Hi Rally community,
This is my second of 3 posts for Rally’s “New to Recruitment Marketing” blog series. During my first post in the series, I shared how I changed careers from recruiting to Recruitment Marketing, and how I landed my first full-time Recruitment Marketing dream job.
In this second post, I’m going to share with you where my attention has been focused during the first 6 months of my new role as Employer Brand & Social Media Specialist for Indellient, and why focusing first on employee experience is important to building out a Recruitment Marketing strategy.
Why employee experience matters to Recruitment Marketing
I once heard someone say that culture is to Recruitment Marketing, what product is to corporate marketing. In other words, as recruitment marketers, we’re marketing a company’s culture and employee experience to candidates, rather than marketing a product or service.
This means that employee experience and employer branding go hand in hand. If our company doesn’t have a great employee experience or culture, it can be tough to have great things to share externally to attract candidates. Conversely, having a strong employee experience can fuel your Recruitment Marketing efforts, as it can bring out great stories and turn your employees into brand champions.
That’s why an important part of my focus over the last 6 months in my new role has been to enhance and create an awesome employee experience! This focus has involved listening to employee feedback, defining the vision for the type of employee experience we want to provide and working closely with HR to deliver a stand-out experience for our employees.
Here’s what we’re doing to market the employee experience at Indellient to attract even more great talent to our organization.
How to decide what elements of the employee experience to focus on
First things first, it’s important to get a grasp on where your employee satisfaction and engagement levels stand. To start, we took a look at different reports such as:
- Employee net promoter/satisfaction survey results
- Turnover rates and exit interview data
- New hire/onboarding survey results
- Glassdoor reviews
Additionally, you could learn more about your current state by building out a culture design canvas. A culture design canvas is a visual tool that allows you to map out and design your workplace culture. Check out this guide for creating a culture design canvas from the Liberationist for more information on how to create one for your own company.
Enhance your employer brand with a culture design canvas.
Once you have collected data and perhaps completed some culture mapping, you can begin to look at what areas to need improvement. For example, are you noticing a trend that organizational communication is on the fritz? Perhaps you could start with introducing an internal newsletter or Slack group.
How we’re improving the employee experience
Based on the feedback from my research, there were a few areas of opportunity we identified:
- Cross-functional communication
- Employee recognition
- New hire orientation
To address this feedback, I created a few different programs to improve our employee experience.
1. Employee newsletter 2.0
The company previously had a newsletter that had fallen out of circulation. Before bringing the newsletter back, I wanted to ensure it would be a worthwhile initiative. I surveyed employees to understand if (a) they were interested in a newsletter, (b) at what cadence (e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly), and (c) what content they were interested in seeing.
From this feedback, I identified that employees were interested in a monthly newsletter that included:
- People news (birthdays, anniversaries, new hires, personal accomplishments, role changes, promotions and retirements)
- Company news (new clients, major corporate milestones)
- Team news (updates on each team/project and shout-outs to their individual contributors)
- Upcoming events (social events, conference/shows that team members are attending, client visits)
- Policy updates (HR, travel and expense policies, etc.)
Newsletters are also a great way to engage employees and take pulse checks through polls, comments and social reactions, and this engagement helps build your employees into brand advocates. Additionally, newsletters are a great platform for showcasing employee stories which will become content that you can use externally in your Recruitment Marketing campaigns.
A company newsletter helps build your employer brand and brand advocacy.
2. All-hands upgrades (with pizza!)
While a newsletter is an excellent medium to share information, your content often has to be kept short, sweet and engaging to keep your readers interested. And let’s be honest: most businesses are much more complex than that. Having an all-hands meeting is an opportunity to dive deeper into business updates and for employees to ask questions to gain more clarity and transparency.
When I first joined the organization, we had bi-weekly team meetings. Often times, our teams didn’t have new updates, we forgot to teleconference in our remote teams and we would disperse after 5 minutes — not the best employee experience!
I believed there was so much potential to add more value to these meetings, especially because it is one of the few times we can get all of our team members together.
To improve our all-hands meetings, I first identified that the cadence was too high. As mentioned previously, often our teams did not have updates to share. Changing the cadence to monthly meetings meant there was more opportunity to identify and prepare talking points. We all love to hate meetings, so it’s important to ensure that if we are going to ask our employees to commit this time, we should be super clear on the purpose and priorities of each meeting.
Second, having all of our team members together is a great opportunity to grow our sense of community. And what builds community better than sharing a meal together? Eating together acts as a sort of social glue for humans. With the inclusion of pizza during the meeting, our all-hands meeting now acts as a monthly community-building experience rather than a weekly chore.
Pizza is a great way to make your all-hands meetings a community-building experience for your employees.
3. New hire orientation
First impressions are everything, and while candidates get a sense of the organization during the recruitment process, they don’t get their first full glimpse of what life is like inside the organization until day one.
As a result, a strong orientation and onboarding experience is ultra important. In fact, employees who felt their onboarding experience was effective were over 29 times more likely to feel satisfied with their jobs!
Additionally, if your organization has an interesting or unique onboarding and orientation program, that’s great content to share up front in your talent attraction efforts.
At Indellient, our new hire onboarding survey results were very positive. In our orientation session, employees are provided with a brief business overview, policy and procedures reviews and an introduction to our benefits package. Then, we provide our new hires with donuts to take back to their desk, and invite all our team members to stop by and introduce themselves over snacks.
However, there was still room for improvement. For example, new hires said they would have liked a buddy during the first week to better integrate into the team. Additionally, some team members felt like they would have liked more information on each line of business.
So, with this feedback, I developed a framework for a new hire buddy program which will be rolled out in the upcoming months. Additionally, I have partnered with our executive team to create presentations about each of their lines of business, which they will deliver to our new hires. This is an awesome opportunity for our new hires to get face-time with our leadership and ask questions about the organization.
Marketing your employee experience to candidates
Through these initiatives, I hope to get some great content to use in our Recruitment Marketing channels, including our careers site, social media channels and other job sites. Further, by helping to deliver on a great experience, the hope is that referrals will increase and employees will advocate more for our employer brand with their networks.
By starting from the inside out, I’m confident that my organization is in a great position to improve our employee experience and build a stronger employer brand over time that we can leverage for retention and attraction purposes. After all, as an employer branding professional, your company culture is your product, and marketing becomes really easy when you have a great product to sell!
Ready to evolve your employer brand? Learn more about how to partner across teams to create content and messaging that tells candidates about your unique culture and employee experience. Watch the Rally Webinar On Demand: Evolve Your Employer Brand: Storytelling for Team Value Propositions.
