How to optimize employer branding research with Glaut

Employer branding research has a speed problem. When the goal is to understand what makes a company attractive to students, most approaches still rely on long surveys or slow focus groups. The result: fragmented data, slow analysis, and insights that rarely make it past the deck.

There’s a different way to approach it, faster, scalable, and structured from the start.

Research design: focused, not overloaded

In this example, the objective was to explore how students choose potential employers, both spontaneously and when prompted with a curated list.

The research was structured around four questions:

1. Which employer comes to mind first?
2. Why that one?
3. Which employer would you choose from this list?
4. Why that one?

The result: a clean comparison between brand recall and brand consideration, useful for understanding what drives preference in an unprompted vs. prompted scenario.

Smart interviews, minimal Friction

The interviews were fully automated. No moderators. No scheduling.
Each question adapted to the respondent’s answers, keeping the interaction fluid and personal, even at scale.

Participants were university students from different backgrounds and career interests, filtered to ensure diversity and relevance.

From verbatims to structure

Once responses were in, analysis was layered to extract more than just top-line trends:

• Brand recognition: Which companies are top-of-mind?
• Thematic analysis: What motivates students? (Innovation? Culture? Career growth?)
• Curated vs. spontaneous: How do perceptions shift when options are presented?
• Breakdowns: Responses segmented by employer type, academic path, and other filters.

The structure made it possible to compare not just what was said—but how and why students made their choices.

What emerged

Patterns stood out. Some companies were consistently named first—without prompting. Others performed better when presented as part of a curated list. Motivations varied: some students looked for mission-driven brands, others for job security or global reach. All of it grounded in open-ended responses, structured and coded for analysis in minutes.

Reporting built for action

All findings were compiled using Glaut’s Report Builder: a tool that turns unstructured qualitative feedback into a clear, navigable report in minutes.

The structure followed the original goals:

• Top-of-mind employers: shown through entity frequency
• Key motivations: surfaced through thematic analysis of open-ended responses
• Prompted choices: cross-compared with spontaneous ones
• Shifts in perception: segmented by employer, category, or background

Everything is filterable and exportable, making it easy to go from raw data to shareable insights, without touching a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

Employer branding decisions often rely on assumptions or fragmented data. This research shows there’s a way to get clarity, fast.

With Glaut, interviews are structured, insights are layered, and reporting is instant. Instead of waiting weeks for feedback, teams can see exactly how students perceive their brand and what to do next.