Content Waste: The Silent Drain on Employer Branding Teams

There’s something we don’t talk about enough in Talent Marketing and Employer Branding because it’s uncomfortable. It’s not AI. It’s not EVP. It’s not budget cuts.  

It’s content waste. The silent killer of EB teams time, resources and results.

Our teams are working hard and producing more content than ever before, yet most of the stories we create disappear almost as quickly as we publish them.

It doesn’t make sense to treat content like single-use plastic: created with your team’s effort and resources, used once, and forgotten instantly.  

I see this pattern too often:

- A great employee interview posted once, then it’s gone

- A powerful story hidden on a careers site that's never seen

- A role spotlight with campaign potential used for a single email

- A video pinned for weeks or months just to be archived

This isn’t a content shortage problem. It’s a content mindset problem.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most Talent Marketing and EB content doesn’t fall flat because it lacks quality; it falls flat because it only lives once.

We’re still treating content like a box to tick and something to post and move on from. Treating your content as done instead of in circulation wastes its full potential.

The spray and pray mindset might have made sense in 2015 but a decade later, it’s holding your team back.

The Future is Circular Content

An employee story shouldn’t have a 24-hour lifespan.  

It should live multiple lives, in different formats, across different channels, and reach different audiences. It should live 6+ lives at a minimum!

Companies who win in EVP, attraction, and reputation:

- Capture the story once

- Repurpose endlessly

- Personalise it for different regions and audiences

- Redistribute intelligently

- Keep stories circulating

- Build a library of stories, not a landfill

The results? One story shared across six formats and channels has a longer shelf life compounding the engagement tenfold.

What Questions Should Your Talent Teams Be Asking

If you’re looking for a starting point, here are the questions to start asking to stop your content going to waste:

1. Why does 90% of our content only live once?

2. Why do employees create more influential content than we do?

3. Why are we still creating content for channels, not systems?

4. Why aren’t our stories used in job descriptions, nurture journeys, or campaigns?

5. Why do we keep reinventing assets instead of reusing them?

If these questions make you uncomfortable, good.

The Cost of Single-Use Content

When we rely on single-use content we’re relying on content that:

- Creates noise, not visibility

- Increases content debt and team workload

- Burns time on disposable assets

- Limits reach, consistency, and brand influence

The problem isn’t content. It’s the lack of a content system.

Building A Circular Content System That Works

Now that the problem’s been identified, the next step is building a system that works for you to get more life from every story.

Here’s a practical example of getting more from one content piece:

Employee Interview → Blog → Social → Email → Job Description → Campaign Assets → Localised Adaptations

One input.

Multiple outputs.

Zero waste.

The benefits add up quickly:

- A clear, consistent brand narrative

- Broader and deeper audience reach  

- A longer shelf life  

- A higher ROI  

This is the content system most Talent Brand and Employer Brand teams are missing.

Video is King but It Needs Support

Video drives emotion and action. But candidates are no longer relying solely on social channels or Google searches.  

Increasingly, they’re turning to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to learn more about your company and LLMs favour text.

A simple Q&A blog introducing or summarising your video suddenly makes your most powerful video content discoverable.  

But we don’t do this, we produce the art and hit publish… then move onto the next story.

How The Martec Fits

Repurposing shouldn’t be manual, most teams don’t have the time. It should be automated and scalable.

That’s why The Martec focuses on:

- Turning one story into multiple formats and outputs without the manual heavy lifting

- Localising your content without re-creating it from scratch

- Building story networks, not isolated assets  

- Eliminating single-use content

The Martec transforms Talent teams from content factories into impact engines.

A Challenge to Try

The future belongs to teams who create more life from their content and not more content.

One story can change your audience's perception. But only if it lives more than once.

To get to the bottom of if you are creating content, or a lasting influence? I have a challenge for you. Look at one piece of content you published in the last few weeks and ask yourself:

- Where else could this live?

- How else could we use it?

- Who else might help us reach?

If you’re stuck for ideas, drop me a message, I’d love to chat about what’s possible and how we can help you move from single-use content to a more sustainable, reusable approach.  

Let’s clean up our content environment together.