Storytelling is also one of the best ways to bring your employer brand to life and make it tangible. After all, any good writer or editor will urge you to “show, not tell” to create a story worth remembering. So rather than simply writing EVP messaging with pretty words and aspirational language, why not back it up with a good story to really make it stick?
Best way to do that: through your employees.
Every person working at your company has an interesting story to tell (yes, even the ones you’d least expect). In the employer branding world, our job isn’t only limited to connecting people with a company, but to connect people with people too. The candidates may care about things like culture, benefits, and career progression, but they also want to know who they’ll work with day in and day out. Making a job change is a massive life decision, and it’s usually the people you work with who make it worthwhile. So why not enhance your employer brand by sharing your people’s stories?
…And no, I don’t mean exploiting them for your own agenda. I mean letting their unique voices and perspectives shine through openly and honestly, helping your company illustrate the employee experience better than we ever could just building the messaging on our own. When it’s time to activate your employer brand, storytelling allows you to share something more meaningful than the same buzzwords and phrases every other company is saying. It’s time to stand out in a real way, and we can’t do that without our employees.
It Builds Credibility with Candidates
If a person came across a message from a company brand and a message from an employee, they’ll likely trust the employee review more. Any company can say they’re the best place ever, and candidates are now seeing through these fluffy, often unsupported messages. Instead, they know the truth lies in what the employees have to say. That’s why sites like Glassdoor, Comparably, and Blind exist and are probably one of the sources candidates use before deciding to work for a company.
After all, if you were comparing three different products on Amazon, you’re likely going with the one with the highest star rating and best written reviews. The same concept applies here, and is even more important. You can always return a product, but jobs are different. Candidates (and current employees too) are weighing this much more seriously.
Candidate expectations and needs have changed dramatically these last two years. Now, they’re prioritizing things like empathic leadership, flexibility in work, a safe and inclusive environment, and so on. Unfortunately, you can’t just say “we’re empathetic!” on your career site as easily as you can rattle off your benefit package and have it actually land. The only way to show this credibly is through solid, honest employee examples.
It Helps Candidates Understand if the Environment is Right for Their Unique Needs
Although I’m sick of hearing the overused terms of “bringing your whole self to work” and “inclusive environment,” it’s important to note that employee stories are a great way to connect people in a way that matters. Your workplace is made up of different people at different stages in their lives and with different needs. By showing a variety of perspectives, candidates can potentially see themselves in your people and understand if the environment is right for them or not.
The more you can deeply show this, the easier it is for candidates to get a clearer picture of whether this truly is an inclusive place for their specific needs and situations. It also helps them understand if your values line up with theirs and how you stand by those values in both small and big ways.
It Connects Employees with the Company and Each Other
Employer branding doesn’t just engage candidates, it also engages employees too. Chances are, your workplace has changed since the pandemic. Even if it isn’t fully remote, maybe it’s hybrid. Or maybe you’ve expanded where you’re hiring, making your company a little less centralized. Because of this, people are connecting and communicating differently.
For some companies, this has caused a problem with employee engagement. Employees either feel in the dark because they’re not getting that informal info like they did in the office, or internal comms aren’t as consistent and clear (or employees don’t see those comms at all because they’re lost in the overwhelming sea of emails, Slack messages, and Zoom meetings), or they’re missing that opportunity to spontaneously meet new people in the office, so those organic bonds might take a little more work to build.
By giving employees a platform to share their stories, you’re also creating an avenue for connection and building bonds by offering a glimpse deeper into who they work with. These little opportunities go a long way if your workplace has gone remote-first and/or has become more distributed.
The easiest way to get started is by creating opportunities for employee spotlights. Need ideas? Check out our blog on how to amplify employee voices here and how to gather employee perspectives here.
For a more comprehensive guide, click the image below to download our free resource.
Taking Storytelling One Step FurtherI won’t bury the lead here: start harnessing the power of employee advocacy.
It’s almost funny to think how a few years ago, companies were policing their employees’ social media. God forbid if an employee posted something on their social channels. (clutches pearls The absolute scandal.) Some companies even added social media policies to their new hire paperwork to prevent any potential brand damage proactively.
Fast forward to 2022, and companies are clamoring for their employees to act as brand ambassadors, so much so that they’re even creating formal brand ambassador programs to encourage it both for consumer marketing and employer branding purposes.
Employee brand ambassador programs can be as simple or as robust as you want them. There are a lot of ways you can build an effective one, from investing in platforms like Bambu and putting on social media challenges with incentives to actually supporting a handful of solid employees to launch their personal brands as thought leaders.
No matter what you choose, the easiest and some of the most important things you can do to encourage organic advocacy are:
If you embrace employee advocacy, make sure you’re supporting them every step of the way. The goal is to encourage (not police!) employees so they feel comfortable sharing their authentic stories. The last thing you want is to make them feel like the brand is influencing their way of expressing it. Of course, you need some guardrails so employees don’t accidentally damage the brand, but genuine organic stories are key, so do your best not to get too in their way.
Need help activating your employer brand? Harlow offers employer branding services. Contact us here to learn more.
The pandemic was (is?) a hot mess, prompting a ton of radical changes in the workforce and causing everyone’s head to spin. But it wasn’t all bad. If anything, it forced companies to consider employee experience more seriously and adapt to the changing market.
For someone who’s mostly worked remotely since 2012, I appreciate the switch to remote-friendly workplaces because it creates a more inclusive and flexible environment. I also love seeing employees take a stand for things that matter to them from DEI and well-being to better pay and flexibility. Workers are no longer playing around with companies who don’t treat them well or aren’t trying to make the world a little better.
Another interesting thing to come out of these last two years is that companies can no longer hide behind their fancy office designs and the ridiculous idea that ping-pong tables equals culture. When most of us were forced to work home, all of that was stripped away and made us question what was worth staying with our employers.
