The Investment in Culture That Doesn’t Show Up in the Branding

By Serge Bejjani, co-founder and CEO of Shootday, a global platform providing corporate event photography, executive headshots, and video production for businesses in 150+ cities worldwide.

Organisations invest significant time and budget into building their culture. Conferences, training days, and client events are carefully planned, well attended, and often positioned as key moments in the corporate calendar. They’re where teams come together, where relationships are built, and where the pressures of the office are, temporarily, left behind.

And yet, when it comes to presenting that culture externally, companies often default to something else entirely.

Corporate brochures, careers pages, and recruitment campaigns continue to be dominated by polished headshots and generic stock imagery, creating a version of the organisation that feels indistinguishable from any other. A good professional headshot still has its place, particularly across LinkedIn profiles, team pages, and executive bios, where formality is expected.

Beyond that, generic images don’t provide any meaningful insight into what it’s actually like to work for a company.

The gap between experience and representation

Events are one of the clearest expressions of organisational culture. They provide a context for genuine, unscripted, real-time interactions and bring people together in a way no staged shoot can replicate.

This is precisely the kind of material employer branding is designed to capture. What usually happens is a handful of images get posted to social, maybe paired with a recap, and that’s the end of it. The chance to use the material as part of a long-term employer branding strategy gets missed.

For candidates, this creates a problem. Researching a potential employer has become a standard part of the application process but, particularly in a competitive hiring market where candidates are openly asking whether a company is worth their time, generic imagery provides very little insight.

Why representation matters

For many professionals, and particularly those with more experience, what matters in a job isn’t just salary and title. They want to understand how a company operates, and whether its culture aligns with their own. To do so, they need real signals about how people actually work together.

Event content, by its very nature, provides them. It reflects the organisation as it exists, rather than as it has been dressed for presentation. Authenticity builds trust, and candidates who feel they can’t get an accurate read on a company’s culture are less likely to apply. When organisations rely too heavily on generic imagery, they risk undermining that trust before the candidate has even walked through the door.

Making better use of what already exists

The challenge is not a lack of content, but how best to use it. This is, partly, a question of ownership. Responsibility for events and employer branding typically sits with different teams, each with their own priorities and timelines.. But there are practical considerations too. Event content is less predictable than studio-based production, and the pace of corporate calendars means that one event is often followed quickly by the next. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does require planning ahead.

Identifying the themes that need to be communicated and planning how best to capture them allows organisations to build a library of material that can be used across multiple channels and shows the business as it actually is.

Importantly, this doesn’t require additional investment. The cost of the event remains the same. But the return increases as the content generated is used more effectively.

Showing what you’ve already built

Most organisations have already done the difficult work of building a culture they’re proud of. And now that the culture exists, it needs to be communicated properly.

Generic visuals offer control, and they might be useful as a placeholder, but they don’t tell the story of an organisation, or what makes it distinct. Event content does exactly that, and often more honestly.

If employer branding is intended to support recruitment, it has to be grounded in something real. For most organisations, the resources needed to do so are already there. They just need to be put to better use.