You’ve spent a ton of effort, time, and resources to craft your employer brand and EVP statements. You’ve plastered it on your career site, shared it with your employees, and updated your collateral. But after all’s said and done, does this beautifully crafted copy really paint a full picture of your company or does it just come off as whimsical marketing fluff?
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.
Establish Content Themes and an Editorial Calendar
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:
Flexibility to create and innovate
People-first culture
Commitment to DEI
A place to grow your career quickly
A mission-driven company
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:
How the company focuses on improving work-life balance
What the company did to support working parents during COVID-19
New mental health benefits
How the company helped employees during a crisis (such as a natural disaster)
How the company recognizes individual employees
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.
Get Clear on Your Goals
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:
Share more detailed information about a specific topic to build awareness?
Get someone to apply?
Have someone join your talent community?
Nurture targeted candidates for future roles?
Highlight your commitment to specific initiatives (e.g., DEI)?
Overcome negative press or misconceptions about your company?
Share news (e.g., won an award; new office opening; going public)?
Provide social proof (e.g., earned media; employee testimonials)?
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.
Consider Who Should Tell These Stories
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:
An individual contributor talking about how they impacted a project
A hiring manager offering insight about the team and why someone would be excited to join
A mom sharing how the company supported her as a new parent
A few employees highlighting how specific benefits/perks have made their lives easier
The Chief People Officer explaining what the company is doing to improve DEI
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:
Q&A style
Editorial
Traditional blog with headers called out
Traditional blog with quote called outs
Traditional blog with embedded videos or audio/podcast
And here are ways to gather the information to build the blog:
A Q&A call where you document their answers
A questionnaire they fill out
The employee writing the full piece
An audio recording
A video submission
Build Your Content Development Process
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 It
Of course, share it wherever you need to first. This could be:
With the employee and the rest of your employee-base
Your company Intranet
Social media
Featured on your career site
Candidate communications
Third-party sites (e.g., Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn)
Ads
Email marketing
You also need to realize most people either won’t see your content the first time you promote it or they won’t take action right away if they do. Therefore, it’s important to break your content down into micro content and spread it out through your marketing strategy over time.
Experiment with different headlines and CTAs. Use different visuals to promote it. Pull out interesting points or quotes from the blog. Either way, this can save you a ton of time when finding content to plug into your recruitment marketing calendar and it can ensure you get more eyes on your content for months to come.
Your employer brand and EVP will mean nothing to candidates if you can’t give them concrete examples why these statements are true. Share a range of perspectives to be inclusive. Help candidates see they belong and make it easy for them to picture what it’s like to work for your company.
Company culture blogs will not only drive more traffic to your career site, but will help engage and convert candidates much easier.
Need help writing blogs? Harlow offers content creation and activation services. Contact us here to learn more.
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