Also, companies can no longer sweep bad behavior under the rug. Employees dgaf about openly and loudly shedding light on poor practices and work environments. If you fire them, they’ll likely have another job offer a second later.
It’s a candidates’ market, baby. We’re just living in it.
Companies who don’t meet these expectations are feeling the pain of their employees leaving in droves, and places who haven’t lost their talent (yet) are taking note. They know they need to not only step up their game, but also be loud and proud about what they have to offer.
Queue employer branding and recruitment marketing. 👋 Hi there. We’ve been here the whole time, and we’re glad leadership is finally seeing our value.
So there’s a purpose to this ridiculously long backstory. I promise. It’s to show that employer branding isn’t as simple as hiring someone who’s good at stuff like social media, writing, and creating cute visuals on Canva. Sadly, many people hiring their first employer brander think it’s enough to have a recruiter, coordinator, or internal comms person moonlight as a talent brander. Or maybe their limited budget will only let them hire an intern or someone fresh to the workforce.
I’m not saying this can’t work, I’m just saying it will be tough to make enough traction to keep up with this wild market AND compete with the many companies now investing in employer branding.
Don’t worry though. Even if you’re a tiny company starting out or a mid or large company ready to jump in, you can be successful.
But in order to be successful, you need to get your expectations in check and do the legwork to make sure you set up your first employer branding person to be successful too. Here are a few things you should consider before hiring someone.
Get specific here because it’s going to help you understand the skills, partnerships, and resources you’ll need. To throw out a blanket statement like “becoming an employer of choice” or “to increase hires” isn’t good enough.
Look at your hiring plans for the next year. For the next three years. Who are you trying to hire? Where are you trying to hire? What are your business goals and how will your teams evolve to support that? What initiatives are in place to enhance your employee experience? Who are you up against when competing for talent? What’s going on in your company’s industry? In the talent market? When it comes to hiring, employee engagement, and retention, what’s working and what isn’t?
Of course the pandemic showed us just how little we can predict things, but we can try to get a clearer understanding of what our hiring needs are and what can impact it to the best of our ability. By understanding this, you can map what you need and which skills are essential to support your goals.
The interesting (and hard) part of employer branding is that it’s basically a branding, marketing, communications, and creative department all rolled into one. There’s a lot to juggle, and that can be tough for one person to handle.
Can one person do a ton of varying tasks? Sure. Can they do them all super well without some form of support or resources? Probably not.
For us in the employer branding space, it peeves us when we see job descriptions requiring a ton of advanced skills in a range of areas. You want a brander who is a social media and copywriter who also has advanced skills in video and graphic design programs, can coordinate massive events, can support internal comms, and be a program manager for DEI? Yikes.
You’re not just competing against other companies for talent, you’re also competing against all the other things out there trying to gain your target talent’s attention. This includes marketing and entertainment teams with massive budgets. (Oh…and the influencers too. Can’t forget about the influencers.)
To stand out from the noise, you need to be able to invest in building the right platforms to connect with people. If they’re stretched thin or don’t have the right skills, you’re setting this person up for failure.
That said, you need to consider what you need this person to handle and determine what they can outsource to internal teams or vendors (more on that later).
For your first employer brander, you’d likely benefit from someone who is both strategic (big picture) and an excellent executer (in the weeds). Now, when I say they’re good at executing, I don’t mean expecting someone to be a social media-copywriting-web designing-email marketing-event planning guru. I mean being able to handle a couple of those things well and effectively project managing other specialists to do the rest.
I don’t mean in the office. I mean what team will they be on. Every company does it differently. I’ve seen this person sit on the People team, the Talent Acquisition team, the Internal Comms team, the Corporate Comms team, and the Marketing team.
Depending on the skills needed and resources available, you’ll want to think about which team and/or manager will best support this person’s career, role, and growth. You also want a manager who has the right influence to help remove roadblocks and deal with the fun politics of the corporate world.
Regardless of where this person sits, they’ll need to have strong connections with each of these departments…which brings me to my next point.
It takes a village to make employer branding work, so who internally have you gotten bought in and committed to help make this happen? As I mentioned, the person you hire needs to leverage others to get everything done.
Before you hire someone, have you talked to the department heads and relevant managers to explain what you’re doing? How will this person impact the corporate brand? PR? What brand guidelines do they need to adhere to? How can they make sure they’re informed on what’s going on at the company and/or inform others (like HR, internal comms, etc.) on what’s going on in their world?
More importantly, who has committed to offering bandwidth and resources to help push projects forward? Just because your creative or web dev teams are bought in, doesn’t mean they’ll have the bandwidth to prioritize employer branding projects. Most people in this role will tell you how often our projects get pushed down on the priority list, deadlines zipping by one disappointing day at a time.
If you’re not getting that commitment or aren’t confident they’ll follow through on it, then you need to make sure other resources are available to fill that gap.
Unfortunately, most of these resources are going to cost money if you can’t do it in-house. So I hope you’re ready to make a case to secure budget. Whether it’s a tool or a vendor, you’ll want to get a sense of the typical cost when pulling together your budget request. Without this budget, you’ll run into delays or will struggle to do things that make an impact.
Here are some things to price out. Again, what you need will depend on what you’re trying to solve and the infrastructure you’ll need to support it.
Employer platform costs (e.g., LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc.)
There are plenty of other things to look into, but this is usually a good start. Some of these might be a little too much for the first year since branding takes time to establish. However, it’s safe to say you’ll want to focus on infrastructure and foundational things. This includes building your anchor messaging (e.g., EVP), setting up the platforms to reach the right candidates, optimizing your career site, figuring out visual language, and crafting foundational content (e.g., blogs, videos, social).
