“Sheng Siong? No lah. I want to work for Google or Meta.”
My friend Kale said, stirring his coffee. He was desperate to escape a toxic work environment, and I had just pitched him what sounded on paper like a tech worker’s absolute dream.
Financially, Sheng Siong looks a lot like a Silicon Valley darling. I heard they offer full-time workers free daily catered meals. Their stock has seen an impressive 52.9% appreciation over the past year, and their business model is completely recession-proof—because even during an economic crisis, people still need to buy groceries. On top of that, they have a history of handing out mind-boggling rewards, with staff receiving up to 16 months of bonus pay after a bumper year.
Even their company culture is extraordinarily warm. Walk down the aisles of any outlet, and the staff affectionately greet you as jie or ge (Mandarin for sister or brother), rather than the standard Singaporean auntie or uncle that instantly makes you feel like you’ve aged two decades.
But here is the problem: Sheng Siong grew from a humble heartland pork counter in Ang Mo Kio into a wet-market-style supermarket chain where live fish swim in glass tanks, waiting to be slaughtered and descaled on the spot. It is an economic powerhouse, but in the eyes of elite talent, it is just not considered “cool.”
That is an employer branding problem. A company can offer meaningful work and treat people well, but still lose candidates if they cannot imagine a future there.
How do you build an employer brand that attracts top talent?
An employer brand is the story people tell themselves about what it would be like to work somewhere. The strongest ones make three things easy to picture: the work you would do, the people you would work with, and the future you could help build.
Tesla, Netflix and Patagonia are very different employers. Yet they managed to make their employer brand so powerful that they have talents lining up to join them.
- Netflix, where their revenue per employee skyrockets from $891,770 in 2009 to $2.823 million per employee in 2025, while pulling in a ~90% offer acceptance rate when poaching senior engineers directly from FAANG competitors?
- Tesla, where landing a job (a sub-0.1% acceptance rate across 3.6 million annual applications for 20,000–30,000 roles) is statistically harder than getting into Harvard (~4%)?
- Patagonia, where a single open role pulls in 9,000 applicants?
1. How does Tesla make the work desirable?
Tesla does not present its jobs as comfortable. It invites engineers and technicians to work on vehicles, energy systems, robotics and manufacturing problems that show up in the physical world. That promise will repel some people. It will attract others who want to point to something they helped build and say, “That is running because of my work.”
Elon Musk famously tweeted the ultimate anti-recruitment pitch: “There are much easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” During crunch periods, he openly demands a “hardcore” environment of 80-to-100-hour workweeks. Yet top-tier engineers line up around the block to apply.
Here is the open secret Big Tech recruiters will never admit: a terrifying number of senior engineers at places like Google or Meta are bored out of their minds. They sit in plush micro-kitchens sipping oat milk lattes, making $400,000 a year to spend six months A/B testing a shade of blue on a “Buy Now” button or tweaking ad-placement algorithms to bump teen click-through rates by 0.01%. It is comfortable, but for a true builder, it feels like golden handcuffs in a velvet prison.
Tesla weaponized that exact existential dread. Musk didn’t hide the brutal hours—he used them to insult the competition. His pitch to elite coders was brutally provocative: “You can stay at Meta and optimize ad clicks for teenagers, or you can come to Tesla, sleep on the factory floor, and ship autonomous code, robotics, and energy systems that interact with physics in the real world.”
Tesla made cushy tech jobs look soft, frivolous, and meaningless, while framing grueling, high-stakes engineering as the ultimate status symbol and proof of craft. Tesla spends zero dollars on traditional recruitment advertising or hiring agencies. Yet despite this, it draws great talent.
- Talent Rankings: Universum’s annual surveys consistently rank Tesla as the #1 or #2 most desirable employer in America for engineering graduates.
- Application Volume: As disclosed in Tesla’s official Impact Reports, they receive over 3.6 million job applications a year for roughly 20,000 to 30,000 open roles. With an acceptance rate under 0.1%, landing a desk at Tesla is vastly harder than earning admission to Harvard (~4%).
