Pride Month may have wrapped up, but employers committed to diversity & inclusion showcase Pride all year long. Many HR and talent acquisition teams plan their Pride Month content well in advance and do an outstanding job sharing employee stories and Pride events on their careers site, careers blog and social media channels throughout June. With all that investment in creating great Pride content to show your allyship for LGBTQ+ employees, why not leverage your Pride content in your Recruitment Marketing plan throughout the year to make your commitment to D&I highly visible to employees and candidates?
So, to provide you with some inspiration, we went in search of exemplary approaches to Pride content that can be leveraged in your recruiting strategy on an ongoing basis.
The 7 examples we’ll share include:
- Authentic employee voices at Instacart
- Visually driven content of Pride events at Hubspot
- Leadership blog featuring a heartfelt narrative at Capital One
- Landing page that communicates LGBTQ+ support and commitment at Lyft
- Virtual Pride events and story curation at Fidelity
- Resource guide that shares Pride Month history info at Johns Hopkins
- Landing page featuring LGBTQ+ employee perspectives at Microsoft
These 7 examples stand out because they show a company’s support for Pride in an authentic and engaging way. Let’s take a look:
7 Exemplary Approaches to Pride Content
1. Authentic employee voices at Instacart
What’s more meaningful to a candidate than hearing from a company about their commitment to inclusivity? Hearing from a real employee at that company.
To showcase their support for Pride Month, Instacart posted employee testimonials across social media describing how being part of the LGBTQ+ community has positively affected their lives.
Instacart shared testimonials of LGBTQ employees on LinkedIn for Pride month.
This type of content stands out because it’s entirely employee-focused. Other than the fact that it was posted on their social media, there is no obvious branding that would indicate the post belongs to Instacart. This avoids making the post too self-serving and instead amplifies the employee voice and shows that a range of perspectives are encouraged, heard and supported at Instacart.
In addition, the design of the employee testimonial graphic isn’t specifically tied to Pride Month so it can be used in other campaigns that share employee voices.
2. Visually driven content of Pride events at Hubspot
Hubspot shared engaging content showing their employees participating in Pride activities. These posts act as an authentic way to tie together Hubspot’s support for Pride while at the same time explaining what kinds of specific events and diversity & inclusion initiatives happen at Hubspot.
This Instagram post stands out because it was created by a Hubspot Diversity & Inclusion Program Manager, who is also a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Just by spotlighting that this role exists, this post offers up even stronger proof that Hubspot is committed to creating an inclusive workplace for people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Even if you don’t have this type of role at your company, consider asking an employee to do a social media takeover of one of your channels to bring their employee experience and perspective to life.
3. Leadership blog featuring a heartfelt narrative at Capital One
As important as it is to hear from employees about their direct experience with a company’s culture, it’s equally important to hear from those who create the foundation for that culture. When you’re trying to communicate that your organization prioritizes diversity, inclusion and belonging in the workplace, it can be particularly helpful to spotlight the people on your team who are driving these initiatives.
This is one reason why this blog post from Rolddy Levya, Vice President of Global Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging (DIB) for Capital One, is so impactful.
Capital One’s Vice President of Global Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Rolddy Leyva blogged about his personal experience and the company’s commitment to Pride.
The blog shows why advancing diversity & inclusion at Capital One is such an important mission for Rolddy by sharing his own personal narrative and coming out story. Rolddy shares his struggles growing up secretly gay in Cuba, his eventual coming out with the support from his friends and employer family, and how these experiences ultimately helped him form a culture of belonging at Capital One.
Understanding the stories of those in leadership roles can give candidates an idea of how a company’s culture came to be and provide valuable proof points that the company is prioritizing LGBTQ+ and other diversity initiatives now and has plans to continue to do so in the future too.
This type of content also extends beyond Pride Month. You should consider collecting and sharing your LGBTQ+ leadership and employee stories and initiatives year-round to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to diversity and equality.
You can also re-share content that you created during Pride Month throughout the year. To do so, you might need to make a few edits to some pieces to make the pieces more evergreen. This might involve removing any statements to Pride Month specifically and instead just focusing on the leader or employee’s narrative.
4. Landing page that communicates LGBTQ+ support and commitment at Lyft
In addition to posting Pride content across their various channels, Lyft dedicated an area of the Lyftup section on their website to Pride. (Lyftup is an initiative dedicated to providing accessible transportation to as many communities as possible.)
The company showcases the various LGBTQ+-related causes Lyft donates to, how they’re trying to preserve LGBTQ+ history and the various ways in which Lyft provides an inclusive environment for their workers and customers.
Part of Lyft’s Lyftup initiative is dedicated to supporting Pride for its workers and riders.
For example, Lyft gives customers the option to choose their preferred pronoun when ordering a ride through the Lyft app. Lyft is also partnered with the National Center for Transgender Equality to provide assistance to drivers who are looking to change the name and gender designation on their driver’s license.
Similarly to landing pages for other talent segments, like students or veterans, a landing page like this one can live somewhere on your site year-round, not just during Pride Month. Your LGBTQ+ landing page might also share information about the LGBTQ+ employee experience and any Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) you might have, in addition to sharing your support and commitment for different causes like Lyft does on theirs. This way, LGBTQ+ candidates and employees can always learn more about your organization’s commitment to their community and how you’re working to provide an inclusive work environment.
