Recruitment Marketing content is even more essential than usual during this remote work period. Without in-person interviews, content is the primary way prospective candidates learn about your organization’s employee experience to judge if your company is the right fit for them.
Your content is the first place where candidates get a sense of your team’s values and provides important cues about the way you work, who they’ll be working with and what they’ll be working on.
However, as with any type of content marketing, expectations of what makes “great content” can change over time. Like our peers in other marketing roles, Recruitment Marketers need to stay up to speed on trends and keep refining our approach to maintain our audiences’ interest over time.
To help here, we reached out to the Nestlé USA team. When it comes to creating compelling Recruitment Marketing and attraction content, Nestlé USA has it figured out — the team took home 1st place for Best Content Marketing at the 2020 Rally® Awards!
Here are just a few of the reasons they won this award:
- They’ve developed a Recruitment Marketing content marketing program that’s building serious employer brand awareness — their Medium publication which houses owned career content and articles drew over 500, 000 readers last year and their corporate videos garnered more than 5 million views
- They are creating a very high volume of exceptional content — they published 2,000+ posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in 2019.
- In 2019, their social media content drove a 40% increase in potential talent readership over the previous year. They’ve also observed followership growth of over 30-40% a year the last few years.
To learn more about their winning approach, we sat down with Liz Caselli-Mechael and Emily Rutt from Nestlé USA’s Communications team to ask their secrets to creating employer attraction content that generates excitement and engagement from your audience. Here are 5 tips that we learned from Liz and Emily to boost your content marketing game.
Meet the experts
Liz Caselli-Mechael is the Digital + Content Communications Lead for Nestlé USA. Her team is responsible for external digital platforms for Nestlé’s corporate and employer brand, as well as a range of internal employee communications initiatives.
Emily Rutt is a Digital Media Specialist at Nestlé USA. She is responsible for developing and driving the Nestlé USA brand voice across digital platforms by creating dynamic content and engaging with candidates and consumers.
1. Experiment with new content trends
The world of content marketing moves fast. To keep your audience engaged, you need to innovate on the types of content you’re producing on an ongoing basis. Staying up to date on content marketing trends outside of the Recruitment Marketing space can be a helpful way to do so. Here are some novel content approaches that the Nestlé team has been relying on to capture attention and engage their followers in the past few months:
- Kinetic text — You can elevate a simple quote graphic by using kinetic text. Kinetic text refers to animated text. The movement associated with this content form helps draw attention as it grabs the eye more than plain text or static images. Check out this example where the quotation text glides across the screen:
We’re dedicated to providing you with the support you need to reach your goals. Check out our latest career opportunities ➡️ https://t.co/HewYeNomlk pic.twitter.com/bBxtZup2yx
— Nestlé US (@NestleUSA) August 24, 2020
- Audio content — You can also take your visuals a step further by embedding a voice track over your visuals to add a more dynamic touch. This is more compelling than a static image and can make your messaging stickier. Research shows that audiences retain more from narration plus visuals rather than just reading on-screen text.
- Animations and GIFs — GIFs are particularly compelling content forms on Twitter. According to recent research by the social platform, posts with GIFs tend to get 55% more engagement on average than posts without. In addition, other longer animations can be a great way to tell an employee story in an unexpected format too. Check out how Nestlé used a GIF to provide helpful tips to prospective candidates:
We’re continuing to add new talent to the team as we bring food to people all across the country. From 13 of our Nestlé recruiters, here are a few ideas for making yourself the strongest possible candidate: https://t.co/HEKB9dnhjb pic.twitter.com/xZzdaH1YOP
— Nestlé US (@NestleUSA) July 16, 2020
The team at Nestlé will be releasing new content that features animation combined with narration to bring employee stories to life. Keep an eye on their social channels this September — you can find them on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
2. Identify and create hero content
Creating a high volume of quality content can be overwhelming, particularly if you don’t have a large team dedicated to content creation. That’s why the team at Nestlé suggests publishing 1-2 “hero” pieces each month.
Hero content refers to longer-form pieces like blog posts or employee videos. Your hero content is the anchor piece that you can create other pieces of content around.
