget, the smaller the share for creative. That means with a media volume of €100,000 to €300,000 you should allow around 30 percent for creative, from €500,000 about 20 percent. Below €100,000, no more than 50 percent should go into creative. Otherwise you have a beautiful campaign your target group never gets to see.
Start with the career website. It’s the only place you fully control and can design the way you want. It’s also worth maintaining your profiles on review platforms such as kununu and your social media channels, where employees speak for themselves. What counts is a consistent overall picture: what you show to the outside world has to match what applicants experience in the first interview – and what employees describe on review platforms.
There is no official ranking. Agencies can be called “specialised” if they work exclusively for employers and cover strategy, creative and media themselves instead of buying them in. Check references from your industry and company size, independence in media buying, and whether KPIs are defined before the project starts. You’ll find seven concrete criteria and four questions for your first meeting further up this page.
Our clients usually have around 800 employees or more, or a correspondingly high recruiting need, for example when a new location opens and many positions have to be filled at the same time. From this size on there are usually several target groups and an ongoing employer branding budget that makes strategic work worthwhile. We work for larger national and international mid-sized companies, global corporations and public employers.
Yes, mainly as workshops: we train your teams in social media and in writing and optimising job ads. We agree every workshop with you in advance and tailor it to your situation and your target groups. Workshops can be booked individually, independent of an ongoing project, and are an easy way to get to know how we work.
No. Our offices are in Munich and Wiesbaden; our clients are based throughout the German-speaking region and abroad. Many project phases can be done from anywhere. For workshops and shoots we come to you when needed – around our two locations the distances are especially short. Through the One Agent Network we also run campaigns in other countries and languages.
We define the KPIs before our measures start. Depending on the goal, these are visibility and reach, number of applications, time to hire or quality of applications. The results feed into a dashboard you can access at any time. It shows clicks, impressions, CPC, CPM, CTR, conversions, conversion rates and leads, among other things. We discuss campaign performance in regular reporting meetings. Since some KPIs require pixels on your website, we advise you on how to implement them in line with data protection rules. That way you can keep a close eye on how your campaigns and measures are performing.