Organic social media gives Recruitment Marketing teams a powerful way to bring their employer brand to life through the people who experience it every day. The strongest strategies connect authentic employee stories with clear talent and business goals, while adapting content to how audiences actually engage on social.
The Rally Awards celebrate excellence in Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding, with entries evaluated by an esteemed panel of peer judges from across the profession.
The winners of the 2026 Rally Award for Best Use of Organic Social Media in Recruitment Marketing show three excellent ways to put that into practice.
UBS earned First Place with “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career,” a campaign centered on internal mobility and employee career journeys. Ford Motor Company took Second Place with its “New Hire Spotlight Series,” turning new employee stories into a repeatable content engine. And IQVIA earned Third Place with “Perfectly Imperfect: How IQVIA Transformed Engagement With Real, Relatable Social,” which shifted the company’s social strategy toward less polished, more authentic employee-generated content.
Here’s how each team approached organic social and what Recruitment Marketers can learn from their work.
First Place: UBS — “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career.”
UBS started with a challenge identified through employee engagement surveys: colleagues wanted greater visibility into internal job opportunities and clearer career pathways.
The Recruitment Marketing, Employer Branding and Internal Mobility teams partnered to make career mobility more visible and show employees that growth within UBS was possible. At the same time, the campaign gave external candidates a look at the long-term career opportunities available within the organization.
Throughout 2025, UBS shared unscripted employee stories built around its EVP-led message, “At UBS, you’re in the driver’s seat of your career.” Employees discussed nonlinear career paths, global moves, lateral moves and cross-functional transitions, supported by real images from their lives.
LinkedIn served as the campaign’s primary platform, reaching both UBS employees and external talent.
The Results
The campaign generated:
- 1.45 million impressions
- 266,000 engagements
- 18.35% engagement rate
- 59.4% of open roles filled internally
- 800 external applications from boosted posts within six months
UBS also reported increased traffic to its refreshed careers site, while employees began sharing their own career journeys and extending the campaign’s reach organically.
Praise from the Judges
Judges praised the campaign for beginning with a real, validated employee insight and connecting employer brand storytelling with tangible business outcomes.
One judge described the approach as a strong example of using social to address internal mobility visibility while supporting retention and engagement. Others highlighted the authentic storytelling, cross-functional collaboration, clear EVP connection and measurable impact on applications and internal hiring.
The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: Employee stories can do more than communicate culture. When they’re connected to a specific talent or business challenge, they can help influence behavior and demonstrate measurable impact.
Second Place: Ford Motor Company — “New Hire Spotlight Series”
Ford faced a familiar Recruitment Marketing challenge: finding employees who were willing to share their stories publicly.
The solution came from an unexpected source. After meeting a newly hired corporate orientation lead who had previously worked as a high school principal, the team saw an opportunity to share her career transition. The post performed well and became the starting point for Ford’s New Hire Spotlight Series.
In 2025, Ford published 14 New Hire Spotlight profiles across Ford’s LinkedIn and Ford Careers’ Instagram and Facebook accounts.
The process was intentionally simple and repeatable. The team received quarterly new-hire lists from its corporate orientation lead, invited employees to participate and used a Jotform to collect information about their career journeys, company culture, benefits and other experiences. A copywriter then developed the responses into social posts.
When Ford noticed a change in LinkedIn’s algorithm after its first three posts, the team adapted, replacing branded photo templates with carousels of candid employee images. Impressions and engagement increased substantially.
The Results
Ford’s standout results:
- 14.4% average engagement rate
- 47,000 average impressions per post
- One post reaching a 41% engagement rate and 210,000 impressions
- More than 1 million people reached
- 2,000 visitors driven to the Ford Careers site
- Zero campaign cost
The series also gave Ford an ongoing source of employee stories that could support hiring initiatives, highlight different roles and teams and communicate company culture through employee voices.
Praise from the Judges
Judges pointed to the campaign’s simplicity, authenticity and repeatability.
One called it a “structured content engine for social,” while another praised Ford for executing a simple idea effectively without overcomplicating the process. Judges also highlighted the team’s ability to adapt to LinkedIn algorithm changes and achieve engagement rates well above the benchmark cited in the entry.
Some judges identified an opportunity to connect the strong engagement metrics more directly to downstream hiring outcomes.
The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: A successful content strategy doesn’t have to require a complicated production process. Creating a repeatable system for sourcing employee stories can make authentic content easier to sustain and scale.
Third Place: IQVIA — “Perfectly Imperfect: How IQVIA Transformed Engagement With Real, Relatable Social”
IQVIA entered 2025 with a strong-performing social recruiting content: a 4.2% engagement rate and 3.4 million LinkedIn impressions in 2024.
But the team believed its content might be too polished and easy for audiences to scroll past.
IQVIA intentionally loosened its approach, centering its new strategy on three priorities: trust employees, modernize the format and elevate the impact
IQVIA began using more self-recorded employee content, including phone videos, natural settings and real employee voices. The team launched “Found in the Feed”, a recurring series that elevated content employees were already creating organically, including self-directed office tours.
The team also introduced shorter videos, animated graphics and audiograms, and began using strong moments from Teams interviews rather than automatically recreating them with professional production.
At the same time, IQVIA shifted its storytelling toward the impact of employees’ work, including accelerating treatments, improving data clarity and supporting patients and sites.
The Results
From 2024 to 2025, LinkedIn results:
- 4.2% to 7.8% engagement
- 3.4 million to 4.2 million impressions
- IQVIA also reported increased employee reposting and organic amplification
Praise from the Judges
Judges highlighted the deliberate shift from highly produced corporate content toward authentic, employee-driven storytelling.
They praised the strategy for being timely, credible and aligned with how audiences engage with social content today. The recurring Found in the Feed format was also recognized for giving the strategy structure and scalability.
As with Ford, judges commended IQVIA for connecting Recruitment Marketing engagement directly with hiring outcomes.
The lesson for Recruitment Marketers: More production isn’t always the answer. Giving employees room to show up naturally can create content that feels more relatable while still supporting a structured Recruitment Marketing strategy.
3 Lessons Recruitment Marketers Can Apply to Organic Social
UBS, Ford and IQVIA took different approaches, but their winning strategies point to several lessons Recruitment Marketers can apply to their own work.
- Start with a real challenge.
UBS responded to employee feedback about internal mobility. Ford addressed the difficulty of consistently sourcing employee stories. IQVIA recognized that polished content wasn’t creating the level of connection it wanted. Each team built its strategy around a specific problem. - Make employees part of the storytelling.
Real employee experiences were central to all three strategies. UBS highlighted career journeys, Ford introduced new hires and IQVIA gave employees more freedom to create and share content in their own voices. - Build something you can sustain.
Strong organic social requires consistency. Ford created a repeatable process for sourcing new-hire stories. IQVIA introduced recurring formats such as “Found in the Feed”. UBS developed a campaign that encouraged employees to contribute their own career stories organically.
Turn Organic Social Into a Strategic Recruitment Marketing Channel
These Rally Award winners demonstrate what can happen when organic social is connected to a clear strategy, authentic employee experiences and measurable goals.
For Recruitment Marketers, the opportunity is to look beyond individual posts and consider the system behind the content: the challenge you’re solving, the stories that can bring it to life, a process you can sustain and the results that demonstrate impact
Congratulations to UBS, Ford Motor Company and IQVIA for creating an organic social strategy that gave talent a more authentic look at the people and opportunities behind the employer brand.
Learn More About the Rally Awards
Think your Recruitment Marketing or Employer Brand work could be award-winning? Learn more about the Rally Awards and consider submitting your work for the 2027 program.
