Recruiters can learn from global brands such as Coca Cola and BMW, Giles Thomas, a marketer with brand consultancy Branded, told an audience of recruiters at Mishcon de Reya, solicitors.

Thomas said that BMW's brand was all about the "performance of the vehicle", and informed everything that the business did, and this could be applied to recruiters.

Thomas said: "A strong brand guides everything you do, and creates an expectation of what's to come.

"A strong brand can make you look better than you really are."

Another benefit was that it made people trust you more, he said.

The first thing his company did when rebranding a job board (although he refused to name the client) was to ask job hunters "what does the brand mean?" The next was to ask "what could it mean?"

Thomas said that it became clear that users wanted a site that was friendly and supported job hunters. He added that the job site had since been designed so that it filled the role of a "jobs mate", who provided moral support in "the lonely business" of job hunting.

Adam Morallee, a solicitor at Mishcon de Reya, said that with brands being so valuable, there were plenty of people who wanted to steal them.

He said that major threats came from the internet and companies which attempted to re-direct web traffic designed for one company onto their own website.

Another threat to a company's brand came from changes announced by Google that will allow companies to bid for competitors' Google AdWords. This would get them further up Google search results pages and effectively allow companies to siphon off their candidates.

Recruiters must take a number of steps to protect themselves, said Morallee:

• register all domain names and names around your name, such as misspellings

• register your trademarks and keywords

• protect your data so that when people leave they don't walk out with commercially valuable information.

Ramona Mehta, a partner in Mishcon de Reya's litigation department, said there were a number of legal steps recruiters could take when people tried to damage them or their reputation. Mehta said the laws of confidence and defamation could be successfully used by everyone "and not just the big companies".