Leverage Employee Generated Content to Help Your Employer Brand

If there’s one thing we learned over the past year, it’s that job seekers want authenticity now more than ever. Having witnessed major social and economic changes, candidates want to know exactly what they’re signing up for in applying for a job at your organization. 

The best way to showcase this is through employee generated content (EGC). By seeing, hearing from or communicating with existing employees in roles they’re interested in, candidates can more clearly envision themselves in those same roles and understand your company’s culture and values, which gives them the confidence they need to apply or accept your job offer. 

But how do you actually go about leveraging EGC to get in front of candidates where they’ll see it? To help you out here, we gathered 6 ways to leverage EGC to influence the candidate journey and elevate your employer brand.

Rally note: Want to learn even more about how to use EGC to support your talent acquisition and Recruitment Marketing strategy? Check out our ideabook: The Future of Employee Generated Content. 

6 opportunities to leverage employee generated content to elevate your employer brand

1. Careers site

Your careers site is likely the top channel candidates visit to learn about your jobs, with 46% of candidates citing an employer’s careers site as the most valuable channel when researching job opportunities, according to the Talent Board. 

To help candidates walk away from your careers site with a better sense of your company’s culture and a realistic view of what it might be like to work at your organization, here are a few examples of EGC to include: 

• Photos captured by your employees
• Integrated social feeds using your #lifeat hashtag
• Employee-created videos with interview tips, career advice and day-in-the-life

DICK’s Sporting Goods leverages integrated video technology where employees can record a video of themselves, which then gets shared on the careers site.

2. Careers blog

According to Symphony Talent, 23% of the Fortune 500 host a careers blog. While a well-organized careers site with EGC can take you a long way, a careers blog opens up all kinds of new ways for candidates to learn more about the employee experience at your company.

Plus, SEO-optimized blog content lives for free on Google and other search engines, offering yet another way for candidates to discover and learn about your company through keyword searches. For example, someone may discover a blog post you wrote after searching the phrase “tech culture in Toronto” on Google. 

Here are some careers blog ideas for inspiration: 

• Repurposed content from your corporate blog (authored by your employees)
• Employee spotlight blogs featuring photos taken by your team members
• Company culture, recruitment tips and story blogs all authored by your employees

Squarespace hosts a blog written for engineers by engineers. The blog explores all kinds of topics, including insights into what it’s like to work as an engineer at the company. 

3. Social media

In this year’s Jobvite Job Seeker Nation Report, 33% of candidates said they get their information about a company’s culture through the employer’s social media accounts, with 79% listing Facebook as their top source.

Translating this stat is simple: enhance your presence on social media. While Facebook is a great place to start, make sure you have a presence on the platforms you know your specific talent audiences like to hang out online. Here are some ideas of how to use social media for employer branding: 

• Reshare employee’s posts
• Respond to candidate questions by having employees chat directly with candidates or host live streams and AMAs
• Host employee takeover days where they share day-in-the-life content 

Dell, for example, gives an authentic glimpse into the lives of its employees on its @lifeatdell Instagram page, where it reshares posts from the personal accounts of Dell employees. 

 

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A post shared by Life At Dell (@lifeatdell)

Dell’s @lifeatdell Instagram page, where it reshares posts from the personal accounts of employees. 

4. Virtual events

Recruiting events used to be something that your talent acquisition team attended, and you may have brought along a few employees to help out too, but today, virtual event platforms make it easy for anyone to host their own event and put even more employees front and center. 

Not only that, but the definition of an “event” is broadening to include any gathering of your virtual audience. To help you improve your use of virtual events and extend your use of them outside of the traditional sense, here are some ideas:

• Have employees host Q&A sessions live on Facebook, LinkedIn, Clubhouse, Instagram and other social platforms
• Give teams or individual employees the authority and resources they need to organize events themselves, and to share behind the scenes content leading up to and during the events
• Post replays of your events and have employees respond in the live chat to questions candidates have, or prompt discussions about topics they’re interested in

5. Q&A platforms

Outside of social media, there are also platforms candidates turn to specifically for answers from experts in their community. Examples include platforms like Quora, Reddit and Discord. But you don’t need to rely on public forums — you can create your own Q&A platform with solutions like PathMotion. Here are some ideas on how to more actively leverage employee-candidate Q&A:

• Establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry through joining communities and participating in conversations related to your talent audience
• Have employees respond to candidate questions directly, rather than always from a corporate account
• Enable candidates to connect directly with your employees by hosting your own online discussion forum on your careers site

6. Candidate communications

Whether a candidate has just applied, is awaiting an interview or at another stage of the candidate journey, it’s important to keep them engaged through email, text or however you’re communicating with candidates.

One way to do that is to use EGC to help candidates prepare for their interview, learn more about your company culture and get a better idea of what they can expect during their first few days in their role. Here’s how you can accomplish this:

• Use personalized templates in your ATS to send emails containing or linking to different EGC depending on the roles candidates are applying for (i.e engineering candidates are sent different emails than sales candidates)
• Have employees or hiring managers send the communications to make candidates feel like they’re communicating with a potential colleague rather than a faceless entity
• Include links to places where you’re showcasing your EGC in your email signature 

We hope that these 6 examples inspire you to start using your employee generated content in new ways to help enhance your employer brand and talent attraction efforts.

For even more insights on how to leverage employee generated content, including how to empower your employees to create content that your talent audience actually wants to see, be sure to read our full ideabook: The Future of Employee Generated Content!