Gathering and featuring authentic employee testimonials and stories is now a generally accepted best practice in employer branding content strategy and recruitment marketing content development. So if more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 use a story approach, will it eventually become a stale strategy?

No!

Use a story approach, featuring employees

In fact, using a story approach featuring employee stories in your recruitment marketing is an underutilized strategy. But let’s say everyone was doing it. Your goal should be to find the stories that show the real and unique you, the true stuff that, best case, couldn’t and hasn’t happened anywhere else.

And there are other reasons to use employee stories, like It Works and It’s an Efficient Way to Talk to candidates all year round. But ultimately the best reason to do it is so candidates get as real of a glimpse as possible into the employee experience.

Here are a few examples that all use a story approach, and in some cases might look the same, but ultimately reflect very different environments.

The personal story

This CVS employee talks about why their exit from tobacco affected her personally:

The support story

This is one of my favorites, a Dell blog post an employee wrote:

After a couple of years away, my good Dell buddies were wondering if I might be interested in returning to the fold, and indeed I was. Other areas of my life were changing too, and issues I’d carried with me for decades were coming to a head. So, when Dell’s recruiter called me and asked if I’d like to come back, I had a whole new question to ask, a question a little different from salaries, roles and benefits:

“I’m changing gender. Will Dell support me in this? Will Dell still support me having a customer-facing role?”

I was told that of course Dell would support me, if and when I decided to transition. Of course I would retain my customer-facing role, and that my management and team would fully support my decision, and my transition.

Jody Ellis, “An Emboldened Path,” Dell Technologies Direct2Dell blog

The creative culture story

And one of my favorite policies I’ve ever heard of. Only at The Motley Fool: you must take two weeks off right now (for a great business reason).

There’s a lot of story talk out there… and for good reason! It’s a strategy that works for most companies and the more you are yourself, the more your content resonates. Any questions?

We’re the story people, we can help. Email me at Lauryn@StoriesIncorporated.com.

This post originally appeared on SRSC’s blog.