I’m sorry to say that building momentum in employer branding takes a while. Just creating the foundation and infrastructure alone can take a few months, and that’s before getting to the actual recruitment marketing part to engage candidates.
You need to get real about what you want this person to accomplish and to ensure you’re not overloading them with unrealistic expectations.
If the foundation/infrastructure will take a good chunk of their effort for the first 3-6 months, what are some smaller, tactical, instant-gratifying projects they can do too just to make small strides to support immediate needs? Is it doing a Q&A LinkedIn Live event with your recruiters and hiring managers? Is it throwing together a casual open house meet-and-greet? Is it connecting with employees to amplify their authentic stories on one of your platforms? Is it working with your employer partners (e.g., Built In, PowerToFly, etc.) for sponsored content or boosting job postings?
There are small things your employer brander can do that won’t pull away too much of their attention from their bigger task. If your leaders want to see these quick wins, this can be a good way to appease those pressing for it without compromising the deep work your employer brander is doing.
Just remember, patience is key.
So, if you’re ready to invest in employer branding and recruitment marketing (which I highly suggest, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it), be sure to do the groundwork first before posting your job.
A bad job description that seems unclear or like it’s combining too many expertises into one role will be a major red flag for branders. They may question if your expectations are realistic or if you have the resources available to help them do a good job.
This role is in hot demand, and there aren’t a whole ton of us out there. You’ll have a better chance of attracting the right person if you present the role in a decisive and realistic way in your job descriptions and share more concrete answers about the role during the interview process.
It will also help ensure you’re interviewing the right people with the right skills that will support your unique needs. Good luck!
Have questions about hiring your first Employer Brand Manager? Harlow can help! Contact us for a consultation call.
]]>But it isn’t as simple as throwing together basic posts anymore. You’ve got a lot of competition to contend with, which means you need to be really strategic about how you’re using your platforms. Not only are you fighting against traditional marketing teams to get reach, but you’re also fighting against other employers who finally embraced the whole “employer branding” thing. In fact, 76% of companies choose social media to communicate their employer brand.
Wow. That means you gotta do a whole lot to stand out, huh?
First off, before you rush to create ALL OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS, I’d recommend starting with one. I personally like Instagram the best because of the visual element and the option to have fun with it (and, depending on your industry, your employees/candidates are probably scrolling through it more actively than something like Facebook).
The goal of using it is to create a wealth of current information that helps candidates discover you and learn more.
That said, you might wonder how you can use Instagram to promote your employer brand. Lucky for you, I have 9 ideas below.
One of the easiest and most low-budget ways to share your story is to give real-time updates. For example, is there something interesting happening at the office? Is your company hosting a recruiting event? Is there exciting news to share? In these situations, you can take photos to promote on your Stories in real-time or create a visual (like through Canva) to promote important news, such as an office expansion, going public, or winning an employer award.
Snap a photo of your employee and share a quote in the caption. This is a great way to showcase your people, get testimonials, and give a glimpse of a “day in the life.” If candidates are looking to understand what it’s like to work in a specific role, this can be a great way to give bite-sized insight into it.
These are always fun ones. Whereas the spotlight posts offer a glimpse, the employee takeovers give a fuller behind-the-scenes look. Here, we get to see what it’s like to work at the company through their eyes. There’s also the added benefit of showing off things like your office design, your awesome team, the benefits and perks, and how this person is connected with leadership. HubSpot does a great job with this. Check out their “Takeovers” story highlight for inspiration.
Take some of your longer content and break it down into shorter, engaging content for your Instagram feed. For example, if you created a video, have the editors cut them into shorter themed videos. If you have a longer video about culture, you can break it down into three 15-second videos highlighting different aspects of your culture that you can share in three posts. Or maybe pull quotes and testimonials from blogs and create visual cards to highlight that. You can even repurpose podcast or audio formats to work for Instagram through Headliner.app.
If you want to lead people to your content, consider investing in something to help make the most of your bio link. For example, Linkin.bio or Linktree.
Candidates love to hear directly from your people, so why not amplify their voices by resharing their content? A simple way to know when new employee generated content is around is to get your people to use your “LifeAt” hashtag for your employer brand or ask them to tag you in their stuff.
Got a bigger thing you need to promote? Consider doing an ongoing campaign that ties all your content together. For example, if you’re doing a campaign for the next three months to attract more women to your company, consider reworking your content to align with that. You can feature more women in your employee spotlights, add visuals with stats, highlight benefits or perks that can support women in the workplace, and more. All of it can tie together with specific visual language, a call-to-action, or a hashtag.
Need a little boost for big hiring pushes or to promote key branding messages? Consider sponsoring your posts or creating new ads. This is a good way to target your ideal candidates to raise awareness, get new followers, increase engagement, or drive them to a specific role or landing page.
I love this new feature because it can make the candidate’s research journey even easier. With guides, you can create a curated collection of posts that all tie together and tell a bigger story. For example, if you want to make it easy for engineering candidates to see relevant employee spotlights, create a guide to include all engineering employee spotlights. Or if you want to highlight your journey in becoming a more inclusive employer, showcase stories about partnerships you’ve made, key hires in leadership, diversity numbers, etc.
Sometimes putting together MeetUps and Open House hiring events just aren’t feasible. Maybe there’s a huge shift in your headcount plans and you need to recruit an entirely different group of candidates ASAP. Or maybe something like the pandemic happened, forcing us to still connect with people, but virtually. Or maybe you just don’t have the time, budget, or resources to pull something together.
In any case, IGTV can be a nice alternative. Here, you can host live events to connect with candidates, such as Ask Me Anything sessions with hiring managers, Meet the Team events with individual contributors, or even sessions with your recruiters as an intro to your company as an employer. Even better, if candidates can’t attend the live session, the recording stays on your profile, giving people the option to watch it at a later time.
