Employee Advocacy is one of your biggest tools in your Recruitment Marketing strategy!

With candidates doing more research than ever before and wanting to see an authentic representation of a company, your staff are key to telling real stories to represent your employer brand!

A huge 96% of candidates now research a potential employer’s reputation before switching jobs and this is mainly through social media and a company’s career site.

However, it isn’t all about your company or leadership generated content.

Consumers are 3x more likely to trust information about a company when it comes from the employee versus their CEO or an official channel! FleishmanHillard Global Intelligence

This is where your employees come in.

Let’s dive into the key steps to developing your employee advocacy strategy:

1. First things first: Have an established Employer Value Proposition

Having an established employer value proposition isn’t only created for potential employees, but is a vital piece within your retention strategy. You can’t expect your staff to advocate if there is not a clear employer value proposition in the first place. And if you are living true to your company values and employer value proposition, staff are likely to be a lot happier, want to stay and therefore are more likely to talk about that end of week half-day or team lunch they had = a win-win situation for everyone.

Gartner reported that organisations that effectively deliver on their EVP can decrease annual employee turnover by 69%.

To read about how to establish your employer value proposition, take a look at our blog on why your EVP is important!

2. Employee Generated Content

Allowing your team members to share their stories delivers the critical information about your true Employee Value Propositions (EVPs) that candidates crave. Showcasing the tangible benefits your organisation provides people in exchange for their hard work shows your EVP (think benefits, culture, perks!) in the best light and in the most authentic way. Give your team members a voice to talk about their day-to-day work and what makes their role, team, organisation and workplace culture unique. This creates powerful, lasting first impressions – because it’s messaging candidates can trust.

This is most effectively done through video & this could be over socials or on your careers site. With the amount of video people watch having almost doubled since 2018, your employee generated content through video is a going to be both trusted and consumed more by potential candidates than written company-generated content and is going to be a valuable in marketing your employer brand as part of your recruitment strategy.

3. Enable your employees with social posting knowledge!

Another way employee generated content can help with your recruitment strategy is through staff social media presence.

To clarify, you don’t want to tell your employees what to post, but instead educate staff on the direction of the social strategy and guidelines around what they could post.

Through this enablement, employees can tell their own stories and create authentic content in line with the company's EVP that not only helps with their own personal brand and exposure but that also represents the organisation, giving people a true insight into your organisation.

For example, staff posting about client success stories or a photo of their ‘bring a dog to work day’ will give potential candidates a real insight and understanding of the organisation!

4. Incentivise participation

Not all employees are going to be natural social media posters, however, incentivising social posting not only means there is something in it for them but it also will encourage a team spirit.

This could be rewarding the person with the most LinkedIn posts in a quarter or it could be the person who is getting the most impressions or engagement!

Final Thoughts

With candidate behaviour completely changing over the past few years, it is essential to introduce new ways to attract top talent to your organisation and to include your employees' real stories as a key part of your recruitment marketing strategy, so that people are getting an authentic representation of the company, more likely to build trust with your organisation and ultimately be open to roles.