Attracting the Right Talent

Your Employment Brand: Are You a Business People Want to Join?

Your employer brand is the reputation you have as a place to work. It is shaped by everything from how you advertise roles to what your current and former employees say about working there. In a market where strong IT candidates have genuine choices, employer brand is a significant competitive advantage.

Why IT Candidates Care About Employer Brand

IT professionals, particularly those with in-demand skills, are frequently approached by recruiters and receive unsolicited interest from prospective employers. The decision to engage seriously with any of those approaches is shaped by what they already know or can find out about the organisation. This means your employer brand is working, or not working, long before any formal application process begins.

What Shapes Your Employer Brand

Factor	How it affects your brand
What your current team says	The most credible signal. What do your engineers, BAs, and developers say when someone in their network asks ‘what’s it like at X?’. You cannot directly control this, but you can influence it through how you treat people.
Your presence on review platforms	Glassdoor, SEEK company profiles, and similar platforms are checked by many candidates before engaging with an opportunity. Unaddressed negative reviews are more damaging than the reviews themselves.
The quality of your recruitment process	How you treat candidates during the hiring process communicates your values as an employer. A disorganised, slow, or disrespectful process tells people what working there might feel like.
Your LinkedIn and web presence	What does your careers page actually say? Does your leadership team have a visible, authentic presence? Are your team’s posts and activity visible and positive?
The reputation of your leadership	Particularly in technical communities, the reputation of technical leads and engineering managers matters. Strong leaders attract strong candidates.

Practical Ways to Strengthen Your Employer Brand

Ask your team what they genuinely value about working there. Build your employer value proposition from what’s actually true, not from what you think sounds good.
Respond to reviews on Glassdoor and SEEK, especially the critical ones. A thoughtful response is often more reassuring than no response.
Feature real team members in your hiring materials. A genuine quote from a developer about what they find technically interesting carries more weight than a stock photo and a marketing tagline.
Share what your team is working on. Technical blog posts, conference talks, and open source contributions give candidates a window into the actual work.
Make your job ads honest about the environment. If you have a fast-paced startup culture, say so. If you’re a large enterprise with stable working conditions, say that. Self-selection works in your favour when the right candidates opt in and the wrong ones opt out.

How can a business become a place that strong IT candidates genuinely want to join? Start by asking your best people what they value about working here. The answer is your employer value proposition. Then go and build more of that, and be honest about it when you’re talking to candidates. Joel, Younity

Embedding Flexibility to Attract Strong Candidates

The expectation of flexible working has fundamentally shifted in the IT sector since 2020. Understanding what this actually means in practice, and offering it genuinely rather than grudgingly, is now a significant factor in candidate decision-making.

What Flexibility Means to IT Candidates

Flexibility is not a single thing. Different candidates value different types, and understanding what your current team actually values, and what prospective candidates typically prioritise, helps you make informed decisions about what to offer.

Type of Flexibility	What it means in practice
Remote working	The ability to work from home some or all of the time. This is the most discussed flexibility type and expectations vary widely by role, team, and individual.
Flexible hours	The ability to start and finish at different times, or to work compressed hours. Often valued more by those with family commitments or long commutes.
Output over hours	A culture where performance is measured by what’s delivered, not by when people are at their desks. Particularly valued by senior and experienced candidates.
Choice of equipment	Some IT professionals have strong preferences around hardware and operating systems. Where possible, offering choice is a low-cost benefit.
Async working	The ability to work outside the rhythm of constant meetings. Developers and engineers in particular often cite deep work time as highly valued.

What’s Reasonable to Expect

Many organisations are currently trying to rebalance back toward more in-office time. This is understandable. The challenge is that the IT talent market is more flexible than most. Organisations requiring five days in the office will find their candidate pool narrowed to those who either prefer it or have no choice. Being clear, honest, and consistent about your expectations, rather than over-promising flexibility and then changing expectations post-hire, is significantly better for your employer brand.

What kinds of flexibility help attract top tech talent? It’s not just about working from home. It’s about autonomy and trust. IT professionals, especially experienced ones, want to be trusted to manage their own time and deliver what they’ve committed to. Rigid presenteeism pushes good people toward organisations that offer something different. Sian, Younity

Supporting Hybrid Working Without Losing Culture

Hybrid working is now the norm for most IT teams in New Zealand. Making it work well requires deliberate effort, not the passive hope that things will sort themselves out.

What Gets Lost in Hybrid Environments

The things that tend to erode in poorly managed hybrid environments are:

Informal connection. The hallway conversations, the shared lunches, the spontaneous problem-solving that happens when people are in the same physical space.
Visibility for quieter team members. In hybrid meetings, the people who are physically present often dominate. Remote participants need deliberate facilitation to contribute equally.
Onboarding quality. New starters in hybrid environments have a harder time building the relationships and absorbing the context that help them become effective quickly.
Team cohesion over time. Without deliberate effort, hybrid teams can drift into silos where the in-office group and the remote group develop different information sets and relationship networks.