2. How does Netflix make the people desirable?
In 2009, Netflix made its culture deck public. Its current culture memo still makes a clear promise: you will work alongside capable colleagues, get room to make decisions, and be held to a high standard. This draws talented people looking to work in a pleasant environment free of office politics.
In August 2009, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings published a 125-page PowerPoint presentation detailing the company’s internal culture. Rather than relying on vague corporate value statements, the deck was refreshingly, brutally direct.
First, they eliminated performance review hypocrisy:
“Sustained high performance, not hard work, is what matters. Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.”
Most companies pretend to be “a family” to demand total loyalty, only to put struggling employees through months of demoralizing Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) theater before quietly firing them anyway. Netflix was honest. If your fit or performance is merely ‘adequate,’ we won’t let you suffer in a role that isn’t working, we will hand you a generous severance package so both sides part clean, freeing up the seat for an A-player. They trained managers on the “Keeper Test,” asking: “If this person wanted to leave, would I fight hard to keep them?” If the answer was no, a severance package was issued immediately.
Second, they eliminated dead weight:
“We’re like a pro-sports team, not a family. Families are about unconditional love. Dream teams are about putting the best player in every position.”
High performers hate carrying dead weight. By framing the workplace as a professional sports team, Netflix signaled to elite talent: If you join us, you will be surrounded exclusively by stunning colleagues.
Third, they replaced bureaucratic red tape with extreme trust backed by strict, retroactive accountability. Their vacation policy was two words:
“Take some (vacation leave).”
There was no PTO tracking or hourly quota, they focused purely on results delivered. Their expense policy was equally concise: “Act in Netflix’s best interest” (later updated to “spend our members’ money wisely”). Managers do not pre-approve travel or corporate purchases. Employees use adult judgment—flying business class for an overnight cross-continental flight before a critical presentation is acceptable, but doing so for a 1-hour flight is not. Anyone caught abusing company trust is terminated immediately.
By pre-filtering for operators who wanted extreme autonomy and top-of-market cash over false job security, Netflix achieved a ~90% offer acceptance rate when poaching senior software engineers directly from FAANG competitors.
Verified SEC filings demonstrate the resulting revenue productivity per head:
- 2009 Baseline: $1.679 billion in revenue with 1,883 full-time employees = $891,770 per employee.
- 2015 Growth: $6.779 billion in revenue with 3,500 full-time employees = $1.937 million per employee ($1.832M across total staff).
- 2025 Scale: $45.183 billion in revenue with ~16,000 full-time employees = $2.823 million per employee.
3. How does Patagonia make the future desirable?
Patagonia asks candidates to see their job as part of an environmental mission. It gives 1% of sales to environmental causes. This shows candidates how they are contributing to the planet, and not just a corporation.
While most corporate employers sell candidates a future tied to quarterly earnings, stock options, and standard corporate climbing, Patagonia positions itself less as an apparel company and more as an environmental crusade. Their core mandate: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
Some brands do greenwashing, publishing glossy ESG reports or throwing a token charity day once a year. Patagonia went the other way, proving that a company’s future can be explicitly aligned with the planet’s future:
- They pledge 1% of total global sales directly to grassroots environmental causes.
- They offer on-site childcare and pay bail for employees arrested during peaceful environmental protests.
- Founder Yvon Chouinard irrevocably transferred all voting stock to a climate trust, declaring: “Earth is now our only shareholder.
They showed top talent that working there isn’t just a job, it’s a form of planetary stewardship.
Because of that, they saw extraordinary amount of talent.
- Astronomical Inbound Demand: Patagonia receives approximately 9,000 applications for every single open role, spanning from entry-level internships to executive corporate positions.
- Unbeatable Retention: Because their applicant pool is heavily saturated with mission-aligned talent, Patagonia maintains an extraordinary staff turnover rate of just 4%—drastically outperforming the retail and consumer product sector average of 13%.
Make Sheng Siong Cool
Which brings me back to Sheng Siong.
I’m waiting for the day a bold strategist comes along, rebrands Sheng Siong, and finally makes them cool.
Because that’s the day my friend Kale looks across the coffee table and says, “You know what? I’m sending in my resume.”
Comments
More to read
Leave a Reply