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An Employer Brand & Experience Studio
Giving Talent Teams the Design & Marketing Support They Deserve
We help Talent Acquisition teams build employer brands, design candidate experiences, and run recruitment marketing that attracts the right people - not just more of them.
The Best Talent Teams
Think Like Marketers
The people you bring in will shape your culture, build your products, and determine where the business goes. That work deserves the same level of marketing and creative support as any other function in the business.When your story is sharp, your experience is intentional, and your marketing is working - here's what changes:
Better candidates: More qualified applicants in the pipeline - and fewer who aren't a fit
Higher acceptance rates: Candidates who already believe in the brand before the offer lands
Lower turnover: Better-fit hires who knew exactly what they were signing up for
Less time per req: The right people are already paying attention before the role even opens
Reduced outside spend: Less reliance on search firms and job boards that scale cost with volume
How We Help Teams Like Yours
At Scout, we give TA leaders the marketing support they deserve. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on what you do best - hiring the right people for your company.
Employer Branding
Employer Brand Audits & Perception Research
EVP Development & Messaging
Employer Brand Launch & Employee Advocacy
Candidate Experience
Candidate Journey Mapping & Touchpoint Audits
Candidate Communications & Job Descriptions
Interview Experience & Hiring Team Enablement
Recruitment Marketing
Career Site Strategy & Development
Recruitment Marketing Campaigns for Hard-to-Fill Roles
Social Media & Employee Content Development
Insights
Ideas on employer brand, candidate experience, recruitment marketing - and what it actually takes to win talent right now.
AI Doesn't Fix a Weak Employer Brand. It Exposes One.
AI can't write your story for you - it just scales whatever you already have (for better or worse). Here's why the honeymoon phase with recruiting AI is wearing off, and what to fix before you optimize the tools.
The Real Cost of DIY Employer Branding at Your Company.
When every recruiter builds their own version of the pitch, candidates notice - and it costs your team more than you'd think. A look at the hidden price of DIY, plus a free calculator to see what it's costing you.
Real Client Results
160%
increase in career site traffic year
over year. (Cornerstone OnDemand)
2x
apply conversions after aligning
brand and experience. (Irvine Company)
20%
faster time-to-fill, without
adding headcount. (Irvine Company)
Want to learn more?
Book a Free
30-Minute Call
A quick, no-pressure call to talk through what your team is working on and whether Scout is the right partner to help. Either way, we'll make sure you leave with something helpful you can use right away.
How it works
Book a time
Grab a spot on the calendar that works for you.We come prepared
We'll take a look at your current setup before we talk.Leave with something useful
Even if we're not the right fit, you'll walk away with a clearer picture of where to focus.
Would you rather send us a note?
Email us at: [email protected]
Our Team
Meet the Team
We're a small group of experts, on purpose. Big enough to take on any challenge, while nimble enough to move fast and stay close to the work - so every project gets our full attention.
Nolan Reiter
Founder & Principal
Caitlin Reiter
Founder & Head of Content
Peter Kotvis
Head of Strategy
Tanya Garner
Designer
Forrest Williams
Designer
Jeffrey Jones
Videographer & Motion Designer
Why we exist.
We started Scout because we believe Talent Acquisition has one of the most important jobs in any company.The people you hire are the people who grow the business. They build the product, shape the culture, and solve the problems that decide where the company goes next. Every one of them came through a door that TA opened.That work deserves more support than it usually gets. Not because it's hard — though it is — but because of what's actually at stake. A hire isn't a transaction. It's a decision that shapes a company for years.We think that makes this some of the most meaningful work there is. Helping a person find the job that's right for them, and helping a company find the people who will build its future — that's work worth doing well, every single day.
Our convictions.
TA is the most important function in any company.
Every decision a company makes is downstream of who they hired. Someone has to find those people with intention. That's not an administrative task. That's the most consequential work in the business.Most TA teams are expected to be marketers, but without the resources to succeed.
The creative and strategic resources that exist for sales and marketing almost never exist for recruiting. That gap is the problem Scout was built to close.Clarity beats technology every time.
The companies winning talent right now aren't the ones with the best tools. They're the ones with the clearest sense of who they are. A clear, compelling story is the most powerful recruiting advantage you have.Your employer brand is only as strong as the worst touchpoint in your hiring journey.
You can have a beautiful career site and a compelling pitch — and then send a form rejection with no name on it. Candidates feel that gap even when they can't name it.
How we work.