As you can see, Instagram is really versatile in connecting with candidates and sharing your employer branding story. Focusing on one platform like Instagram will give you the bandwidth you need to get strategic with your social media plan and test what resonates and what doesn’t. Equipped with that information, you can launch strongly on other platforms if you decide to.
Need help creating your recruitment marketing content? Harlow offers activation services. Contact us here to learn more.
Then came the attention span issue. As people became overwhelmed with nonstop messages, target audiences were harder to reach and keep engaged.
And who could forget the algorithm changes and their own hot mess of problems? As more platforms worked to curate content based on user interests, your precious content either had a strong enough strategy to be seen or it was lost in the black hole of nothingness.
So, we killed ourselves to create new content. Better content. Flashier. More.
We got a little extra.
And as we cranked it out, trying to one-up ourselves along with everyone else, we hit the point where the increased output didn’t necessarily add value. Basically, we were busting our buns for no good reason.
People still weren’t seeing our content. Even if they did, they likely gave it one whole millisecond to scan it before scrolling on past. It took some crafty strategy and likely money (thanks to the monetization of…like…EVERYTHING) to see the results we used to see, and hopefully better. At this point, we’d take anything.
Exhausted yet? Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be. Although I try to steer away from clichés, this is a good time to mention the whole working smarter and not harder thing. If you want to make an impact with your content, it’s not about all the new stuff you’re pumping out. It’s about how you work with what you’ve got.
If you put effort and heart into the content you’ve created, then it’s worth sharing it more than one or two measly times. Again, people likely zipped by it in their newsfeeds or didn’t bother to click to learn more. This is why you need to keep a content repository of all your hot links (especially evergreen content) so you can share it as time goes on.
Look at that. You’ve filled slots on your content calendar without even trying. What can you do with all that free time?
Here’s a hit: repurpose your top trending content or breathe life into your so-so stuff.
Different personas will consume content in different ways. Also, different platforms have specific types of content that perform better than others, so pay attention and rework your content to get the most impact.
Let’s say you created a beefy piece of content. Maybe it’s a blog, whitepaper, video, deck, or podcast. This is your macro content. That content packs a lot in it, which means there are plenty of key points you can promote in other ways. It also probably means people who actually took a second to check it out skimmed it and might have missed some important stuff.
That’s where repurposing your content comes into play. Not only does this give you a lot of room to keep it fresh and let it go the extra mile, but it’s also a good way to engage new people or reengage others.
Here are some quick ideas on how you can create rework your content:
These are just a handful of the countless ways you can reuse your content. Not only will it fill your content calendars, but it can also help you see what adds the most value to your audience, supports other initiatives in the company, and acts as the best resource on the fly.
So rather than burning yourself out trying to produce more and more, take a breather to consider what does the best for you and your audience and think about how you can create content that has longevity.
Need help building your recruitment marketing content calendar? Harlow offers activation services. Contact us here to learn more.
And then I discovered Trello.
I’d been using Trello for a while to keep myself organized. As a solo employer brander, there are a crazy amount of things to juggle. Thankfully, Trello kept me on track. I loved it so much that I even started using it for other things like managing all my household to-dos, meal planning, plotting novels, saving important resources, organizing trips, and keeping track of my budget.
(And no, this isn’t an affiliated post. I just love it that much. I basically don’t know how to function in life without it.)
It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I played around with the Calendar Power-Up feature that I realized this tool was exactly what I was looking for to make content planning a breeze. Even better is that it all can be done with their free plan!
Curious to see how I use it? Check out this step-by-step guide.
Although Trello has great community templates to get you started, I like working with a blank slate. All of us have different goals and tactics for our recruitment marketing plans, so a blank board lets me organize it based on evolving needs.
This will depend on your approach to content marketing. I typically break it down into categories such as:
Themes: I often group my content strategy into quarterly themed chunks. For example, one quarter might focus on DEI stories. Another might focus on our engineering hiring efforts in a specific talent market.
This might feel like a very busy content calendar already, and you may wonder how we can distinguish what’s what. That’s where labels come in. More on that later.
If you need to add a list, simply click on “Add another list” on the right-hand side. To remove a list, click the three dots on the right corner of the list and choose “Archive this list.” You can still access it in your history.
If you want to change the order of your list, click on your list and drag it to the desired spot.
Select the “Add a card” option under each list to start organizing your content. For the card title, keep it high-level.
Just like moving your list, you can simply move your cards from one list to another by clicking and dragging. Or, you can open your card and select the “Move” option under Actions on the right-hand side.
Okay. There’s a lot you can do here. It’s up to you on how detailed you want to get, but let me show you some of my favorite features so you know what’s available.
The description box is a great way to post high-level details. Maybe this can be your meta description or a one-liner to help you and/or your team know what’s going on in this piece. This can even be a place you put your copy for a social media post.
You can use the attachment option (found on the right-hand side of your open card) to add files, links, other Trello cards, and links to your drive. In this example, we’ll attach an image we’ll use for the social media post. As you can see, the photo will pop up in the card header and in your list view.
If you prefer to keep your board clean, you can remove the header image. To do this, open the card, click on the “Cover” option on the bottom right of the header and choose to remove or change the cover.
In a perfect world, everything would be done immediately with no loose ends. In the real world, that’s rarely the case. To keep yourself super organized so you don’t miss your deadlines, use the checklist option (found on the right-hand side) to add your pending to-do’s.
You can also use the notes section to keep yourself and your teams up-to-date on what’s going on. In the notes, you can add attachments, other Trello cards, emojis, and tag members from your team.
