As of April 2019, the U.S. national unemployment rate was 3.6%, which means the talent shortage is far from over. Along with many other employers, we here at RaceTrac have been looking for new ways to combat this shortage. When we started to expand into our new mid-Tennessee market, we realized that not only is it imperative to grow our consumer brand, but we also needed to amp up our employer brand and look at our content strategy through a different lens. You could consider it one of those ‘Ah-ha!’ moments. The idea was two-fold as well: We determined that authentic content not only benefits our new market but can also help us in our current markets.
As we looked at how we could evolve the content we share, one overarching theme consistently came to mind: our employees. RaceTrac would not be the company we are without the people that truly make us who we are. Whether it’s our Store Associates who greet customers at our stores or our Category Managers who bring new products to fruition, our people should be at the forefront of our content.
There are many techniques for capturing compelling content, but sharing stories about your company comes best from your current employees. Here I share some of the strategies RaceTrac has used that allow us to tell these stories and showcase our company in different ways. From a quick photo to a longer article, candidates want to see a variety in how you promote your employer brand!
Photos Capture the Special Moments
One of the key components to creating content is realizing that your Recruitment Marketing team isn’t alone. By collaborating with multiple teams across the organization and posting updates on our Intranet Portal, we receive photos from many departments as they have events or complete their projects – all of which is worth celebrating!
One example is for Mother’s Day. My team and I wanted to feature the moms of RaceTrac. Whether they are one of us or raised one of us, their contribution to our company deserves to be recognized. When we posted a request for photos on our Intranet, the response was fantastic! We received photos from many different employees with their mothers or children. Below is one of the photo collages we created and posted on LinkedIn to show our appreciation.
RaceTrac created a collage of employees celebrating Mother’s Day and shared it on LinkedIn.
We’ve also used photos from the previously mentioned expansion into the mid-Tennessee market, like this photo from the team that broke ground on one of our new location in the area.
RaceTrac shares employee photos to demonstrate their team culture. This LinkedIn post shows the team that broke ground on the new location in the mid-Tennessee area.
Collaboration is the key to generating employee-centric content. If you communicate your goals and explain that you want to showcase the fun and successes that employees are having, you’d be surprised at how many photos will arrive in your inbox!
Videos Spotlight Our Teams
Our initial approach with videos has been to highlight teams with open roles. For these spotlights, we like to keep them short but catchy. We partnered with RaceTrac’s Manager of Learning Marissa Williams to create videos that give candidates a glimpse of not only who their future manager could be, but also an inside look into one of the projects they would collaborate on. This approach highlights the personality of the team and gives insight into what a candidate could work on.
This video give candidates a glimpse of not only who their future RaceTrac manager could be, but also an inside look into one of the projects they would collaborate on.
Our wish list of videos we want to create keeps growing, but our first content goal to tackle is more culture-centric spotlights. Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for more to come!
Written Content Provides the Details
LinkedIn continues to improve its functionality year over year and has become a great tool for companies to share Recruitment Marketing content. One of my favorite features LinkedIn has released within the last few years has been the ability to write and share articles. Since we do not have a company blog dedicated to careers, this avenue has really helped us showcase different teams with more information than what you can provide in a caption. Our sweet spot for article length has been no more than 4 page scrolls for the viewer – even better if it’s less!
In order to broaden the reach of one specific article, we partnered with our Procurement department to share the spotlight from one of the team member’s personal accounts. Not only did this tactic help get that content in front of more industry-specific professionals, it helped build the personal brand of the employee who shared the article.
Instead of a careers blog, RaceTrac encourages employees to write LinkedIn articles and then share those articles with their networks.
Ever since we’ve started focusing on these three different content formats, our average LinkedIn click through rate is 3.9% and an engagement rate of 5.38%. A LinkedIn engagement rate above 2% is considered great, so does that mean we’re doing super great? I’d like to think so!
I hope after reading this article you now feel a sense of confidence and encouragement to take some of these tactics and showcase the amazing people within your company! Always keep in mind that the benefit for highlighting your employees is two-fold: you get to humbly brag on how cool they are and you get to show candidates the great people they could work with.
