The development of an Employer Brand can be very useful in attracting talented employees. Organisations are realising that directly, or indirectly people, not products, deliver most brand promises.

Employees experience every day whether you are delivering what you promise and this will be demonstrated through their attitudes and behaviour. Nothing will destroy a reputation faster than an organization promoting itself as having a strong and ethical employer brand only to find its employees informally giving out a very different opinion to its customers, or their own family and friends. Organisations need to keep replenishing their talent pool; ideally you want people to come to you. A question all organizations should be asking themselves is 'Are our employees acting as ambassadors for us?' 'Are they talking positively to their families, partners and friends about our organization? What are they saying to our customers?’

An example of a pro-active approach to recruitment was illustrated by Rusty Rueff when he was senior vice president of HR at Electronic Arts, in the US. In a 2001 Fast Company article by Anna Muoio, Rueff was interviewed about his approach to talent:

"Creative talent is the scarcest resource on the planet," said Rueff, "The primary limiting factor on our business is having enough creative leaders on our team. The challenge then becomes how to come into contact with the best of the best and how to establish relationships with them. If we can do that, then somewhere down the road -- I might not know exactly when or where -- they will work with us. If you build and nurture those relationships, you just know that it's going to happen."

Rueff’s solution to this was to use the Internet to create a community of potential employees ‘“We're operating on the leading edge in terms of creating community through technology," Rueff says. "When people hear from us, I hope they think 'Wow, I thought you forgot about me. And now you're actually contacting me to tell me something has changed and that there's another opportunity?' I know this sounds really simple, but how many companies treat people like that? This stuff just doesn't happen. And, for us, it's the tip of the iceberg….My dream is that this database continues to grow to a point where the community gets so large that we can become very targeted and, more importantly, extremely personal in our approach. We're going to get to a point where I'll ping someone who registered when he was 16 and say, 'You're 18 now. Where are you? What's new in your life? Can I tell you about some things that are going on at EA?'"

He believed that the real power is in high touch. "In today's marketplace, people don't want to be treated like a commodity," he argues. "They want to know that someone cares about their dreams." As well as his success with volume recruiting, elsewhere in the article it talks about him establishing global networks to identify talented people and how EA created a “Top 40” list a hit list of the most-talented people throughout the world who, EA hoped, would one day work with the company.