Remember what I said about keeping your cards organized? Labels are a visual way to help you see what’s what when looking at your calendar view. You can also filter your content using labels.
In your open card, click the labels section (on the right-hand side) and edit your labels by clicking on the little pencil next to the color and creating a name for your label.
Then, select the label that applies to your card. You’ll see it at the top of the card when it’s open and in the card title area when in list view.
To visually organize your content calendar, adding dates to your cards is the most important thing to do.
In your open card, select Dates (on the right-hand side) and choose your due date. You can also choose a start date for ongoing projects. Again, this will show up at the top of your card and in the title section when in list view.
This is my favorite Power-Up to help me see what’s going on at a high-level. Better yet, it’s included in their free plan.
To get your Power-Up, open a card and select “Add Power-Ups” from the right-hand side. From there, search for the Calendar Power-Up and click the “Add” button.
Once you add your Power-Up, you’ll see it as an option at the top right-corner of your board. To check out the calendar view, click on the Calendar Power-Up from this area.
And because random things love to pop up so our perfect schedule feels like it never goes according to plan (I know you know what I mean), you can simply click on a card and drag it to another date. This is probably my favorite part of this. Whenever I used other tools, it felt like a hassle. Don’t even get me started on all the Wite-Out I used for the paper calendars.
I covered the basics, but there are plenty more features we didn’t go over. I’d be here all day telling you about them, and that’s just on the free plan! There’s even more on the paid versions.
However, here’s a quick rundown of some of the other features I use:
Sort by: Click on the three dots on the top corner of your card to sort your lists by things like due dates, card names, etc.
Trello can be as simple or as robust as you want it to be. I’ve tried many project management tools over the last decade, but I keep finding myself coming back to this. Hopefully, this offers you a free, easy, and organized way to plan your recruitment marketing content calendar.
Need help building your recruitment marketing content calendar? Harlow offers activation services. Contact us to learn more.
]]>When it comes to employer branding, the voice of your employees is the most important tool to use. Their perspectives, experiences, and stories bring your employer brand to life in tangible and authentic ways. So how can you share these insights? Start creating employee spotlights.
Employee spotlights amplify these voices, giving your employees a platform to connect with candidates and even other employees!
There are a lot of ways to incorporate this content into your recruitment marketing strategy. How you approach it depends on your bandwidth, available resources, which options are more attractive to your people, and what makes the most sense for your employer brand.
Not sure which platforms or formats to use when telling your employer branding and employee stories? Here are 5 employee spotlight examples to consider when planning your recruitment marketing strategy.
Blogging is one of the most popular ways to share your employees’ stories. In fact, many companies even have a blog feature on their career site so they can share company news, insights into the culture, details about benefit offerings, and more.
However, blogs that usually get the most interest and engagement specifically feature employees. Examples of these employee spotlights are posts written by the employee, written by the company (such as a team spotlight) with employee quotes scattered throughout, or written as a Q&A editorial piece.
Whichever format you choose, be sure to include call-outs and headlines to make it easy for the reader to scan for the information they care most about.
Video has quickly become another popular choice for employer branders, especially with new platforms to create user generated and live videos. Years before, employer branding videos could be time-consuming and costly, as many companies opted for high-production videos. But with the growth of social media features like Stories and live steaming, the need to create highly polished videos isn’t as crucial.
For videos, you can go the route of produced videos, user generated, or live. (More on that here.) However, a new option for formatting videos came to light during COVID-19. With many people working from home, and with companies going remote-first or fully remote, the option to create engaging videos became challenging. Watching Zoom-like videos got tiring because we were all getting Zoom fatigue as it was, so some companies got creative in their approach to videos: they used illustration. See an example of what Nestlé has done here.
No matter which option you go for, make sure you include captions. Many people watch videos with sound off, so including captions can increase the likelihood of people watching your videos to the end.
Podcasting is another option for sharing employee stories. With many people on the go, juggling a million things a minute, they might not have time to read a blog or watch a video. Therefore, audio can get your employee stories out there when people can’t sit down and stare at a screen.
What’s great about audio employee spotlights is that they can be repurposed. For example, some people will record a Zoom call so there’s a video version of it. Then they’ll pull the audio for audio-only type podcasts. From there, some choose to transcribe the audio version into a blog format and for shorter social media posts. How about that? You basically created four content formats from one employee spotlight!
If you’re looking to create video versions of your audio, you can use Headliner App. This tool pulls the audio and creates a video version. You can add photos/videos and captions too. This is a great tool if you want to share on social media or if you want to embed it into other content.
What better way to share your employees’ voices than by empowering them to use it directly? There are plenty of employee advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or Bambu that allow employees to reshare content and add their own commentary or even suggest content for the company to share.
Other ways you can increase employee advocacy is by giving them prompts, digital assets, hashtags, or tools to encourage people to post directly on their social networking sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on. For example, if you send new hire swag to an employee, include a note encouraging them to share a photo with their LinkedIn network using your employer branding hashtag.
Or if you see employees using the hashtag, reach out to ask if you can repost their content to your company’s social sites. Not only are employees excited to get recognized in this way, but these posts tend to get the most engagement because they are more genuine.
Hosting or sponsoring an in-person event can be timely and expensive. Also, these events might not be convenient for candidates to attend. For instance, if you’re hosting a career fair at your headquarters in the suburbs after work, it might be hard for people to leave their workplace or homes and fight through rush hour traffic to get there in time.
Not to mention, people might not be willing to commit that much time and effort to a company they’re not super familiar with. Or maybe they’re currently working and don’t want to tip off their employers that they’re looking.
Digital events can be a great way to connect with candidates in a private, safe, and easy way. Not only can the attendees hop on from anywhere, but you can also include more of your employees on the call who might be distributed in other locations.
