How Pfizer Runs Its Employer Brand Like a Lab Experiment

Pfizer needs little introduction. The research-driven pharmaceutical company employs around 90,000 people across 90 countries from its New York City headquarters, and its name recognition means it rarely struggles to attract applications. But brand awareness and a full inbox aren’t the same thing as finding the right people — and that distinction is exactly what Anne Kennedy Dotson’s team was created to tackle.

Dotson leads global employer brand and recruitment marketing at Pfizer, a function she built from scratch three years ago. We sat down with her on the Employer Branding Podcast to talk about how a small team treats its employer brand as an ongoing experiment — one where hypotheses get tested, measured, and refined as they go.

Building the Function From Scratch

Before Dotson’s team existed, employer brand at Pfizer was a bit of an orphan — something several people touched but nobody owned. Her leaders in People Experience (Pfizer’s name for HR) recognised that needed to change. The problem was never volume; the company has always had strong brand awareness and plenty of applications. The harder task is surfacing the right talent — people who are mission-oriented and share Pfizer’s values. “It’s not just the top talent,” Dotson says. “It’s the top talent who fits at Pfizer.”

It’s a lean operation: three full-time employees, a rotating cast of colleagues on temporary “growth gigs,” a few interns, and a handful of agency partners who handle most of the creative. The team sits within candidate experience in the talent acquisition organisation, with a dotted line to Pfizer’s chief marketing office. Being small has an upside — Dotson’s team can test ideas quickly and cheaply, and a few things they piloted on the careers pages ended up becoming templates for the wider Pfizer site.

The talent challenges are ones many recruiting teams will recognise. One example Dotson points to is high-volume, associate-level enterprise tech and digital roles — not coding jobs, but positions supporting Pfizer’s enterprise applications, where the company competes with essentially every other organisation hunting for tech talent. Layered on top is the question everyone is wrestling with: what AI means for the roles they hire for, and how to upskill the colleagues already inside the business.

Finding a Purpose That Unites 90,000 People

The team’s first move was research — around six months of focus groups, surveys, and internal conversations to work out how to position the brand. Where they landed was a line built around Pfizer’s mission of breakthroughs that change patients’ lives: use your power for purpose. It’s a route other healthcare multinationals have taken too; Baxter built its EVP around a similar life-saving mission to connect everyday roles to a bigger picture.

The idea is that purpose is the thread connecting everyone, no matter how far they sit from the lab. “That is the driver that people come to Pfizer with,” Dotson says, “whether you’re in the digital organisation, working in a lab, in marketing, or in the medical field. This is the tie that binds everyone together.”

What’s surprised her most is where it resonates. The connection to the mission was always going to land in R&D and manufacturing; less obvious was how strongly it landed in enabling functions like compliance, legal, and digital. People across the business, she notes, are proud of that link to the mission whether or not they’re doing lab research day to day.

The first real test of the positioning was a relaunched career site — and the numbers moved. Simply launching the brand, with supporting materials and content, more than tripled site visitors and engagement. It’s the kind of result that earns a team room to keep experimenting — a point host Jörgen Sundberg couldn’t resist, joking that Pfizer is “still experimenting with the employer brand” in its own “employer brand lab.”

Activating the Brand on a Modest Budget

With no appetite for big media spend, activation has to be resourceful. Alongside the expected channels — career site, social, LinkedIn — two initiatives stand out.

The first is a colleague ambassador network: employees who’d give Pfizer a high Net Promoter Score and genuinely want to talk about the company. Rather than buying reach, Dotson’s team amplifies the voice of the colleague. “We can amplify the brand through doing things that are not high-dollar spend,” she says, “but are in line with what we want the brand to showcase.” It’s a form of employee advocacy other brands have leaned on to bring an EVP to life — Sanofi built much of its activation on the same idea.

The second is deliberately left-field. Last year Pfizer partnered with the Drone Racing League, building a 3D racecourse for a simulated drone-racing competition. The point was reach into an audience Pfizer would otherwise never touch — digital natives a few years out of school, exactly the young tech talent the company wants for those entry-level roles. Dotson’s philosophy is to check the expected boxes and then look for something unexpected to bring the brand to life.

Weaving the EVP Into Recruitment

The team’s newest focus, over the last six months, is making sure the EVP is lived rather than laminated. “How do we really weave the employer brand into the recruitment process,” Dotson asks, “so that it’s not just a tagline or something you see on a career site, but something that is really lived out?”

Recruiters are the first humans a candidate meets, so they’ve become the focus. The team has trained recruiters on the employer brand, produced an employer brand handbook, and has more tools rolling out. Some are genuinely simple — an email signature block that links to the EVP headline video, or a branded LinkedIn banner — while others are more involved. The aim is for the EVP to show up in recruiters’ day-to-day conversations, not just on the careers site.

Measuring What Actually Matters

Pfizer is, in Dotson’s words, a data-driven organisation, and the team is under pressure to show business impact. Time and cost to hire are the obvious measures. The harder one — and the one she says peers everywhere are chasing — is quality of applicant, a measurement challenge Thermo Fisher Scientific has wrestled with on the podcast too.

“It doesn’t help us to put 10,000 more candidates into a particular job req,” she says. “It doesn’t help the recruiters — they’re overwhelmed. What we want to show is the quality of the applicants that come out of these different marketing efforts.” They’re not there yet, but that’s the goal: tying spend to candidate quality. For now, the dashboard tracks social engagement, time on the career site, how many touchpoints a candidate visits before applying, and conversion through the funnel by channel.

The mindset is what makes it an experiment rather than a report card. Instead of relying on quarterly look-backs, the team evaluates constantly — comparing one post against another and tweaking as they go. Not every bet pays off, and Dotson is candid that the drone racing partnership “very much could have gone the other way” before it took off and went viral. The discipline, she says, is to learn from what works and what doesn’t and adjust in real time.

The Takeaway

The through-line of Dotson’s approach is a posture more than a playbook: treat your employer brand as a living experiment. Form a hypothesis, test it inside the actual recruitment process, measure honestly — even when the honest measure, candidate quality, is the hard one — and adjust as you learn.

It helps that Dotson clearly loves the work. “You’re not selling somebody a product,” she reflects. “You’re trying to see if there’s a mutual fit for how somebody’s going to spend the majority of their time. We spend more time at work than we do with our family and friends.” Getting that fit right, for the company and the candidate alike, is the whole job.

To follow Anne Kennedy Dotson’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. And to understand how your own employer brand is perceived — and whether your experiments are working — measure it with the Employer Brand Index.