Employee advocacy is a valuable strategy that can expand your employer brand, help recruiters reach passive talent and give candidates a more authentic view of your company. But without the right structure, running the program can quickly become another full-time job for Recruitment Marketing professionals who already have a lot on their plates.
If you’re new to employee advocacy, here’s the definition:
An employee advocacy program gives employees and recruiters the tools and support to become employer brand ambassadors, sharing authentic content and experiences with their professional networks that help candidates understand what it’s really like to work at your company.
Employee advocacy sounds relatively simple at first. Your role is to find people who want to participate, give them great content and ideas, encourage them to post on social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, and measure the results.
But then you actually launch the program and reality sets in.
Suddenly someone needs to plan and create content, communicate with advocates, onboard new participants, answer questions, recognize contributions, track results and keep everyone engaged. As the program grows, so does the work, and what started as a great way to expand your talent attraction strategy can quickly require constant attention just to keep it moving.
This is one of the challenges I hear about across the Rally Recruitment Marketing community. Teams aren’t struggling because they don’t believe in employee advocacy. They’re struggling because they’re already managing employer brand, social media, recruitment campaigns, careers site content, events, technology, analytics and everything else that falls under Recruitment Marketing today.
The good news is that running a successful employee advocacy program doesn’t require you to manage every interaction, create every post or chase employees every week to participate. It requires the right structure, processes and technology to make participation easier for your advocates and the program easier for you to manage and sustain.
In this blog post, I’ll share what you need to run an employee advocacy program that can grow and deliver recruiting results without making it your full-time job.
Establish Clear Ownership, Not More Process
One of the first questions to answer is who actually owns the employee advocacy program. This sounds obvious, but unclear ownership is one of the fastest ways to create more work than necessary, and could put your EA program at risk of failing.
Someone needs to be accountable for the overall strategy and results, but that doesn’t mean one person should be responsible for doing everything. Before you launch, determine who owns the program, who will create or manage content, who your executive sponsor is, what approval processes are actually necessary and how results will be measured. Making these responsibilities clear from the start eliminates repeated questions and decisions later.
This is also an area where I see organizations overcomplicate things. Employee advocacy usually doesn’t need a large governance committee or a 20-page policy document. In most cases, simple guidelines that explain who owns what, how advocates can participate and what they need to know before posting are enough to get started.
Create a Pilot Advocate Group and Learn From Them
There can be pressure to make an employee advocacy program look successful by getting as many people involved as possible. But when you’re launching, the experience of your first advocates matters much more than the number enrolled.
Your employee advocacy pilot group should include employees or recruiters who are excited to participate, comfortable on LinkedIn and willing to experiment and provide feedback. You’re looking for people who can help you understand what works, where they get stuck and what would make participation easier.
Starting smaller also gives you time to work out the operational details. If onboarding 10 advocates feels difficult, onboarding 100 won’t be easier. Build the processes with a smaller group first, then expand once you know they work.
Make Participation Easy Enough to Become a Habit
One of the biggest barriers to employee advocacy is time. Employees and recruiters usually aren’t opposed to participating. They just have a lot competing for their attention, and even people who enjoy creating content can struggle to post consistently when every LinkedIn post starts with a blank page.
That means one of the most important jobs of the program is removing friction. Advocates need an easy way to find content ideas, but they also need to be empowered to create original content in their own authentic voice without turning the process into another assignment. That could mean sharing a lesson they learned at work, offering their perspective on an industry trend, celebrating a team accomplishment, giving career advice or telling a story about an experience that reflects your company culture.
AI can make a significant difference here when it’s used the right way. Instead of asking advocates to write every post from scratch, AI can help them turn their experiences, expertise and ideas into original content they can review and personalize. The goal isn’t to replace the advocate’s voice, but to make it easier to create authentic content consistently.
The easier participation becomes, the less time you need to spend reminding employees to participate. You’re building a habit instead of repeatedly asking for an action.
Build Repeatable Workflows Before You Need Them
Seven repeatable workflows help keep an employee advocacy program running efficiently: content planning, content creation, content approval, content distribution, advocate onboarding, recognition and reporting.
This is where employee advocacy often becomes much more work than expected. Programs launch with enthusiasm, but the processes behind them are informal and the program owner simply takes care of whatever needs to happen.
That can work with a small pilot, but it becomes much harder as the program grows. There are seven workflows every employee advocacy program should think through:
- Content planning
- Content creation
- Content approval
- Content distribution
- Advocate onboarding
- Recognition
- Reporting
These don’t need to be complicated, but they should be repeatable. The strongest programs keep these activities moving without requiring the program owner to reinvent the process every week.
For example, instead of deciding each week what advocates should talk about, develop recurring content themes around employee stories, career advice, team accomplishments, community involvement, company news and career opportunities. This gives you a structure for generating ideas rather than starting from scratch every time.
The same principle applies to onboarding. Create a repeatable experience that explains why the program exists, what advocates will gain from participating, how to use the tools and where to get help.
A useful test is to ask yourself: if I weren’t available next week, would these processes still happen? If the answer is no, that’s probably an area where you need a more repeatable workflow.