These events are a low-key way for candidates to ask employees questions about their specific job, learn about what the hiring managers are looking for, understand what the day-to-day is like, and so on.
The event can also be recorded and shared on your employer branding platforms or via recruiter communications so it can reach a wider audience for months to come.
Test out these different options and see what sticks. Perhaps you’ll find a certain content format or platform gets the most engagement, or maybe how a story is told will increase the likelihood that an employee will want to participate. The results might surprise you. It’s all about trial and error.
Keep measuring your results to see what’s worth your effort and time. However, the most important thing you should remember is to have fun with it! If employees are enjoying themselves and feel safe to be open and honest, this will show through authenticity in the content you create, resonating with candidates better.
Need help developing employee spotlight content? Harlow offers content development services. Contact us here to learn more.
This compulsion is completely understandable. After all, we want to keep up with the frontrunners producing amazing things and are setting the standard employer branding. The harsh truth is that these companies likely have resources you don’t, making it tough to get into the same league.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t continue studying our craft or staying current with new tools, platforms, channels, and techniques. However, it’s important to assess these options critically to see what makes the most sense for you. Otherwise, you’ll be spreading your efforts, resources, and time across way too many channels, limiting your ability to go deep and make an impact.
You can’t stand out if you’re producing meh results inconsistently. To help you battle the shiny object syndrome and produce better results, here are a few things to consider when evaluating channels/platforms for your employer brand strategy.
Here’s the deal: those companies putting out amazing things you aspire to do yourself not only have full employer branding teams with members who focus on specialized areas, they also have budgets many of us can only dream of.
As a sole practitioner for smaller/mid-sized companies, that was a harsh reality I had to learn, and it’s what I see many colleagues and clients grappling with too. We often put too much pressure on ourselves to compete with these big brands. That comparison is not only unrealistic, but it’s also probably causing a lot of unnecessary stress in your job. In the end, you might discover you worked yourself into the ground trying to do all these things, only to realize it really didn’t make sense for your brand and recruiting goals.
So first get really honest about what’s available to you. The key things you should consider are:
Of course, a good reason companies invest in an employer brander is because they want to attract and convert top talent. However, that’s too broad of a statement. Instead, dig deep and uncover the core goals for this year (or, if you’re able to, the next three years). This focuses your strategy more.
For example, maybe the goal is hiring more tech talent. Maybe it’s building out the DEI function and promoting initiatives. Or maybe it’s launching a new market. By understanding these goals, you’ll better see what you need to create and where you need to invest. Check in with your talent acquisition leaders regularly though, because these goals could pivot unexpectedly.
As I mentioned before, the big brands producing more robust employer branding and recruitment marketing strategies might have budgets we can only hope for. Getting clear on your budget helps you knock out platforms that are too far out of reach. And if you have a limited amount of budget, be cautious about the platforms that are reasonable for you to pursue. Just because you can afford it, doesn’t always mean you should.
If your financial resources are limited, assess what’s truly worth your investment rather than spreading it all around. For example, does it make sense to spend a larger chunk of money in one or two areas to maximize results? Or would you rather disperse money evenly across multiple platforms to expand general reach? If you’ve already invested money in certain platforms, are the results worth the amount you’ve spent, or is it better to cut your losses and move those funds to something more impactful?
Just because you have the budget to invest in certain activities and platforms doesn’t mean you’ll get the buy-in from your leaders to pursue it. For example, if you want to implement a specific technology, you might run into roadblocks from your IT and Security teams. Or if you want to invest in events that would require sending several members of your Engineering team to work a booth or speak, you might discover their managers aren’t willing to let them go because they have other business-impacting priorities to focus on.
Some of this push back can be overcome with great facts, case studies, analytics, or a detailed plan to battle objections. However, other times you may need to reevaluate your strategy and take a different approach that will have less resistance.
This one is always tricky (at least it’s been for me and many other practitioners I know). Just because you have the budget and buy-in to do a bunch of things doesn’t mean you should do a bunch of things. Your mental capacity and creativity are finite resources. Maybe you’ve successfully mutlitasked major projects in the past, but there will come a time where the quantity of things you’re trying to do will affect your quality. Part of that can be caused by changes in your bandwidth, unexpected hiccups, new competing priorities, shifts in goals or the market, or your current skill set.
Consider what’s realistic for you to get done on your own. Then think about what you’d need to outsource. This will once again let you see what’s going to make the most sense for you to invest your energy in.
My best piece of advice is to start small, assess often, and iterate. It’s much easier to get a handle on a few things and get really good at it, than trying to keep up with a bunch of things that aren’t producing enough valuable results.
Also, if you’re someone who thrives in learning environments and loves being autonomous, then try to build relevant skills often. By focusing on one area at a time, you’ll be able to dive deep rather than fragmenting your attention in a bunch of different directions. That’s usually a guaranteed way to take forever to finish things or to only produce mediocre work.
There are countless channels, platforms, and techniques available to promote your employer brand and activate your recruitment marketing strategy, with more emerging regularly. If you’ve done the work to understand your goals, budgets, and bandwidth/resources, evaluate those against the common channels we’re seeing in the space. These channels include:
Career site
The list can go on and on, and likely will as more vendors come on the scene. However, this list is a good starting place for you to question whether the channel will aid in your goals and if you’d have the budget, bandwidth, and resources available to make it worth your while.
As you dig in, try to find out the following:
Are these self-serve or do they have services to help you manage them effectively?
Once you gather that information, form a high-level plan of what you’ll need to do to best utilize these channels. For example, if you invest in social media, what content and cadence will you need to make it effective? If you’re investing in employee advocacy tools, how can you communicate and engage your employees to participate?
