Employer branding video is a filmed argument for why a specific type of person should consider a specific employer in Belgium. The brief is different from a recruitment ad brief at every stage: the question it starts from, the way interviews are run on set, and the logic the editor uses to choose between takes. Those differences show up in every cut, including the ones that look like production choices.
Most Belgian employers commissioning an employer branding video commission a recruitment ad. The difference is not obvious from the output. Both involve filming employees talking about their jobs. Both have candidates as their audience. Both end up as a two-to-four-minute edit on a careers page or a LinkedIn post.
What separates them is what the filming is trying to find.
A recruitment ad is built to fill a role. The brief is calibrated to the job specification: what the role requires, what the contract offers, what good candidates look like. The employees on screen deliver the line about what they enjoy working here in several takes until one is usable. The edit takes the cleanest version.
Employer branding video is built to create a self-selection test. The brief is calibrated to a specific type of person: the candidate who would stay and the candidate who would leave within six months for a reason the organisation could have predicted. Finding that specific person on screen, and filming them saying something a candidate would not hear at any other employer in the sector, is what makes the difference between the two formats.
What does the brief look like when it produces a different result?
It starts from a different question. The question is not who do we want to hire. It is what is it actually like to work here that is true, specific, and would not be said the same way by any other employer in this sector.
That question has a harder answer. It requires discovery work before the shoot: conversations with employees that are not coaching sessions but interviews aimed at surfacing the specific contradictions and concrete realities of the organisation. The employee who will say the thing that no HR communication would have scripted. The detail about the actual job that the right candidate will find immediately credible.
What this brief structure looks like at planning stage:
- A specific target candidate profile, not a general applicant category
- A question the production team is trying to answer on camera, not a message list to deliver
- Interview preparation that looks for specificity and contradiction, not polished delivery
- Edit logic that selects for the person who sounds like themselves, not the person who sounds like a company brochure
What does this look like in practice?
For Federale Politie, Majortale produced an employer branding film to recruit for a brand-new police unit in Belgium. In under five months, the production contributed to 404 applications for that unit.
The brief that produced those numbers was not built around positive messaging about the job. Law enforcement recruitment in Belgium, specifically for a new operational unit, cannot use the standard employer brand formula. Candidates who apply to Federale Politie have a specific motivation. The film was built to speak to that motivation directly, not to a general public-sector value proposition. The production found the specific people on set who could say that specific thing in a way the right candidates would believe.
For Lidl Belgium, a large household-name employer competing for candidates who have options across retail, logistics, and increasingly the tech sector, the brief has to address the specific competitive context. The employer branding argument is different from Lidl's consumer advertising argument, and the film that works for talent acquisition starts from the candidate's actual choice, not from the brand's preferred positioning.
Does every Belgian employer need this?
Organisations with strong and consistent candidate flow, where the challenge is selection rather than attraction, are solving a different problem. Employer branding video in the sense described here is for organisations where the film is doing active recruitment work: reaching the candidate who would not have considered applying, addressing the objection the careers page cannot answer, or speaking to a specific candidate type that a generic value proposition will not reach.
In Belgium, the sectors where this has become a real brief rather than a discretionary project are sectors facing candidate preference shifts: logistics, public services, large-format retail, and any organisation competing against the tech and consulting sectors for skilled candidates. In those sectors, the film that works is built on a different foundation from a recruitment ad from the first line of the brief.
If you are working on an employer brand brief in Belgium and want to understand what that planning process looks like, a conversation is worth the time.
