As part of your company’s recruiting team, you’ve worked hard to make sure your employer value proposition (EVP) is clearly communicated to candidates. And for good reason! Your EVP helps to guide your employer brand and helps candidates better understand your culture, values and mission.
While your EVP should be a central focus of your Recruitment Marketing efforts, so too should details and insight into your company’s individual teams and departments. After all, 42 percent of candidates want to learn more about how they would fit within potential teams when searching for jobs, according to LinkedIn.
What does this mean for you as a practitioner? It means you’ve also got to create a team value proposition (TVP) to provide the information that candidates are looking for! One of your best ways for creating and communicating your TVP is by tapping into your current employees who can offer insight into what it’s like to work as part of a specific team or department.
Employee stories are the key to attracting top talent and helping candidates gain a better understanding of your company’s teams along with their individual culture, experience and projects. Lauryn Sargent, co-founder of Stories Inc., recently presented at Rally’s pre-conference workshop at EBrandCon on how Recruitment Marketing and employer branding practitioners can create engaging and compelling employee stories. Read on to learn about the best formats for employees stories and how you can capture candidate interest with the right approach.
You can also download our ideabook 12 Ways to Tell Team Stories, sponsored by Stories, Inc., to see real-word examples of how companies are featuring their employee stories to help communicate their TVP!
1. Videos
Video has quickly become the best medium for engagement. With video, you are able to feature snippets of your current employees, giving them a chance to tell candidates directly about their experience working on their specific team, how they fit within the culture and the opportunities that exist within that team. You’re also able to show employees in their physical working environments so that candidates can see what it looks like.
BAE Systems’ employee Joanna describes how her deafness doesn’t prevent her from being included in career opportunities.
2. Photo stories and testimonials
Another format that provides value is photo stories and testimonials that feature real employees. These are great to feature on your website or in social posts to capture candidate attention. These images can include current employees in their physical working environments or elsewhere in the office. They help put a “face” to your company’s teams and departments. When included with employees quotes, they are able to convey what those team members value most about working in their specific department.
BAE Systems creates photo stories and testimonials featuring employees, like this one for National Engineers Week.
3. Photos
Photos of your employees help to show what a real working day is like. And the best part is that taking photos of employees and featuring them in your content requires minimal effort! Use authentic photos of team members working at their desks, collaborating in meetings and even gathering around the “water cooler” to catch up. It’s also a good idea to include photos of employees outside of work. For example, a group photo from a team volunteer activity can show candidates more about the culture and experiences.
Employee photos show what your authentic employee experience is like.
4. Blogs
Visual images help candidates see into the culture of specific teams. But it’s also important to provide more details in the form of written content. Careers blogs are a great way for you to feature current employees, whether it’s an interview-based piece or just a general overview of what a certain team member does in the department and their career path for getting to where they are now. You can even ask employees to author the content to provide more of an inside look for candidates.
Careers blogs help candidates see into the culture of specific teams and provide more details in the form of written content.
5. Employee-generated content
One of your best sources of content for telling employee stories is the content that your employees have already created themselves! Photos, social posts and other types of content that team members create around work are great to feature in your efforts. You can encourage employees to share content by creating hashtags for the company, department and even events they attend that you can then curate from. Seeing content directly from employees helps candidates learn firsthand from those team members who are already part of the culture and experience that they want to learn more about.
Employee-generated content helps candidates learn firsthand from those team members who are already part of the culture and experience that they want to learn more about.
Let your employees lead the way for telling the stories that candidates want to hear! By providing a glimpse into your teams’ culture, experience and work, you give candidates the information they need to find out about their potential fit at your company and within specific departments. Better yet, you might give candidates the motivation they need to apply!
To learn more about creating your TVP and telling it through employee stories, download our ideabook 12 Ways to Tell Team Stories!
Note: Stories Inc. is a sponsor of Rally and supports our efforts to provide educational content and events on Recruitment Marketing.