Stop Making Every Communication a Reminder to Post
Communication is another area where employee advocacy can become surprisingly time-consuming. When participation declines, the instinct is often to send more reminders: new content is available, don’t forget to post, here’s something else you can share.
Over time, advocates start tuning those messages out because every communication is asking them to do something for the company. A better approach is to create a consistent rhythm that includes new content and ideas, but also tips, recognition, milestones, recruiting results and opportunities for feedback. The strongest programs communicate to build the advocate community, not only when they need someone to post.
One of the recommendations in our Employee Advocacy Launch Plan is to create a simple 90-day communication calendar. This gets you out of reactive mode by planning what advocates need to hear, when they need to hear it and what action you want them to take.
When new ideas, recognition and results show up regularly, the program feels active without requiring constant promotion from the person running it.
Give Your Advocates a Reason to Stay Involved
Another way to sustain participation is to make sure employees are getting real value from the program. Traditional employee advocacy has often focused on what the company needs: extend our reach, amplify this campaign or share this job. But if employees don’t see a personal benefit, participation will always require more encouragement.
Employee advocacy should help advocates strengthen their professional brand, expand their network, share their expertise and become trusted voices in their professional communities. In doing so, they become stronger employer brand ambassadors who can authentically represent your company and culture to potential candidates. Those outcomes motivate advocates to keep participating even when no one is reminding them.
You also need to show advocates the impact they’re making, and a good employee advocacy tool can do that. When their content drives careers site traffic, influences applications or contributes to a hire, share those results. It reinforces the impact they’re making to your overall talent acquisition goals.
When advocates can see both personal and recruiting value, employee advocacy starts to feel like an opportunity rather than an assignment.
Measure Employee Advocacy Results That Matter to Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing
Measurement is critical to a sustainable employee advocacy program, but it can become another manual task without the right technology.
Most programs can measure participation and engagement, but those metrics don’t tell you whether employee advocacy is actually influencing recruiting. I recommend thinking about measurement at three levels:
- Advocate activity: Are employees participating?
- Candidate engagement: Is their content getting talent to engage?
- Recruiting impact: Is employee advocacy influencing careers site visits, applications and hires?
Together, these levels show you the health of the program and the business impact it’s creating.
This is where technology becomes important. If someone has to pull LinkedIn activity into a spreadsheet, match it with careers site data and determine whether an advocate influenced an applicant, reporting can become a part-time job.
With Recruitment Marketing Attribution, you can connect employee advocacy to candidate behavior and hiring outcomes to see which advocates, content and messages are influencing results. More importantly, you can stop asking, “How do we get people to post more?” and start asking, “What should we help people create more of because we know it works?”
Assess the Whole Program Before You Add More Advocates
As I worked through what it takes to build and manage employee advocacy successfully, it became clear that these challenges are interconnected. You can have great advocates, but without content they want to share, participation will decline. You can have great content, but without simple processes and communication, managing the program becomes difficult. And you can generate a lot of activity without having any idea whether it’s influencing recruiting.
That’s why I developed the Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework™, which identifies 9 building blocks that work together to create a successful program:
The Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework™ identifies 9 building blocks for launching, managing and scaling a successful employee advocacy program: Strategy, Program Ownership, Advocate Selection, Content Strategy, Advocate Enablement, Program Management, Communications, Measurement and Scale.
The framework helps you identify the areas that need to be in place so your EA program doesn’t depend on one person manually holding everything together. The 9 building blocks cover the foundational elements needed to launch the program and prepare it to grow over time.
If your employee advocacy program is starting to feel like a full-time job, look across those 9 areas and ask where the work is coming from. Are you manually creating everything? Are advocates struggling to participate? Are you repeatedly answering the same questions? Are you communicating only when you need people to post? Are you spending hours pulling together reporting?
Those are usually signs that the program doesn’t need more effort. It needs better infrastructure.
Build for 100 Advocates While You’re Managing 10
A successful employee advocacy launch is only the beginning. As participation grows among your brand ambassadors, the processes that worked for your first group of advocates will need to evolve.
The goal isn’t to build complex systems for a 100-person program before you’ve launched your first pilot. But you do want to make decisions with scalability in mind. The processes, communications and technology that support 10 advocates may not support 100, so look at where manual work is increasing, whether new advocates can join easily, whether content stays fresh and whether you can continue to support employees and measure recruiting impact as participation grows.
Ultimately, employee advocacy should expand the reach and impact of your Recruitment Marketing and Employer Brand strategy. It shouldn’t consume you to actually run it. The most sustainable programs make participation easy for advocates and management easy for the people behind them, with clear ownership, repeatable processes, consistent communications, meaningful value for employees and tools that reduce manual work.
Ready to build or improve your Employee Advocacy program? We’ve put together The Employee Advocacy Launch Plan, a practical guide for Recruitment Marketing and Talent Acquisition leaders. It walks you through all 9 building blocks in the Rally® Employee Advocacy Framework™, with recommendations, reality checks and action items to help you launch, manage and grow a program that delivers measurable recruiting results.
I can’t wait to see the impact you make with your Employee Advocacy program. Reach out if you have any questions!
