Employer brand is a set of economic, psychological and functional benefits provided for employees and associated with a particular employer. The problem of efficient employer branding methods and tools for commercial organizations has been actively discussed nowadays, but as for the public civil service it has not been tackled and developed yet. The goal of the article is to reveal the features of the current employer image of the public civil service in Russia in the perception of different youth target groups (state employees at the age of under 35years, students majoring in “Public Administrations” and “Human Resource Management”). In order to evaluate the attractiveness of work in the public civil service in Russia the authors’ questionnaire survey was conducted, and to identify the career preferences the respondents filled in the questionnaire “Career Anchors”, designed by Edgar Schein (1993). The revealed career preferences reflect an ambiguous perception of the employer attractiveness in the public civil service, which enables to conclude that public authorities in Russia make insufficient efforts to attract young employees and build the employer brand. On the basis of our pilot research among state employees and students we provide Russian public civil service organizations with a number of recommendations on how to improve their employer attractiveness. Most of the respondents have a strong motivation to be involved in valid applied projects. Thus, we strongly recommend public civil service organizations to implement different projects with the valuable practiceoriented content during internship programs for students.