Strategic consultant Marta Riggins joins Sarah Nicastro to explore why employer branding is one of the most underutilized levers in field service — and what leaders can do right now to start winning the talent war.

Frontline industries need to hire 250,000 people a month just to keep pace with retirements. And yet 87% of frontline workers aren’t sure the culture their company markets even applies to them.

That’s not a recruiting problem. That’s a branding problem.

In this episode of UNSCRIPTED, Sarah Nicastro sits down with Marta Riggins — strategic consultant and former employer brand leader at Instacart, LinkedIn, and Pandora Music — for a candid, practical conversation about what service organizations stand to gain from thinking more intentionally about employer branding. Marta brings a refreshing perspective: this isn’t a nice-to-have marketing exercise. It’s a direct lever for attracting and retaining the frontline talent your business depends on.

What Employer Branding Actually Means — And Why It’s Urgent Now

At its core, employer branding is about perception: is this a good place to work? It’s closely tied to employee engagement and retention — because your engaged employees are your best brand ambassadors. You can’t market your way to being an employer of choice if the reality inside the organization doesn’t back it up.

Marta draws on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to explain what candidates across every generation, industry, and geography want from work today. The list is consistent: competitive pay, work-life balance and flexibility, job security, and the opportunity to keep learning. Flexibility, in particular, is rising fast — 40% of candidates will accept up to a 5% pay cut just to have more agency over when and how they work.

For service organizations, this is both a challenge and a genuine opportunity. Job security is something frontline industries can offer that many sectors currently cannot. That’s a story worth telling.

“Whoever brands themselves as ‘frontline first’ is going to win in this space. I think this industry has such an incredible opportunity to rebrand as an amazing future path for people.” — Marta Riggins

Building an EVP That’s Grounded in Reality

The employee value proposition (EVP) is the articulation of what employees get in exchange for giving the organization their talent, skills, and energy every day. Done well, it gets everyone singing from the same songbook — reminding long-tenured employees why the organization is special, and helping candidates understand why they should care before they’ve even interviewed.

But Marta is clear: it has to be authentic. You can tell a story that isn’t true, but people will simply leave. Her approach is to back every brand statement with at least four data points — policy details, cultural examples, benefit specifics — that prove the claim. Aspirational is fine; fictional is not.

To find the real story, she interviews stakeholders across geographies, levels, and tenure, asking two simple questions: why did you first join, and why have you stayed? The answers, she says, reveal threads of genuine cultural advantage that no career site or benefits guide could ever capture on its own.

The Frontline Disconnect — and How to Close It

The conversation takes a particularly resonant turn when Sarah and Marta dig into the reality that so many frontline employees feel disconnected from the company culture marketed to the rest of the workforce. Historically, this wasn’t intentional exclusion — it was simply that what was working kept working, and organizations never stopped to ask whether it applied to everyone.

The fix, Marta argues, is often simpler than it seems:

• Extend the lifespan of existing programs so frontline workers have access — a community service day becomes a community service month
• Bring executives to the field rather than skipping those markets on roadshows
• Broaden recognition programs — like president’s club — to include top performers across all functions, not just sales
• Pilot flexibility models — even small experiments signal that the organization is willing to evolve

Culture Fit Is Out. Culture Add Is In.

One of the most memorable moments in the episode is Marta’s mission to ban the term “culture fit” from the hiring conversation. Her argument is straightforward: fit is exclusionary. When we ask whether someone “fits,” we tend to default to subjective, often unconscious bias about who looks or feels familiar.

Culture add flips the question. Does this person bring something we don’t already have? Do they expand our thinking, our perspective, our capability? It’s a small language shift with significant implications for how service organizations build the diverse, resilient teams they need for the future.

The Opportunity Is Right There

Throughout the conversation, both Sarah and Marta return to the same theme: the potential here is enormous, and it’s largely untapped. Service industries offer stability, purpose, variety, and genuine career progression — but too few organizations are telling that story in a way that resonates with the people they need to reach.

The organizations that figure this out first — that brand themselves as frontline first, that build EVPs grounded in what people actually want, and that extend their culture to every level of the workforce — won’t just fill open roles. They’ll build the kind of teams that make everything else possible.