Effective talent attraction happens when three things are working together — in the right order. Most teams come to us somewhere in the middle. They need a new career site, a job description refresh, or a campaign for a hard-to-fill role. We'll start there. But the first thing we do is make sure the foundation is solid before we build anything on top of it.1. Employer Brand
This is the story of what it's like to work at your company, and your reputation as an employer. That includes your career site, but it also includes what AI tools are saying about you, and what candidates find when they search you on Glassdoor or Blind. Everything else builds on top of this. If it isn't clear, nothing downstream works the way it should.2. Candidate Experience
Once the story is sharp, the next question is whether candidates can actually feel it. Every touchpoint in the hiring process — the job post, the confirmation email, the interview, the offer letter — is either building up your employer brand or taking away from it.3. Recruitment Marketing
Once the story is right and the experience is cohesive, then — and only then — you scale. Good marketing amplifies what's already working. That's why it should be the last stop, not the first.
Who we typically work with.
We work with Talent Acquisition leaders at U.S.-based companies, usually between 2,500 and 10,000 employees. Most are already using the latest technology and AI, but they aren't seeing the results they hoped for — more software has often meant more complexity, and less connection with the people they're trying to hire.We work in two ways:Embedded Support
Ongoing access to our full team of creative and marketing experts. We act as an extension of your own team — not a vendor you check in with once a quarter.Project-Based Engagements
For specific, high-impact needs. This includes building your employer brand strategy, refreshing your career site, or running a targeted campaign for hard-to-fill roles.
Find out exactly what AI is telling candidates about your company.
Candidates are researching companies using AI before they ever talk to a recruiter. We'll show you exactly what they find, where it's coming from, and three things you can do about it.Here's what you get with your free, personalized report:
Every source AI uses to tell your story - ranked by influence
How you compare to competitors on AI visibility
What's coming through positively and negatively
Three things you can do this week to improve your standing
Get Your Free Report
Free. Personalized to your company.
Delivered in 24 hours.
You can't fix what you can't see.
40% of candidates rely on AI to help evaluate companies, but most TA teams don't know what it's saying.In 24 hours, you'll know exactly what AI is telling your candidates, which sources are driving the narrative, how you stack up against competitors, and three specific things you can do to help improve the story.
How it Works
1. Submit the form
Fill out the form above to tell us your company name and email - it takes about 10 seconds.
2. We build your report
We research what AI is saying about your employer brand and put it into a clean, easy-to-share report.
3. Get your PDF + video
Within 24 hours, you'll receive your personalized report and a short video walking you through exactly what we found.
Orange County, California | Copyright Scout Studio LLC, 2026
Almost there!
While we start working on your report, please take a minute to answer a few more questions to help make it a lot more useful for you specifically.
Check out a sample report walkthrough:
If you want to talk through what we find in your report, or just get a sense of whether Scout might be a good fit for your team, grab some time below. No agenda - just a real conversation.
Orange County, California | Copyright Scout Studio LLC, 2026
Insights
AI Doesn't Fix a Weak Employer Brand. It Exposes One.
The companies hiring the best talent right now aren't the ones with the shiniest recruiting tools. They're the ones who did the slower, harder work of figuring out what's actually true about working there, and say it clearly.
Nolan Reiter | May 2026
Don't worry - our AI recruiting bot is here to save us!
There has been a lot of excitement over the past few years about what AI can do for recruiting. The promise of doing more with less is real, and is an especially appealing offer for TA teams that have been asked to take on more and more every year.But I'm starting to wonder if the honeymoon phase is wearing off.If everyone is using the same tools, sorting through the same talent pools now filled with AI-generated resumes and cover letters, where exactly is the differentiation coming from? More technology hasn't made hiring easier - it's just made everything louder.Your employer brand is the last moat. How clearly you can articulate the real challenge your company is inviting people to take on (and exactly what makes that challenge worth it) is the most direct path to attracting and hiring the people who will grow the business.
What AI actually does.
AI is not a creative force. It does not invent meaning or manufacture differentiation or figure out why someone would thrive at your company vs. the one down the street. What it does, and does really really well, is take whatever already exists and move it further and faster than you could on your own.If what exists is sharp and specific and honest, that’s a real advantage. You can reach more of the right people, more efficiently, with a message that actually resonates. But if what exists is generic - the kind of carefully approved, safe-for-everyone language that most employer brands eventually become after enough rounds of review - then AI just moves that further and faster too. The funnel gets bigger, the quality gets thinner and it becomes hard to understand why all of these AI tools aren't working the way we thought they should.
How brands lose their edges.
I don’t think most companies set out to have a generic employer brand. In my experience, the original thinking is often really good. Someone did the work, talked to employees, found the honest and specific things that make the company worth joining - the real challenges, the genuine rewards, the kind of person who thrives there vs. the kind who doesn’t.But then.... legal reviews it. Leadership weighs in. Someone from marketing wants to make sure it’s consistent with the consumer brand. Someone else is worried it might exclude a candidate group if it’s too specific. Each round of feedback is well-intentioned, and each round sands down another edge, until what started as something differentiated becomes something that applies everywhere and therefore says nothing about anywhere. The people who made it through that process feel like they accomplished something, because getting it approved was genuinely hard work. What got lost along the way is harder to see from the inside.