Once you have your hero piece created, the next step is to create spin-off pieces for different platforms. The Nestlé team refers to these spin-off pieces as constellation content, because it orbits off of the central piece of hero content and draws people back in to learn more and engage with the longer content too. For example, you can create the following pieces of constellation content from a longer-form piece of hero content: an employee testimonial, a social media post, a short audio clip or an infographic.
Fun fact: In 2019, Nestlé produced about 34 hero pieces with a couple of dozen spin-offs each. To accompany each piece, they created over 600 designed social assets and 3,600 original photographs!
Nestlé’s blog, 5 Interview Tips from a Recruiter That Knows What Makes a Great Hire, was turned into videos and image-based social posts:
Rally note: looking for more tips on how to repurpose your content so it can go further for you? Check out this Q&A with Brittni Williamson and Lauryn Sargent where they share insights on how to create Recruitment Marketing content that lasts.
3. Rely on your employee influencers
Creating content is one component of your Recruitment Marketing strategy, but getting it in front of the right audience is another. Employee advocacy is an important part of that strategy. According to LinkedIn, candidates are 3 times more likely to trust your employees’ messages rather than those coming directly from an organization.
To build this employee influencer base and amplify their content, Nestlé engages their employees as ambassadors to share their content with their personal networks. This approach has led to more than 70,000 organic, unpaid engagements already this year!
To do this, Nestlé started to build a dedicated group of ambassadors about 2 years ago. They identified highly engaged employees with strong networks. They then provided them with training on the Nestlé EVP, along with branding, messaging and social media best practices.
Today, training doesn’t just come from the Nestlé Communications team. In fact, the program has evolved so successfully that some ambassadors have begun facilitating training themselves!
To make sure ambassadors remain engaged with the program, Nestlé recognized early on that it’s not enough to just provide posts to ambassadors to share. The relationship had to be a two-way street and the team makes sure that they are also providing value back to their ambassadors. Some examples of the value they provided back includes extra time with executives and opportunities to participate in content in development.
Rally note: check out the recent Rally blog by Jennifer O’Brien from Booz Allen to get more tips on how to build an effective employee advocacy program.
4. Source high-quality employee generated content
Typically when she’s in the office, Emily is working on photography or video with top-of-the-line equipment. However, with current remote work arrangements, producing the same quality of content has been challenging.
As a result, the team has had to adjust their approach and expectations. Today, much of the content they are sharing is recorded on cell phones and laptops. The team has relied on their employees to become their own photographers and videographers — and that’s okay! These days, audiences are craving authentic content. People don’t want to see anything overly-polished, they want to see what’s really going on.
However, to maintain consistency in your branding and messaging, it’s important to level-set with your employees — you can’t expect them to become content creation experts overnight! That’s why strong communications are important to get the results you’re looking for. “Be very specific about what you want to see and provide really solid examples of what you’re looking for,” Emily shares.
Outside of enabling employees to create content that you can feature, you can also lean into content that your employees are already creating organically. For example, after Nestlé put out a statement in support of Black Lives Matter, employees started writing about their own experiences with racial equality in the workplace. Employees are starting to become more comfortable taking the stage and producing their own content, which you can then amplify in turn from your corporate channels.
5. Rely on your metrics to tailor your content for different channels
As most of us already know, each social media platform has a different set of “rules” and norms. From character limits to image sizes, you’re probably already doing some customization for each channel. For instance, you’re likely using the same messaging for each platform, but making minor tweaks to fit the character limits.
However, Liz and Emily recommend that we think beyond simply updating the copy and think about what type of content is resonating best on different platforms. Since different demographics tend to populate different platforms, this leads to some variability in the type of content that performs well in different spots.
To adjust your strategy for each channel, take a look at your metrics. Start by identifying your top performing content on each platform and take notice of common themes and trends.
Using this approach, the Nestlé team identified that promoting long-form and video content works nicely on LinkedIn. In contrast, shorter-form posts featuring attention-grabbing graphics work best for Twitter. Check out how the team translated their social post on how employees transitioned to remote work on different platforms:
In employer communications, one of the most challenging aspects of our work can be to consistently create engaging content. We hope these tips from Liz and Emily are helpful as you think of ways to continue to produce exceptional Recruitment Marketing content. As we move into the fall season, we hope you feel inspired to refresh your approach and experiment with new content types and strategies that could attract qualified talent to your organization.
Images courtesy of Nestlé USA
