How to Harness Employee Stories to Boost Your Brand

Bryan Chaney, Director of Employer Brand, Indeed

Employer branding is having an “Ah-ha” moment. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, the best response to challenges like the pandemic is to be fluid like water and move around the things that move toward us. By embracing the moment, we can bring people together and create meaningful content.

Let’s face it: When people are home, they are more comfortable. They are also more motivated to connect and share stories. People have increasingly been sharing their lives outside of work - including family and pets - in social media content. Coming directly from employees, this type of content tends to humanize your company’s brand.

For companies that have yet to establish an employer brand strategy, now is a great time to start. For those with an established employee-generated content strategy, it’s time to get creative and go beyond Zoom meeting screenshots. After all, people’s stories are where the real magic happens.

Here are some ideas for harnessing these impulses now:

Challenge all employees to be content creators - Look beyond the marketing department - anyone can be a brand ambassador and content creator. Encourage employees to create interactive content. Short videos bring stories to life and can deliver real business results. VideoMyJob and EveryoneSocial are two tools we use at Indeed to first capture and then amplify employee-generated content.

Make content easy to share - The best content is meaningful stories grounded in work. Make it easier with a social media policy that sets basic parameters for sharing and hold employee workshops on content creation. Show them what good sharing looks like. Employee advocacy programs provide a centralized location for content and make it easy for employees to create and share what matters to them.

Encourage employee advocacy - Advocacy should be part of everyone’s work from day one. From a career perspective, it benefits employees by helping them elevate their personal brand. When employees create and share work-related content, it sends a message that employees believe in their work and the company. Doing this under a unified culture hashtag (ours is #insideindeed), can create a ripple effect through their networks.

Start with recruiters - Current employee advocates can influence others to share their stories. So can your recruiting team. Train recruiters to be marketers - your very own engaged employer brand army. For starters, hiring manager videos and podcasts are a great talent attraction tool.

Go beyond “vanity metrics” when tracking and monitoring results - While these answer an immediate need, they only give you an idea about sentiment or brand awareness in a particular channel. The buying cycle for careers is much longer and more complex than that non-stick cooking pan you may have been thinking about. To get at ROI, slower-moving metrics such as CLTV (customer/candidate lifetime value) which measure volume and quality of engagements over time, are more useful.

Shift the content mix from brand storytelling to employee storytelling - Leave room for organic stories to breathe. If you use a prompt or interview format to help employees share experience stories, leave space in the interview to let natural conversation happen and draw out their stories about the unique work environment at your firm.

Lead by example - Show them you’re comfortable sharing on social, too - if you’re brave, confident and willing to be vulnerable, other employees will follow your lead.

With so many of us working remotely, a new appreciation for human connection has been born - including connections with work colleagues and within workplaces. As people look to share stories with others, employers can harness these impulses and encourage employees to create meaningful content that benefits both themselves and your company as a whole.

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