The only thing that cuts through.
What I keep coming back to, after all the career site reviews and all the conversations with TA leaders, is that the companies doing this well are not necessarily the ones with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that did the harder, slower work of figuring out what is actually true about working there. Not the aspirational version, not the version that got approved, but the honest version - the real challenge they are asking people to take on, the specific kind of person who would find that challenge meaningful, the genuine reasons someone would stay and grow and do their best work inside that particular company.When you know those things with clarity and can say them plainly, everything downstream gets easier. The job descriptions write themselves more honestly. The outreach feels less like noise because it’s actually specific. The candidates who respond are more likely to be the right ones because the message was designed for them, not for everyone. And then, when you layer the tools on top of that foundation, they actually deliver on what they promised, because now they are scaling something worth scaling.
What I’d suggest before anything else.
If you are considering adding more AI to your recruiting process, or you already have and you’re starting to feel like the results aren’t quite what you hoped, I’d encourage you to pause before optimizing the tools and spend some time on the foundation first. Ask the honest questions. What is the actual challenge you are inviting people into? What kind of person genuinely thrives in your environment, and what kind of person doesn’t? What would a great hire say a year in about why they’re glad they joined?Those answers exist inside your company right now. They’re in the heads of your best employees and your best managers. They just haven’t been found and shaped and said clearly yet. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the one thing that makes everything else worth doing.AI will scale whatever inputs you give it. Make sure what you give it is something real.
Before you go
Free Report: What is AI telling candidates about your company?
40% of candidates rely on AI to help evaluate companies, but most TA teams don't know what it's saying. We'll put together a free, personalized report outlining what AI is telling candidates about your company - and what you can do about it.
Insights
The Real Cost of DIY Employer Branding
Plus a free calculator to help uncover the hidden costs of DIY on your TA team
Nolan Reiter | October 2025
I wonder if he plans to DIY his employer brand too?
When I led employer brand and recruitment marketing in-house, I saw firsthand how hard it was to get support from internal (or external) resources.Internal marketing teams were always too focused on supporting sales and product priorities, and external agencies rarely understood what TA teams really needed.But here’s the thing: Talent Acquisition teams play one of the most important roles in any organization. They’re building the teams that build the business. That deserves real, thoughtful marketing support.That’s actually the story behind why I started Scout – to give TA teams the design and marketing support they deserve. And the reality is, the most cost-effective way to make that happen isn’t more DIY, but to partner with a team that can help you scale - while delivering a return on your investment.Let me explain -
The hidden cost of DIY recruitment marketing
When recruiters spend hours each week creating or tweaking materials, that’s time they’re not spending with candidates. Over time, it adds up – in both hours and missed opportunities.But the bigger issue isn’t time – it’s consistency.When every recruiter is building their own version of the company pitch, candidates experience multiple versions of your employer brand. Different visuals. Different tone. Different promises about culture and opportunity that may (or may not) resonate with the candidate you’re talking to.That inconsistency doesn’t just look unpolished – it creates doubt. Candidates are building an impression of what it’s like to work at your company - and will wonder: Is this really what it’s like to work here?At Scout, we call this Recruitment Debt – the compounding effect of quick fixes, mismatched touchpoints, and underinvestment in the candidate experience over time.
Three signs it’s time to bring in support
1. Your recruiters are acting like designers.
If your team is spending time creating net-new materials in Canva, it’s a signal. Recruiters should be spending as much time as possible connecting with people, not figuring out how to update a social post template.2. Your employer brand looks different everywhere.
Outdated logos, inconsistent messaging, rogue slides – these aren’t small issues. They create friction and erode trust. Some of these things you can’t even see as a recruiter without going through the application process yourself.3. Your marketing team keeps saying “next quarter.”
If your timelines depend on another team’s priorities, you’ll always be behind. Hiring moves fast - and your creative partner should too.
What changes when you invest in creative support
Trusting design, copywriting and storytelling to a dedicated partner isn’t about handing off busywork. It’s about building a consistent, scalable system that protects recruiter time and improves the candidate experience.The return will show up quickly:Time saved: Recruiters get hours back each week.Faster hiring: Cohesive materials convert candidates more effectively.Brand trust: Every touchpoint tells the same story.The reality is, creative support isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a multiplier. The right partner gives your team tools, templates, and structure that not only save time but elevate the candidate experience across the board.
Try it for yourself.
If you’re curious what DIY recruitment marketing is actually costing your team, I put together a DIY Recruitment Marketing Cost Calculator you can use. Answer two simple questions to find out how many hours (and dollars) are being lost to design and content work your recruiters shouldn’t be doing.
Before you go
Free Report: What is AI telling candidates about your company?
40% of candidates rely on AI to help evaluate companies, but most TA teams don't know what it's saying. We'll put together a free, personalized report outlining what AI is telling candidates about your company - and what you can do about it.