Activating a dormant EVP with 5,000 employee advocates, and using the Employer Brand Index to prove it worked.

Background

Sanofi is a Paris-headquartered biopharma company with around 90,000 employees, hiring in dozens of markets and focused on immunology, neurology and oncology. A company-wide transformation brought a business built through acquisitions together under one brand, and Sanofi now positions itself as an R&D-driven, AI-powered biopharma.

The employer brand challenge was awareness. Competitors with high-profile pandemic vaccines had become household names, and Sanofi needed to reach talent in markets where it had little presence.

Sanofi wrote an EVP in 2021, but it was never activated. In 2023 the Chief Talent Officer invested in an employer brand center of excellence under Dan Perkins, Global Head of Employer Brand. The team’s first job was to find out how talent actually saw Sanofi.

Brief

• Give the new center of excellence one consistent, quarterly measure of how talent sees Sanofi.
• Show where the two positioning pillars, Progress Your Career and Discover and Make Experiences, really stood with talent.
• Benchmark Sanofi against the pharma companies it competes with for talent.
• Tell global and regional teams which campaigns to run, and what to ask ambassadors to talk about.

What we do

• We have measured Sanofi’s Employer Brand Index every quarter since 2023, analyzing public conversation from 130+ sources and scoring all 16 Employer Brand Attributes.
• We benchmark Sanofi against its closest global pharma competitors, with breakdowns by job function and by key locations, including the capability hubs.
• We track culture hashtags such as #SanofiStories and #SanofiFeeling, and show which advocate groups drive the most activity, reach and engagement.
• We cover China in depth, including Xiaohongshu, Weibo and WeChat.

What Sanofi did with it

The Index showed that career progression and workplace experience, the two themes the new positioning was built on, were both threats in 2023. Talent either rarely mentioned them or said negative things.

The team started with audiences, building quarterly target audiences from hiring data, regional input and workforce planning before planning any content. Then it built an employee advocacy program open to everyone, from interns to senior leaders, which has grown to more than 5,000 trained ambassadors.

The first lift in the Index came from the Paris Olympics. Sanofi could only talk about its Olympic partnership in France, so ambassadors told the story on their own channels instead. In 2025 the #SanofiFeeling campaign repositioned the return to the office around how Sanofi’s workplaces make people feel, with hero content filmed alongside 20 ambassadors in China, the US, France, Germany and India.

At every step, the Index tells regional teams where to point ambassadors and which topics to amplify.

Sanofi’s Perspective

Results

The outcomes include:

• Both positioning pillars converted. Career progression and workplace experience, consistent threats in 2023, both moved into opportunities in the Index by Q3 2025.
• One campaign, one quarter. #SanofiFeeling moved workplace experience from a threat to an opportunity in a single quarter of activation.
• Advocacy moved the score. Ambassador activity around the Paris Olympics drove the first lift in Sanofi’s Employer Brand Index, and #SanofiFeeling went on to break its records.
• An earned-media engine. More than 5,000 trained ambassadors now take part in every campaign, co-creating content instead of only sharing it.
• One KPI for global and regional teams. The Index is reviewed every quarter, and every regional team uses it to choose campaigns and decide which topics ambassadors amplify.