Starting an employer brand from scratch is daunting enough. Try doing it for a brand that doesn't exist yet, with a 12-month deadline to build an entire digital bank from the ground up.
That's exactly the challenge Brie Mason faced when she joined AMP to head up and Employee Experience and EVP.
In this special edition of the VMJPod's Employer Brand Series, our series co-host is in the hot seat, talking to David Macciocca and VideoMy's Gavin Lamb to share the unconventional strategies that not only attracted talent to a nameless startup but proved employer brand could lead the entire go-to-market strategy.
Brie's first week was a masterclass in ambiguity. "My first questions were: what is this business? What's the name of it? There isn't one. Is it a separate business? Is it going to be operating within the business? Don't know yet," she recalls.
Without a brand identity, website, or even a clear business structure, the traditional employer brand playbook was useless.
Her solution? Start with the story. By interviewing the CEO, consultants, and tech platform partners, Brie helped collectively form a vision for what the business could be.
"Through that process of asking the right questions, we were able to start to collectively form a view of what this business might be, what that culture might look like, what might be the types of people that we're looking for," she explains. In the absence of assets, narrative became everything.
With employer brand going to market before any consumer brand existed, Brie couldn't afford passive employees. She needed vocal advocates from day one.
"I was up there every single week running challenges," she shares. The pitch was simple but compelling: "What we're doing here is a once in a lifetime career opportunity for you. But no one will know you've been part of this unless you've told that story."
Brie systematically removed every barrier to participation. Sentence starters for social posts. Copilot prompts to generate content. Cheat sheets. One-on-one coaching sessions. "Every challenge I faced, every reason why they wouldn't do it, we'd leave a solution for how we could," she notes.
With such a small cohort, she couldn't afford to leave anyone behind.
Attracting startup talent to a traditional financial services brand required disruption. Brie's team put ads on LinkedIn with messaging like "teaching an old dog new tricks" – copy that would never have flown in traditional AMP communications.
"We had license to be a bit more disruptive," she explains. "We had to move at pace. We had to push."
The risk extended to new social channels. Over the December-January period when most people weren't job hunting, Brie pushed into TikTok and Instagram with content featuring team members like Mark running through Circular Quay and touring the office.
"We need a different result. We can't get there with the same traditional approach," she argued. The gamble paid off, with Instagram unexpectedly becoming the best-performing channel on a modest budget of around $10-15K.
Traditional employee referral programs didn't fit AMP's reality. Their permanent employees didn't have networks in the startup world they were targeting, but consultants working on the project did. The solution? Rebuild the referral program to include non-permanent employees and reward leads rather than hires.
"It's not your people's job to be the recruiter or the hiring manager," Brie emphasises. "Their job is to find people you think would actually be a good fit for our culture. Pay them for a lead if they've got someone into an interview." She also championed shameless promotion – standing up in weekly huddles to call out new roles, creating shareable assets for every position, and dropping them into team chats.
After six months of grinding, the payoff came in the most unexpected way. The CEO, wearing branded merch at a Friday afternoon pub visit, was recognised by the bartender: "Oh, you work at the new AMP bank. What's it like to work there? I've seen so much across everywhere, across town, social media. Everyone's talking and buzzing about this new bank."
"That is gold," Brie reflects. "I couldn't have set it up as good as that for that to happen." But the success also revealed an important truth: momentum requires maintenance. "You can't just turn it on. It will fizzle. You need to continually push that."
For organisations starting from ground zero, Brie's experience offers a powerful lesson: when you lack brand equity, invest in authentic voices, remove barriers to advocacy, and give your team permission to be disruptive.