Of course, we can’t guess all the contributing factors that influence the success of a strategy, but at least considering the different opportunities, challenges, and requirements lets you see what’s realistic so you can weed down the list even more. Therefore, when you’re ready to get buy-in for things, you’ll have a clear vision for why you’re selecting these options. This can hopefully convince decision makers a lot easier.
I didn’t write this to discourage any of you from dreaming big or trying to compete with the big brands out there, even if you’re a lean team. My goal is to help you really think through the options available to you so you don’t waste time, money, and energy keeping up with things that might not serve you or your candidate audience right now.
I’m emphasizing right now because the beauty of employer branding is that the role and landscape are always changing, and branders have the fun opportunity of continually evolving their brands and skills. You might be bummed if you discover you can’t do the things you’d hoped to at first, but as you build momentum in other areas so they become a well-oiled machine, or you knock things off your strategy list when you realize they’re just not performing how you’d expect, you’ll free up yourself to tackle new and exciting things in the future.
Need help developing your recruitment marketing strategy? Harlow offers activation services. Contact us to learn more.
]]>That’s where blogs come in. Blogs that showcase your company culture, teams, and roles are the perfect extension of your employer brand, offering tangible examples to back up your EVP claims. It uses your employees’ voices to bring your employer brand to life, limiting the skepticism candidates might initially feel when exploring your brand.
Rather than making them think it’s “too good to be true,” show them how your company rolls. Use your blog to elevate your EVP, offering a look at a range of employee experiences to support it. More importantly, be transparent about your workplace. No one’s asking you to be perfect, but showing where you’re at and what you’re doing to ensure these EVP claims stay true will make a difference.
So, what do you need to do to create a career- and culture-focused blog? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
When planning your content, think about what topics are going to best support your employer brand and EVP messaging. Then, determine how you can illustrate that best. If you haven’t already, consider your high-level themes. Usually, these are pulled from your EVP statements and pillars. For example:
After you establish your themes, break it down even more. For example, if you’re leaning into the people-first culture, you can share stories about:
Now, plug it into a content calendar and align it with your talent acquisition goals. For instance, if you’re hiring a lot of entry-level employees and interns in May, add stories such as how the company supports employee career growth, highlights about the mentorship programs, features on current interns, and other relevant topics from March through May.
Also, make sure you’re spreading the love evenly. You have a lot that makes up your employer brand, so don’t only focus on one or two areas. Looking at a high-level content calendar can ensure you’re not missing any opportunities to share the full story.
If you’re going to spend time doing this, it should be worth both your time and the candidates’ time. People have zero attention spans these days, and with the candidate experience mimicking the buyer experience, they expect information to be served to them directly and clearly.
For every piece of content you create—whether it’s a blog, video, social media post, or collateral—you need to think about the end goal. For example, do you want to:
Knowing your goal for the piece ensures your call-to-action (CTA) is appropriately aligned and that each section of your content is driving the candidate to take the desired action.
Your blog will only be as engaging as the impactful and open stories your employees tell. When thinking about your goals, whose experience or voice will be the best to share? Some suggestions:
Also, think about how these people will tell the story. Depending on the format and how comfortable someone dictates this. Here are formats to consider:
And here are ways to gather the information to build the blog:
Okay. So you have your goals, your blog topic, and the actual content. Now, it’s time to think about all you need to do to share it with the world.
First, write it and edit it. Get it into the format you want, follow up with employees for clarification, and push it through an approval process. For example, you may want the employee, an HR business partner, a DEI Manager, and the employee’s manager to sign off on the blog before it goes live.
Then, prep the blog for publication. Are there other relevant blogs or content you can hyperlink throughout? Have you checked how strong your SEO is? Included photos and meta details to ensure it shows up in the search properly? Tagged and categorized it so candidates can search easily? Can you backlink it on other previously published blogs or content?
Promote ItOf course, share it wherever you need to first. This could be:
]]>Here are a few compelling reasons to consider crafting a video content strategy for your employer brand:
There are a handful of video format options, such as:
Note: the pandemic has made shooting videos a little tricky, but not impossible. If you want advice on safe ways to film company culture videos, check out this guide from Stories.
What should your videos focus on?It depends on your goal, your overall employer brand voice/personality/identity, and how you plan to use the video. Here are some options to consider:
All of these are great options depending on your bandwidth, budget, and needs. However, whether you’re shooting a video quickly on your phone or hiring a production company, it’s important to get clear on your goals first.
Consider your overall talent acquisition plans for the year and a few years beyond. If you’re considering high production videos or user generated, you want to craft ones that will work with your long-term initiatives to give them more mileage, making the effort and costs worth it.
Need help planning a video shoot? Harlow offers content creation and activation services. Contact us here to learn more.
However, despite all the technological and marketing strategy shifts, one thing still rings true: you need effective copywriting skills to make an impact.
Long form content or short tweets. Persuasive or emotional. Writing compelling copy is an important skill to master. Whether you’re trying to sell a product/service or you’re trying to recruit great talent to join your team, your pitch and supporting stories need to be rooted in great writing.
Both novice and experienced copywriters can benefit from consistently honing this skill. But, for this post’s sake, let’s focus on the here and now, and specifically on digital marketing. The point of writing copy is to tell a story. Doesn’t matter if you have space enough to fill a magazine spread or only a sliver to write two words. Every word matters.
In my experience, here are some of the most helpful tips I learned as I built my skills as a writer and a published fiction author.
You need to know who you’re speaking to in order to understand what matters to them and what you want them to feel. Talk about the benefits first and tap into their wants, needs, hopes, and fears to show them why whatever you’re promoting is the thing to help them.
But don’t stop there. Keep in mind what action you want them to take. Do you want them to sign up for a webinar? Join your email list? Apply to a job? Schedule a call? Share with a friend? Leave a comment? Make sure whatever you’re writing leads them on a journey that will make them want to take this action without hesitation. Knowing what your “ask” is helps you consider how to layout your content and what key points you need to make.
