An employer brand manifesto for the people behind the party
How It Started
Ahram Beverage Company came to People of the Internet in 2019 wanting to revamp their public image as an employer. The product side was handled. What they needed was a recruitment story. Something that told the market why working at ABC was worth applying for.
So I wrote a manifesto.
The Thinking
Employer branding is a strange category. Most of it reads like HR wrote it for HR. Every company claims the same things: growth opportunities, work-life balance, great culture, passionate team. Nobody says anything.
I didn’t want to write another one of those. I wanted to write something that acknowledged the actual feeling of hating your job, because that’s the feeling the audience is sitting with when they’re scrolling job listings. You can’t sell someone a better life until you admit they’re in a worse one.
The turn came with the line “Romantic, we know.” A self-aware pivot that gives the audience permission to call the whole thing idealistic, then keeps going anyway. That single beat is what stopped this from being another corporate recruitment pitch.
The brand tie-in came last. ABC is a beverage company, so the connection to work was never going to write itself. I landed on a product-to-context swap for the tagline: “Crack open your career.” The cue is the bottle opening. The meaning is a career starting. Two moves in five words.
The Script
There are countless ways to waste your time and energy. But none are as subtly destructive as a job you hate. That look of terror when you see your alarm. The dread you feel at your office’s doorsteps. The coworkers that drain your enthusiasm. The worst of all is that heavy feeling of going nowhere.
An ideal job should make you feel welcome, as if you’re going to a second home. It should make those eight hours feel like three. It ought to give you the energy you need to go the extra seven miles. And everyone inside should be as close to you as your brothers and sisters.
Romantic, we know. But we’ve been around for quite some time, and if nothing else, a healthy work environment is the one thing we believe in.
You might not associate us with a whole lot of work. We are the life of every party around, after all. But just as we power your celebrations, we empower our own at the workplace. We give them the edge they need to cut through what may come. We give them the support they deserve so that they can push on with confidence. We give them more reasons to come to the office besides a paycheck and medical.
Work is a whole third of your life. But it doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be something much more rewarding. And it is, when you’re with us.
ABC. Crack open your career.
Why This Work Matters to Me
Employer branding is a specialisation most copywriters never touch. It sits between HR, marketing, and internal communications, and it tends to get handed to whoever’s free. The brief is usually stiff by default, because the people approving it are the same people hiring from it.
What I wanted to prove with this manifesto was that recruitment writing doesn’t have to sound like recruitment writing. You can start from honesty. You can use a self-aware pivot. You can land a consumer tagline on a non-consumer problem. You can write a manifesto that a real person might actually finish watching.
I also voiced this one myself. The read matters as much as the words; a manifesto is a spoken document first, a written one second.
Project: ABC Employer Brand Manifesto
Role: Copywriting, Voiceover
Year: 2019
Agency: People of the Internet
Client: Ahram Beverage Company