While You’re Waiting on Your Employer Brand Update: Share Stories
If your company is working on an employer brand update or new EVP, your recruitment marketing efforts can’t be on pause. Get employee stories for content now. They’ll serve your employer brand later, too. For further reading, read our GoTo case study, which describes how Stories Inc. created an employee story content library that served the company’s culture content needs during a corporate rebrand.
The future of work — distributed teams, hybrid work, a focus on employee well-being — is becoming a reality in organizations today. Our cultures are being rebuilt and employer brands are being reimagined.
In the midst of transformation, many culture communicators are waiting on their organizations’ employer brand update, refreshed rebrand, or their company’s first employer brand strategy. Constructing a good Employee Value Proposition (EVP), defining or redefining your values, and/or deciding on a purpose statement are big feats. They can take months of internal discussions and employee interviews, research, testing, and refining before getting right.
Recruitment Marketing Can’t Be Paused During An Employer Brand Update
Meanwhile, you can’t stop recruitment marketing, recruiting, and hiring while you get your messaging and branding in line. And so you may be wondering, what are the most impactful recruitment marketing programs to launch now, while you’re building (or rebuilding) your brand messaging?
We have the answer for you:
Employee story content is the best recruitment marketing content, period, and should be considered an always-on priority.
Cultural Celebration Content
You may feel like you’re in a holding pattern, but moments in which to celebrate your employees and recognize major cultural milestones are still happening.
Look at the next two or three upcoming celebrations on the calendar. Is it Autism Awareness Month? National Volunteer Week? Asian Pacific American Heritage Month? (Here’s a link to our 2022 Diversity and Inclusion Celebrations and Observances download.)
While you’re waiting on your brand messaging, capitalize on the moments where you can celebrate your employees and reflect and promote your company’s commitment to building inclusive environments – all in a way that’s timely and part of a larger discussion.
Photos of Your Employees and Your Spaces
Another change your company is likely going through, that you’ll need to address outside your EVP:
How your people are working today and your plan for where team members will be working in the future.
Maybe everyone is returning to the office, maybe the only office is home, or maybe you’re giving employees a choice (woot!).
Regardless, you need to show candidates what work looks like. Develop photo libraries of current employee experience images for use across your channels. These up-to-date photos are a fantastic way to show candidates work in all the ways it’s now happening.
Employee Spotlights
As your specific hiring and recruiting needs ramp up, highlight your employees who are leading those high-growth areas. Employee spotlights provide great content to showcase people and teams, and they also serve as excellent employee recognition.
Culture Content: Relevant Now … and Later
You don’t need to wait on anything to start getting stories from employees.
If your EVP, values, and purpose statements are truly representative of your culture, the employee experiences you uncover and communicate to candidates now will not be a waste.
In fact, your employee stories can provide double value:
- Launch them right now, for your on-fire recruiting needs
- Use them later, connecting the stories to your messaging (once it is ready)
These stories from Lockheed Martin are connected to their pillars and messaging, but they also stand on their own for culture content and recruiting needs.
Day in the Life of Always-On Roles
We have a unique perspective on video job descriptions: they need to talk about why candidates should choose that job at your company.
Junior or entry level candidates might need to know what a call center analyst does, sure. But, professionals in that career already know the basics. Why is this job different at your company?
Answer their questions with day-in-the-life videos featuring real employee stories. These videos and stories bring the employee experience to life while also advertising the job. They work great as ads, in job descriptions, and on job family landing pages.
Awareness and Consideration Stepping Stones: Shorter Story Snippets for Social Channels
Your upcoming, big brand activation and launch assets will need to be thoughtful and clearly connect the employer brand concept to the experience.
But, right now, quick snippets do the job for brand awareness. Share short stories to your social channels to build familiarity with candidates and give them a look at your right-now culture.
Hey, just because an employee story is quick, doesn’t mean it lacks substance. A short story can still speak volumes about your culture. And, knowing that candidates go 18 places before applying to your job, a quick social video does the job influencing those in the consideration phase as well.