Building Booksy's employer brand: this is what it means to 'Be Booksy'
by Jess Baker10 minute read
When I joined Booksy in April 2025, I jumped straight into a project that most EB people dream of: build the employer brand from scratch.
We were excited. But a clean slate also means no shortcuts. No pre-existing framework to lean on, no established narrative to polish. Just a company of a thousand people across multiple countries, a product that genuinely matters to the people who use it, and a question we had to answer properly before we could do anything else.
What is it actually like to work here?
Why we needed to do this at all.
Booksy is a scale-up. We're growing fast - across five countries, multiple markets, hundreds of roles. And when you're scaling at that speed, you can't rely on culture spreading by osmosis.
The things that made the early team feel like the early team - the shared purpose, the informal understanding of how decisions get made, what's expected, what's rewarded, what it really feels like to work here - those things don't automatically travel when you go from fifty people to a thousand.
If you don't define your culture deliberately, someone else will define it for you. Usually through a Glassdoor review written at a bad moment, or a job ad that overpromises and underdelivers, or a new hire who joins expecting one thing and finds another.
We also had a specific hiring challenge. We weren't trying to attract volume. We were trying to attract the right people. The ones who would genuinely thrive in an environment that's remote-first, moves fast, and gives you real autonomy, trust and empowerment in exchange for real accountability. That's a specific kind of person. And you can't find them by broadcasting generic employer brand content and hoping for the best.
So the goal was never reach. It was self-selection.
We wanted the people who read about Booksy and thought: that's exactly what I've been looking for. And we wanted the people who read it and thought: that's not for me - to make that call early, before anyone wasted anyone's time.
That meant being honest. About what's great here. About what's hard here. About who thrives and who doesn't.
And to do that, we had to know the answer ourselves first. Before we wrote a single word of copy, designed a single asset, or briefed a single photographer, we listened.
A company-wide survey. Leadership interviews across the business. Focus groups across all locations and all roles. A hard look at what our competitors were saying about themselves as employers — and what they weren't.
What came back shaped everything that followed.
Once we knew what we wanted to say, we went on the road.
We could have done what a lot of employer brands do - license stock photography, hire models, build a polished visual world that looks the part from the outside. We didn't. Because that's exactly the kind of content that candidates have learned not to trust, and that our own people wouldn't recognise when they saw it.
Instead, we travelled to three cities - Miami, Warsaw and Madrid - and spent real time with our actual people.
Around 60 Booksy employees across those three locations gave us their time, their stories and their faces. Engineers and salespeople. Customer success managers and product leads. People who've been here since the early days and people who joined in the last year. People who wake up in Florida and people who log on from Poland and Spain.
The shoot wasn't just a creative exercise. Every location, every conversation, every brief we gave the creative team was anchored directly in what we'd heard from employees during the research.
The photography is our people. The words on the careers site came from real conversations, not copywritten lines. When you land on a page and see someone looking back at you, that's a person who actually works here, and what they're saying is something they actually said.
And then there's the detail we're most proud of.
The hair and make-up on the shoot was done by Booksy providers. Two of the photographers, Marino and Vishal, were barbers who used Booksy to run their businesses every day. We didn't plan this as a brand moment, it was simply the obvious thing to do.
The people who helped us tell our story are the same people our product is built to serve. It felt right. And it ended up saying more about what Booksy actually stands for than almost anything else we could have scripted.
The visual identity had one job: show the world inside Booksy.
We needed a visual identity that could hold it all together and, just like the copy, do some filtering work of its own.
Each world is a carefully crafted, surreal collage: a cut-and-paste visual environment that places our real employees at the centre of a scene that captures what working here actually feels like. Fast. Creative. A little chaotic in the best possible way. Cities and locations that ground it in somewhere real. Maximalist typography and colour that give it energy. A library of stickers and visual details drawn from the worlds Booksy operates in: beauty, wellness, technology, the places our people live and work. And a sense that every time you look, you notice something new.
The idea behind them was simple: if the EVP is about ownership, creativity and showing up fully — the visual identity should feel like that too. Not safe. Not corporate. Not the kind of thing you scroll past without registering.
And because every world is built around real people, from a real role, in a real location, the system is endlessly scalable, and a great tool for activation. As Booksy grows, the worlds grow with it. New people, new cities, new stories, new channels - each one becoming the hero of their own chapter.
That felt important. Not just creatively, but strategically. When a candidate sees themselves reflected in the visual world of a company, not a model who looks like them, but a person whose job mirrors theirs, in a city they recognise, something shifts.
The brand stops being abstract and starts being real.
It's ironic really. The identity is surreal, abstract, almost dreamlike, and yet somehow, that's exactly what makes the people inside it feel more real.World
The result an employer brand that - for the first time - genuinely reflects what it's like to work here.
I've been thinking about why employer brand work is hard, and I keep landing on the same answer: because you're essentially asking a company to tell the truth about itself, and then be okay with the fact that the truth will put some people off.
The research showed us that Booksy is a place where collaborative, supportive and friendly were the words people most used to describe the culture. Where 92% of people said their immediate manager was a strength. Where the work connects, genuinely, tangibly, to real people building real businesses.
It also showed us a company that's mid-journey. Not arrived. In the process of shaping what’s next. Still figuring some things out.
That feels honest. And honest, in my experience, is the only thing that actually works.
If any of this sounds like your kind of company - or like someone you know - take a look at the rest of our career site.