The infrastructure of employer brand is cracking. Candidates no longer start on your careers site — they start with an AI search result, a Reddit thread, a TikTok from a former employee, or a Glassdoor page you didn’t write. The content you carefully optimized for Google isn’t showing up the way it used to. And AI-powered hiring, whatever efficiencies it creates, is generating a new category of brand risk that most TA leaders haven’t fully reckoned with: you can scale recruiting without scaling trust, but you can’t scale your way out of the damage when candidates feel processed rather than seen.

Bryan Chaney, Colleen Molloy, Kellie McCann, and Chrystal Moore bring four distinct vantage points to the same core problem. Colleen has been working on what comes after SEO — adapting employer content for the AI-driven search environments that are reshaping how candidates form first impressions and how EVPs need to be structured to survive retrieval-based discovery. Kellie has been studying the collapse of corporate-controlled narrative: why employees, creators, Reddit, and TikTok now carry more credibility than anything your brand team produces, and what that means for how TA leaders think about reputation strategy. Chrystal brings the operational and insights lens, exploring what the data tells us about how AI and consumer brand perception are shaping candidate expectations, and what it takes for employer brand and the hiring experience to deliver on that promise. Bryan ties it together through the lens of experience brand — the argument that your employer brand isn’t what you publish, it’s what candidates feel at every touchpoint from first search to first day.

This fireside conversation is for TA and employer brand leaders who sense that the old playbook is losing its grip but aren’t sure what to build instead. It’s a direct, practical conversation about the forces reshaping employer brand right now — and the operating decisions leaders need to make before the gap between perception and reality becomes a pipeline problem.

Attendee Takeaways

Generative Engine Optimization vs. SEO. Understand how AI-driven search is changing the way candidates discover and evaluate employers — and what you need to do differently with your content, EVP messaging, and online collateral to stay visible and credible in that environment.
The trust stack has flipped. Map where your employer brand actually lives in the eyes of candidates — and why employee voice, third-party creators, and community platforms now outrank your careers site in credibility. Learn how leading teams are working with that reality instead of against it.
AI can scale recruiting. It cannot scale trust. Identify the specific points in an AI-assisted hiring process where brand risk concentrates — the signals candidates read as cold, impersonal, or evasive — and how to design for human connection without abandoning the efficiency gains.
From recruitment marketing to reputation strategy. The shift in how employer brand leaders need to think about their function in a transparency era — less campaign management, more credibility architecture — and the practical moves that start that transition.