Talent Branding: How to Control Your Story in the Candidate Market
Take control of how candidates hear your story. Micro-sites ensure a consistent, transparent, and compelling message – designed for applicants, not customers, and amplified by every recruiter you work with.
Why this matters
The right message, to the right people, every time
When you hire in Japan, your story is usually told not by you, but by recruiters. The problem? Few know how to pitch your company well. Some skim your website for talking points, others recycle PDFs, and many just paste job text into an email. The result is inconsistent, improvised, and often uninspiring messaging. That’s a risk when you’re competing for scarce bilingual GTM talent.
Client branding is about taking control of that story across every channel – job boards, LinkedIn, and agencies. Our team and technology help you coordinate and deliver your message consistently, wherever candidates see it.
Your content strategy needs to focus on applicants, not customers.
From websites to PDFs to improvised email pitches, your story is often told inconsistently – and you don’t control what candidates actually hear.
The difference between noise and a message that converts comes down to four things: creating a central micro-site, structuring the story, adding the right content formats, and giving agencies controlled access. Get these right, and every recruiter becomes a consistent amplifier of your brand, not an improviser. This is exactly what our RPO recruiters and platform deliver.
Improving Your Talent Brand
Partner access and message consistency
In an RPO context, our recruiters act as your extension. They carry your branded content directly into the market, embedding their own profiles and calendars so candidates can book meetings seamlessly.
External agencies also benefit. They can add their own details – logos, recruiter bios, testimonials – but your company’s message is read-only, with you in control. That means your brand story is always consistent, accurate, and up to date, while still allowing agency partners to add their personal credibility.
The end result is a unified voice: whether a candidate is approached directly by us, by your internal TA, or by an external recruiter, they’re hearing the same core story.
Know Your ICP: Branding for talent, not customers
Define your audience as carefully as your marketers define theirs. It’s important to recognise that employer branding for talent is not the same as marketing your solutions to customers. The audience is different, and so are their priorities. Just as marketers define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), we need to define the Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP).
Your marketing team may want to control what’s shared, but their materials often focus on buyers, not joiners. Candidate branding must go deeper, addressing career motivations, culture, leadership style, and growth opportunities. And it must be coordinated across all touchpoints – job board profiles, LinkedIn, agency briefs, and direct outreach – so candidates hear one consistent, compelling story. If you let marketing dictate the story, you risk sounding like a sales brochure – and candidates will tune out.
Fixing the Pitch: The recruiter reality
Some recruiters are excellent storytellers – usually because they’ve had proper sales training. They can pitch your business clearly and persuasively. But most aren’t trained that way. What you actually see is a patchwork of approaches:
PDFs hastily built from your website content
Plain-text emails with no design or consistency
Over-simplified one-liners that fail to inspire
The content medium is all over the place, and you have no control over what candidates are being shown, or by which medium. Your target audience may see information that is outdated, inconsistent, or even misleading.
That’s a real risk when you’re competing for scarce bilingual GTM talent.
Micro-sites – your story, told consistently
Our solution is simple: micro-sites for every hiring project. These are branded pages designed specifically for candidates, with content you control. Recruiters no longer improvise – they share your dedicated site. Candidates no longer hear mixed stories – they see a consistent, accurate, and compelling one.
Each site follows a storytelling model proven to resonate with bilingual GTM talent:
Industry trends and drivers – why now
Company positioning – where you fit and why you’re credible
Product-market fit and impact – the problem you solve
People – leadership credibility and cultural signals
The role – concise, not bloated
Career path – what this means for the candidate’s future
Whether the candidate is approached by us in an RPO, by your internal TA, or by an external agency, they see the same high-quality story.
Content that builds trust
Candidates are curious and resourceful. They will research everything they can about you. That’s why our platform (originally Referable.ai) starts with a scan of public information – the same data they’ll find. Even the negatives matter. Transparency builds trust, and we help you contextualise challenges while highlighting strengths. The goal is not just to accentuate positives, but to eliminate doubts that stop a candidate from saying yes.
We support multiple content formats that go beyond text:
Leader videos – e.g. your Country Manager explaining the vision
Webinars – recorded and reused as candidate-facing material
Charts and visuals – to illustrate growth and impact
Profiles and calendars – so candidates can book meetings directly
This turns static information into dynamic storytelling – candidates get a real sense of people, culture, and opportunity.
