Organizational Storytelling for Employer Brand
This piece is an excerpt from our download, The Complete Guide to Organizational Storytelling.
Organizational storytelling for employer brand is a forward-thinking strategy for showing talent audiences what it’s really like to work at a company. Employer brand specialists serve the world in hugely essential ways. They help organizations realize their potential and success by defining who they are to attract the right talent. And, they help candidates make decisions that improve their lives.
An employer brand team can use organizational storytelling in three specific ways:
1. Activate Your Employer Brand
2. Change Your Brand Perception
3. Grow Brand Awareness
Activate Your Employer Brand
Organizational storytelling is the best approach to employer brand activation because it connects core values, mission statements, Employee Value Propositions (EVPs) and EVP pillars to the lived employee experience. By aligning candidate perception to the reality of the employee experience, you are grounding your employer brand in the actual employee experience. Stories from employees affirm your employer brand and help talent audiences best understand your messages.
Let’s look at an example. Global healthcare leader Pfizer’s EVP is “Own it!” and has four pillars: Purpose, Community, Quality and Progress. Those words alone might not stick with candidates. But when paired with John’s story about a brand new robot innovation that assists patients, it makes it clear to candidates what the Quality looks at Pfizer.
Change Brand Story
Sometimes, an organization needs to transform how an audience perceives their employer brand. This need could come after a negative company event forces a company to rebuild its culture from the inside out. Or, when a company has transformed its business and needs to attract a brand new category of talent.
Due to digital transformations in the financial sector, financial services companies have had to reinvent their employer brands to attract essential tech talent and compete with more established technology companies. With an organizational storytelling approach, Stories Incorporated’s finance industry clients have sourced stories from technologists across specialties, tenures, and experience levels. They’ve talked about the projects they’re working on, why they came and why they stay. These stories are the key to changing perceptions and convincing technical candidates.
Stories helped Discover Financial Services reach early careers technology candidates. Discover knew that recent graduates might think a credit card company could be “stiff” or “boring.” To address these concerns, Discover uncovered stories from employees who have seen the opposite to be true.
Grow Brand Awareness
Some companies have great cultures that no one knows about…yet. If your company culture is stellar but has low employer brand awareness, organizational storytelling is an innovative growth strategy. In addition to uncovering a wealth of content that will widely communicate your universal employer brand, you’ll generate messaging that connects with your niche audiences. Stories from voices throughout your organization bring your culture to life, show what differentiates your workplace from the competition, and build trust with talent.
Stories Inc. worked with Intel to create a series of employee story videos highlighting the experiences of African American women in technology roles.
While the world already knew Intel as a world-class technology innovator, employer brand leaders at the semiconductor company needed to grow brand awareness with African American women in technology. To build strong connections with this audience, Intel worked with Stories Inc. to uncover stories from African American women technologists at Intel about what their experience has been like working there. Stories like this one from LaToya show candidates how working at Intel compares to other tech companies.
Organizational storytelling activates employer brand, helps update your brand’s story, and increases awareness of culture. And, in our full organizational storytelling guide, you can see learn how to use organizational storytelling across departments in your company, to the benefit of multiple stakeholders.
Get the Organizational Storytelling Guide