What do you see as the biggest challenge for 2026?
Honestly? Staying human. We’re drowning in tools, frameworks, and AI-generated content, and somehow, in all of that, we forgot that employer branding is about people talking to people. The biggest challenge is about remembering why any of this matters in the first place.
We’ve gotten very good at producing content and very bad at creating connection. And candidates feel that. They can smell a templated message from a mile away. They know when a company’s values exist only on a website. In 2026, the organisations that will actually stand out are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tech stack, they’re the ones that have the courage to be real. That’s a harder challenge than it sounds, because real is messy, and most organisations still prefer polished over true.
Where do recruitment organisations need to improve on the corporate side?
Stop selling jobs. Seriously. Candidates are not impressed by your “dynamic environment” and “competitive salary.” They’ve read that sentence a thousand times and it completely lost its meaning. What they actually want to know is what it feels like to work there, on a Tuesday afternoon, when a project falls apart, when the manager is having a bad day, when the company hits a rough patch. They want the real story, not the brochure.
Recruitment organisations need to get uncomfortable with honesty. That means closing the gap between what HR says in a job ad and what employees say at lunch. It means building EVPs that people inside the company actually recognise, not aspirational fiction that collapses the moment someone joins. The corporate side of recruitment has a credibility problem, and no amount of employer branding budget will fix it if the foundation is off. You can’t market your way out of a culture issue.
What should recruiters focus on in 2026?
The experience instead of the transaction. A recruiter’s job isn’t to fill a role, but to be the first real, human touchpoint of an employer brand. Every message, every interview, every moment of silence after a final round either builds trust or burns it. And right now, a lot of trust is being burned.
In 2026, recruiters need to think like hosts. That means treating candidates with the same care and intentionality you’d want for your best customer. It means communicating clearly even when there’s nothing new to say. It means giving feedback like it costs you something, because for the person on the other end, it does. The recruitment experience is the employer brand in action, the most tangible proof of what a company actually stands for.
If you could give one piece of advice to the industry, what would it be?
Talk to your employees. Not through an annual engagement survey with a five-point scale and questions nobody reads the results of. Actually talk to them, in real conversations, with real curiosity, about what it’s like to be there. Because you cannot build a credible employer brand from a boardroom, and you cannot fake a culture that people live every single day.
The most powerful employer branding content in the world is already inside your organisation. It’s in the stories people tell each other, in the moments that made someone stay when they had a better offer, in the things that genuinely make people proud to work there. But you will never find it if you’re only looking at your LinkedIn analytics. Get out of the deck and into the building. Start there, or don’t start at all.
What would be the one lesson you would share from 2025 based on your professional activities?
That the industry is remarkably good at learning nothing. We had every signal: burned-out candidates, disengaged employees, employer brands that collapsed the second someone posted an honest Glassdoor review, companies that spent years building a reputation and lost it in a month. And a significant chunk of the industry responded by doing the same things, just faster and with AI helping them do it at scale.
What I kept seeing in 2025 was the same old mistakes with shinier packaging. Generic EVPs localised for markets that deserved something real. Recruitment campaigns built around aesthetics instead of truth. Employee advocacy programmes that felt more like a social media obligation than genuine pride. The tools changed. The thinking didn’t. And that’s the lesson that apparently still needs to be said out loud, at conferences, repeatedly, until it sticks: authenticity shouldn’t be a trend you adopt when it’s convenient, because it’s the only foundation that holds. Everything else is just noise with a good font.
Thank you for the answers Iva Marinković, Managing Partner & EB and Comms consultant at Empple.