Hate to break it to you, but no one will read your beautiful, clever, well thought out content if you can’t hook them first. New content pops up at warp speed, competing for your ideal audience’s limited attention span. Your headline or hook needs to be interesting, exciting, curious, or shocking to make them stop scrolling and click to learn more.
Writing professionals suggest crafting anywhere around 25 headlines before you even think of writing your copy! Use this space to summarize your message in an engaging and clear way so people take action.
Bonus: you can repurpose those unused headlines for things like social media posts or Pinterest pins. This is a great way to see how well certain headlines perform so you can reframe future headlines.
In fact, keep it simple. Unless you’re writing for some prestigious scientific paper for the world’s greatest geniuses, you’re safe to keep it around a fifth-grade reading level. The thing is, if you try to get clever or use unnecessary big words, you’re going to lose your audience.
Think about the language they comfortably use. Write it conversationally. Read what you wrote out loud to make sure it sounds natural. Not only will this make it flow easier in their minds as they read, but the natural breaks and emphasis people use as they speak will build in seamless pauses so your reader can better consume the information.
With the popularity of social media, text messaging, and email, reading casual language is the norm. Think about it. You’re consuming content and thoughts from regular people every day. Your parents. Friends. Colleagues. Idols. Celebrities. They’re keeping it real. They (hopefully) don’t sound like an uptight, pretentious robot.
(Okay. Maybe some of them do. Thankfully, we now have mute, hide, and delete buttons!)
Like I said, people have zero attention spans these days. I highly doubt many of you have read this post word for word, and I won’t be offended because I know that’s how it goes. Therefore, it’s important to make your message clear even if people are scanning your content.
For longer content like a blog, whitepaper, ebook, and so on, spend the first few sentences getting clear on the purpose of your content. Don’t make them guess. Let them know what they’re in for and what they’ll learn if they continue reading.
Then, use call outs, subheads, bullets, and the like. Not only does it make your piece scannable so people can get the core idea without having to read it in full, it makes the content more digestible. How many times have you read an email or a book with insanely long sentences or endless paragraphs and you were just like “nope” and clicked out of it?
I’m guilty of it, and I’m both a writer and an avid reader. Big blocks of text without white space are overwhelming, so do what you can to break it up so it’s easier on the eye. Whether that be the suggestions I just made or even changing up your font, line spacing, and/or sentence or paragraph length (if you need help with this, here’s an app to help you).
You want to know why some people think they can’t write? Because they’re too busy trying to be perfect. They’re overthinking every word they put down. They’re editing as they write. Before they know it, they’ve spent three hours writing one exceptional paragraph, and then they’re too burned out to finish what they’d started.
As Jodi Picoult said, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
Get the words on paper and fix it later. When I was writing my first novel, it took me years to complete it because I was too worried about making it perfect. It wasn’t until I wrote the thing with a reckless abandon that I finally finished. Now I’m able to write the first draft of a full novel in 3 months or less.
As much as I hate revisions and editing, I’ve learned it’s part of the process. It’s my least favorite part of writing, but it’s how it goes. I know it’s a necessary evil I can’t avoid, and because I know it, I just write. I write dumpster fire pieces. Some of my first drafts are cringy. Hell, some of my eighth drafts are still rough. But by knowing that the first draft isn’t the last draft, it helped me be more productive.
So, kick your ego out the door because even the best writers in the world have terrible first drafts, and you will too. Don’t let it be your reason to stall and overthink it.
You could be a wiz at editing. Maybe you are an editor. Maybe you work with editors and hire them to edit your work. I’m going to tell you right now: it still will never be perfect. When I got deeper into publishing books, I was told there will still be 10% of publishing errors even after going through several rounds of editing.
Want to know why? It’s because you’re human (and so are your editors). It’s also because your eyes get fatigued and your brain automatically fills in words it’s predicting them to be there. If you’re too close to the content you created because you just wrote it, it will be fresh in your brain. You will guess what the next word will say, completely overlooking the fact that you missed two words or you spelled something wrong.
If you have time, take it. For social media, I try to give myself at least a day or two before I double check it. For blogs, at least a week. For novels, at least a month. Just give yourself enough reasonable time to forget what you wrote word for word so you don’t miss something.
If you don’t have a copy editor on hand, using tools like Grammarly or ProWritingAid can help. Although not perfect, it still catches many of those silly mistakes.
By “it” I mean unnecessary words. When editing, cut the fat to make it concise. If anything seems vague or if you’re getting too fancy with your words, overly complex when trying to be creative, or cliched, nix it.
This also means getting rid of common filler words. You might not realize these are filler words, such as that, very, just, actually, absolutely, and so forth. Here’s a list of potentially redundant/ filler words if you’re curious.
However, know you don’t have to cut every filler word. There needs to be a balance between the conversational tone and distracting words dragging the piece along, distracting, or boring people. Use your discretion.
Copywriting is an art and a skill, and is something you need to practice constantly. I’ve been writing for what feels like forever, and I still learn something new every day. I thank my wonderful book editors and copy editors for illuminating areas I’m weak in and helping me build knowledge and skills every day.
I know that everyone has editors on hand, so I urge you to study! Take courses (I did a ton on Udemy), get books, read blogs, or pay attention to your favorite writers. Study. Study. Study.
But also remember that writing is subjective (I’ve heard that a zillion times in the publishing process), so stay true to your own voice or the voice of the brand you’re representing. These tips are just a small amount of suggestions for effective copywriting, but for my most important tip of all: keep practicing. Writing consistently will help you become the best you can be.
Need help crafting content? Harlow offers content creation and activation services. Contact us to learn more.
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