5. Virtual Pride events and story curation at Fidelity
In case you missed it! Learn how Fidelity’s Pride celebration is going virtual, via @hrdive: https://t.co/6U6vh5agU2 #FidelityAssociate #PrideMonth #FidelityJobs
— FidelityJobs (@FidelityJobs) June 26, 2020
To still be able to honor Pride despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Fidelity’s ERG for the LGBTQ+ community and its allies pivoted their strategy to be almost entirely virtual.
This took the form of:
- Posting dedicated articles on their intranet website highlighting visible allies in leadership positions
- Hosting virtual art tours with their Corporate Art Ambassadors to highlight queer artists and art
- Having employees and senior leaders share their stories of coming out in the workplace via Fidelity’s internal “Out and Proud” podcast series
- Hosting a queer parenting virtual roundtable discussion highlighting experiences as queer parents and advice for raising inclusive allies and queer children
While many of the events above were internal, Fidelity also took to giving interviews with online news outlets about their Pride involvement and using their social media — specifically their careers Twitter @FidelityJobs — to share their actions with the public.
To an outsider looking in, Fidelity’s dedication to upholding their celebration of Pride despite all of the disruption caused by COVID-19 conveys just how important they consider diversity & inclusion to be in the workplace.
It’s worth keeping in mind that you can also consider organizing these types of events throughout the year. LGBTQ+ issues are at the forefront during Pride Month, but they can (and should!) be discussed and advanced throughout the entire year too.
6. Resource guide that shares Pride Month history info at Johns Hopkins
Ever committed to education, Johns Hopkins created a downloadable PDF containing not just what they offer to the LGBTQ+ community — including 10 separate resource links supporting different groups within the community — but also a quick history lesson detailing major LGBTQ+ milestones in the United States over the past 60 years.
Johns Hopkins’ Pride Month Heritage Guide
In addition to LGBTQ+ history, the PDF also offers a number of stats relating to Health Disparities in the LGBTQ+ community, such as the fact that LGBTQ+ youth are 4x more likely than straight youth to make a suicide attempt requiring medical attention.
While this piece of content may not have been intended with candidates and recruitment top of mind, it still communicates that Johns Hopkins is an employer dedicated to providing a diverse and inclusive environment by showing the organization’s commitment to supporting the LGBTQ+ community through public education and awareness initiatives.
This type of content could be leveraged in Recruitment Marketing by posting this directly on your careers site, so candidates visiting can see that you’re a diversity-focused employer and so they can learn about Pride and LGBTQ+ issues. In addition, you could also share a resource like this via social media to reach your followers who may not be regularly visiting your careers site.
7. Landing page featuring LGBTQ+ employee perspectives at Microsoft
Microsoft’s Pride landing page is intended to amplify LGBTQ+ voices and issues, share their commitment to supporting Pride and showcase a range of Pride products (some paid, some free) that you can purchase or use to show your support.
Microsoft shows their support for Pride through a dedicated landing page and microsite.
The best part of this landing page is really the employee perspectives panel at the top — which also links out to a separate page full of short employee narratives and opinions. This page features Microsoft employees addressing common criticisms aimed at Pride and the LGBTQ+ community in general. Employees respond to these criticisms in order to share their perspective and help to educate people outside of the LGBTQ+ community.
Takeaways From This Pride Content That You Can Use
To summarize what makes these 7 approaches to Pride content exceptional, here is a short list of tips you might use at your organization. Each of the approaches rounded up in this article all embody at least one of the following five characteristics:
- Take an employee-centric approach: Content that portrays your inclusive company culture from the perspective of real employees is more useful than a general support statement expressed from the corporate brand.
- Avoid creating overly branded pieces: Content that places the message first and the company branding second comes across more sincere than the other way around, especially when the content relates to social causes.
- Showcase leadership perspectives too: While including perspectives from mid-to-low level employees can give a clear idea of the day-to-day D&I culture of a company, also including perspectives from leadership can provide a clear idea of how that culture came to be and where it’s headed.
- Create helpful or educational content: It’s really important that your content about different social causes and D&I initiatives doesn’t sound like it’s
“checking a box.” To avoid this, you can curate and create content that features voices from LGBTQ+ employees and allies and deliver content that is genuinely helpful for people to hear about. Helping to advance people’s knowledge about a given topic is another way to show your support. - Show how you’re taking action: It can feel really disingenuous when companies publish a statement supporting a cause or talking about their priority to D&I, but then they don’t actually showcase any actions they’re taking. Think about ways that you can share the steps your company is taking to support the LGBTQ+ community. This might come in the form of spotlighting internal programs and policies or listing external donations you’ve made to not-for-profit organizations.
I hope this article empowers and inspires you to create more great content that authentically expresses your organization’s support for Pride during the month of June, but also year-round too. Showing your support through action and producing this type of content is an important demonstration of allyship and inclusion that can go a long way towards advancing equality and attracting the diverse and awesome people that our organizations need to thrive.
Rally note: Feeling inspired? Brittni Williamson shares some examples of Pride content that Ochsner Health has utilized as well as strategies for building long-lasting and relevant content in this on-demand webinar Strategies for Creating Recruitment Marketing Content that Lasts.