What this means for leaders
Get the right message to the right people – consistently!
If you don’t control your employer story, you’re leaving it in the hands of whoever happens to tell it – with all the risks that come with inconsistency. Some will be good, many will not.
Your ATS may provide content but agency partners will not send candidates to your application page. Micro-sites solve this problem. They give you a central, controlled story that every recruiter and every candidate can access, in a format that converts curiosity into genuine interest.
For leaders expanding in Japan, this is not optional. In a market where candidates are scarce and sceptical, consistent client branding is the foundation for successful direct sourcing, agency partnerships, and long-term hiring success.
Success Starts With Strategy
Hope isn’t a strategy. Every effective RPO begins with a clear plan – one that shows where you can improve quickly and how to build lasting capability.
Our approach focuses on three critical levers that create the foundation for rapid wins and sustainable results:
Agency Optimisation
Agency management with teeth
We don’t just manage agencies – we audit and classify them. We identify which recruiters are true specialists and which are generalists.
Easy-to-fill reqs go to referrals and direct sourcing. Hard-to-fill or urgent reqs go to qualified, motivated agencies, with the right incentives to get the job done.
Because great results are about partnership and mutual success.
Content Strategy
Tell Your Story with content that converts
Most agencies pitch candidates with their own improvised story. We fix that. We create micro-sites for each project, with a storytelling model that works:
Industry trends and drivers, company positioning, product market fit and impact, people (leadership credibility), the role (kept concise), the candidate’s career path.
Every recruiter, every candidate, sees a consistent, compelling message – controlled by you, amplified by your agents.
Direct Sourcing
Candidate-first, Channel-smart
Our RPOs start with candidate mapping with the goal of optimising direct sourcing. We build a view of who’s in the market, who can be referred, and who should be avoided. From there:
Referrals – engage employee networks first.
Direct sourcing – outbound targeting of the right people.
Job boards – assessed and used tactically, not by default.
Trust Earned, Not Claimed
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Goh Hattori, APAC Talent Acquisition
“Instrumental in hiring key people, including Country Manager, and delivering RPO”
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Sung Hae Kim, Global Head of People
Murray built our Japan team, securing key sales & engineering hires. High quality candidates, knows his stuff.
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Jon Robertson, APAC VP
“Murray has been a tremendous help in hiring dozens of individual contributors as well as key leaders”
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Josep Garcia, APAC VP
“Impressive research and a job well done! Thanks for the great work.”
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Kate Berkeley, APAC Talent Acquisition
“One of the top recruiters VMware has worked with, across the whole of Asia Pacific. Exceptional.”
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Anthony Palladino, CRO
“Thanks for your work. Nice job! I appreciate you running at a very intense pace. ”
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Anesh Ravi, APAC Sales Director
“Thanks for all your work throughout the process - I’ve enjoyed working together!”
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Patrick Cook, Director Innovation
“Murray has done outstanding work for PARC in a difficult talent space”
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Matt Thatcher, Global Sales VP
“His business sense and creativity helped fill a high level executive position in a relatively short period of time.”
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Stephen Beck, Services VP
"Murray was invaluable. His advice, cultural guidance, and results were outstanding. I highly recommend him.”
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Gerry Sillars, APAC VP
“If you need someone to assist as you try to enter the Japanese market don’t look any further.”
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Mathew Fleming, APAC Sales Director
“Helped us lock in a key leader for Japan. Did an excellent job.”
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Barry Kent, Global Sales VP
“Excellent work to hire a key sales lead for our new all-flash product in Japan.”
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Brian Burns, Founding Partner
“I see Murray as the only recruiter that really understands the markets that he recruits into.“
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Matt Young, APAC VP
“We almost exclusively found Murray to be our go-to recruiter. I highly recommend him.”
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North Compton, Executive Recruiter
“Murray has deep knowledge and experience about all things RPO.”
Collective Experience In Practice
We’re not just another agency calling itself an RPO. Together with our partners, we’ve led Asia-Pacific recruitment programmes that helped build some of the world’s top technology companies. From executive search to large-scale hiring, our experience spans the leaders that have shaped today’s innovation economy.
And more.