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 overhaul their reputation as an employer. The product side was already handled; what they actually needed was a recruitment story, something that told the market why working at ABC was worth applying for in the first place.
So I wrote a manifesto.
The Thinking
Employer branding is a strange little category. Most of it reads like HR wrote it for HR, with every company claiming the exact same things, growth opportunities, work-life balance, great culture, a passionate team, and somehow none of it actually saying anything.
I didn’t want to write another one of those. I wanted to write something that admitted the actual feeling of hating your job, because that’s the feeling the audience is sitting in when they’re scrolling through listings. You can’t sell someone a better life until you’ve admitted they’re stuck in a worse one.
The turn came on the line “Romantic, we know.” A self-aware pivot that hands the audience permission to call the whole thing idealistic, then carries on anyway, and that single beat is what kept this from being just another corporate recruitment pitch.
The brand tie-in came last. ABC is a beverage company, so the link to work was never going to write itself, and I landed on a product-to-context swap for the tagline: “Crack open your career.” The cue is a 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 go near. It sits somewhere between HR, marketing and internal comms, and it tends to land on whoever happens to be free. The brief comes out stiff by default, because the people signing it off are the same people hiring from it.
What I wanted to prove with this manifesto is that recruitment writing doesn’t have to sound like recruitment writing. You can start from honesty, use a self-aware pivot, land a consumer tagline on a decidedly non-consumer problem, and still end up with a manifesto a real person might actually watch to the end.
I also voiced this one myself, because the read matters every bit as much as the words; a manifesto is a spoken document first and a written one second.
Project: ABC Employer Brand Manifesto
Role: Copywriting, Voiceover
Year: 2019
Agency: People of the Internet
Client: Ahram Beverage Company