What a week in San Diego! Conferences are always a great time for learning, networking, and sharing and EBrandCon in San Diego last week was no exception.

While the conference did a great job capturing the entire employer brand lifecycle – think conception and research stage all the way through deployment and measurement – there were a few overarching themes that stayed buzzing in our brains long after Tisha Leslie’s closing-session-turned-yoga-class (photo below!).

Check out our takeaways from last week’s EBrandCon:

1. Let’s get personal

While the title of Craig Fisher’s opening keynote was “Using Technology to Power Your Employer Brand,” his message was something a lot closer to home: be yourself.

Personal details are memorable and should be injected into any place we can –  conversations with internal stakeholders, within EB content creation, and, especially, our interactions with each other during this conference and beyond. And while this fact may also be a nod to the close-knit nature and community of EBrandCon, I found myself among many others, more willing to open up than I have been at other conferences.

The other speakers echoed this sentiment by adding more of their personalities into their presentations. Susan Lamotte opened with a childhood photo of herself to demonstrate the emotional power of content – in this case, the cringing, nostalgic feeling of seeing that hair and those ribbons (Killing it, Susan!).

Fisher’s message was meant to inspire action. So to carry this message forward, here’s some personal content about me, which also features a childhood photo of yours truly!

2. Branding and storytelling go hand in hand

If stories weren’t necessarily the headliner of EBrandCon 2018, we’d give them best supporting role. The importance of using real experiences as proof throughout the employer brand experience made its way into several of the presentations and workshops – eleven, actually, by my count. I think Jennifer Johnston Di Loreto of Salesforce summed up the need for them best:

“Culture is owned by everybody in your organization, and employee advocacy is something that must be earned.”

Read: Building it doesn’t mean they’ll come. You can create the employer brand, but it’s the team member experiences (and, hopefully, willingness to share them) that make that brand true.

Charlotte Marshall’s presentation on Magellan Health’s journey in “Build a Better Employer Brand in 100 Days” drove this point home. After extensive research, Marshall and her team created the EVP tagline, “When you say…We hear you,” with space in the middle for a team member to fill with their own words.

This tagline, for one, promises to team members and candidates that the organization listens and takes your words seriously. But more subtly, by leaving a space between the two phrases, the brand itself becomes dependent on team member involvement. Their words, and more importantly, how the organization responded to those words, is the story that matters to candidates and the proof of what a career within the organization looks like.

3. Culture is ongoing…and so should your content

Salesforce’s Di Loretto had another strong point in her presentation – culture is ongoing; so, therefore, should your brand and the content that supports it. While many avenues of content creation were discussed, two seemed most relevant in supporting a long-term content calendar: repurposing stories and employee generated content.

Our own Lauryn Sargent provided the baseline for story repurposing: because a story stands in its own right, it can be used for different purposes. A team member story demonstrating a core value does just that – it brings that core value to life. But say the storyteller was a veteran, or an intern, or someone in a different niche hiring area; that story could also be used within those recruitment marketing contexts to highlight that particular team member experience.

Not to mention stories can be told in a multitude of mediums – video, text, and graphics, to name a few. That flexibility allows for variations and combinations that can fill an entire content calendar across multiple platforms.

Outside of professionally created content, capturing employee-generated content and stories is a great way to collect a ton of material from around your organization. Vital for the same reasons as stories alone (see bullet #2), employee-generated content has the added bonus of being free and being everywhere (honestly, jury’s out on which is better!).

Not sure which employees to tap on the shoulder to get the ball rolling? Take a pro tip from Dell’s Jennifer Newbill: turn to your Employee Resource Groups to point you in the right direction. These groups are often avenues for team members to combine their personal and their professional lives. And honestly, what makes for a better recruitment marketing story than that (see bullet #1)?