What Good Hybrid Looks Like

Clear and consistent norms. Everyone knows what days are in-office, what that means, and why. Flexibility within that is fine, but ambiguity creates resentment.
In-office time designed for collaboration, not individual work. If people are coming in to sit on calls at their desk, they’ll question why they came in.
Equal meeting experience. Meetings should be either fully remote or fully in-person where possible. The hybrid meeting where some people are in a room and some are on a screen is the worst of both worlds for the remote participants.
Deliberate team rituals. Regular team activities that don’t revolve around work, whether monthly lunches, quarterly offsite sessions, or informal check-ins, maintain the social fabric of the team.

How can organisations support hybrid work while still maintaining a strong and connected team culture? You have to design for it deliberately. Culture doesn’t just happen in a hybrid environment. You have to create the structures and the rituals that connect people, even when they’re not in the same place. Alicia, Younity

Clear Purpose and Values That Resonate with IT Talent

IT professionals increasingly expect to understand not just what they’ll work on, but why it matters. Purpose is a genuine driver of attraction and retention, particularly for mid-career and senior candidates who have choices.

What Purpose Actually Means in Hiring

When IT candidates ask about purpose, they’re typically asking one or more of these questions:

Will my work make a meaningful contribution to something that matters?
Are the problems I’ll be working on technically interesting?
Will my contribution be visible and valued, or will it disappear into a large organisation?
Does this organisation’s behaviour align with its stated values?

How to Communicate Purpose Authentically

The key word is authentically. Generic mission statements about ‘creating value’ or ‘making a difference’ are invisible. What resonates is specific and honest:

‘Our platform processes hospital appointment scheduling for 40,000 patients annually. Your work directly affects how quickly those patients get seen.’ That’s purpose.
‘We’re the team that built the payment infrastructure used by half of New Zealand’s online retailers.’ That’s technical pride.
‘We have a quarterly product showcase where every team presents what they’ve shipped. Your work will be seen.’ That’s visibility.

How should a company communicate its purpose and values so they genuinely resonate with IT professionals? Be specific. Don’t tell them you have a great culture. Tell them what that means in practice. What decisions has the company made that demonstrate those values? What does someone’s typical day actually look like? Specifics are what build trust. Amanda, Younity

Values Alignment: Testing in Both Directions

Values alignment is assessed by candidates during the interview process. They’re watching how you run the process, how you communicate, how you treat them as candidates. If your stated values include ‘we respect people’s time’ but your interview process involves six rounds and long periods of silence, there’s a mismatch. The interview process is a demonstration of your values, not just an assessment of theirs.

Promoting Growth Culture and Belonging

Growth opportunities and a genuine sense of belonging are two of the most consistent factors in IT talent attraction and retention. Organisations that deliver on both attract stronger candidates and keep them longer.

What Growth Means to IT Professionals

Growth in IT does not automatically mean promotion. Many experienced IT professionals have no desire to manage others and would see a move into management as a step sideways or backwards. Understanding the different dimensions of growth that matter to individuals is essential:

Growth Dimension	What it looks like for IT professionals
Technical depth	Going deeper in a specialisation. Becoming the go-to expert for a particular technology, architecture pattern, or domain.
Technical breadth	Developing a wider range of skills across adjacent areas. The ‘T-shaped’ profile valued in agile and cross-functional environments.
Leadership (people)	Taking on responsibility for team members, mentoring, and creating career pathways for others.
Leadership (technical)	Becoming a technical authority, solution architect, or principal engineer without people management responsibility.
Commercial scope	Taking on work that connects more directly to business outcomes, client relationships, or strategic decision-making.

Practical Ways to Demonstrate Growth Culture

Dedicate time for learning. Even a half-day per fortnight for structured learning, exploration, or attending industry events signals genuine commitment to development.
Run regular one-on-ones that focus on development, not just delivery. Understanding what each person wants to achieve and actively helping them get there is the most powerful retention lever available.
Create internal showcase opportunities. Regular sessions where teams share what they’ve been building, learning, or experimenting with create a culture of growth and recognition.
Fund professional development. Training budgets, conference attendance, and certification fees signal that you take development seriously.
Promote from within where possible. When you hire externally for a senior role that an internal candidate was ready for, the message to your team is clear.

Growth can come in so many ways and it’s really individualised. If you can commit to helping your team develop in the way they feel they need to grow, that’s genuinely powerful. Just sitting down with them, finding out what’s important to them for growth, and then actually following through. Sian, Younity

Building a Sense of Belonging

Belonging is harder to manufacture than growth. It emerges from the lived experience of being valued, respected, and included. Some indicators that it exists:

People talk positively about their colleagues and team outside of work.
New starters are integrated quickly and feel they have people to go to.
Differences in working style, background, and perspective are treated as assets, not inconveniences.
People feel safe enough to raise concerns or disagree without fear of consequences.