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We recently welcomed Shannon Edwards to the team as a Project Manager, Content Strategist and Diversity and Inclusion subject matter expert. Prior to joining Stories Inc., Shannon worked with an in-house media team to create employer branding content. Here’s advice from Shannon on why you need a recruitment marketing agency for content — namely, Stories Incorporated — for your next employer branding and recruitment marketing videos and stories.

An important part of your job as a recruitment marketer is to communicate culture through media, and sometimes your in-house team can help make your vision come true. But many times, you still may need to engage an outside content creation team to achieve your big candidate attraction and engagement goals. In fact, almost all of our clients have in-house production resources. 

Before joining Stories Incorporated, I helped build out the Inclusion and Diversity function at a Fortune 500 healthcare company. I used whatever was available to me to create content about employee experience and worked closely with our in-house media, communications, and talent acquisition teams. 

In retrospect, I wish I had known then what I know now — and I’m excited to share my thoughts with you. 

Here are my top four reasons why you need a recruitment marketing agency for content, like Stories Incorporated, for your next employer branding project.    

1. Bandwidth, Bandwidth, Bandwidth

Recruitment marketing and talent brand practitioners like yourself are always  managing multiple projects at once. It’s hard to juggle everything on your task list! On the other hand,  in-house marketing, creative, and production teams are dedicated to your company’s customer marketing efforts. This causes your important (and sometimes deadline-driven) employer branding and talent acquisition projects to be prioritized behind customer marketing plans.

At Stories Inc. we are experts in culture communication and marketing. We understand what candidates, employees, and other stakeholders (including customers) need to know in order to choose your company over all the others. We specialize in communicating your unique culture, so that your audiences have the information to make their important decisions, like where to apply. We know how to uncover these important stories and tell them to the specific audience you’re trying to reach. 

2. Jack-of-all-Trades vs. Dream Team

In-house teams often have limited specialists compared to the recruitment marketing content studio team you have access to at Stories Inc. In-house professionals are often asked to take on all administrative and creative tasks. From scheduling and conducting employee interviews, filming, editing footage and designing graphics, video projects are a huge undertaking. At Stories, each project is assigned a dedicated project manager and creative professionals. This ensures that you have not only meaningful content and curation but the best video quality. 

Additionally we peer-review every client video. That’s right, every one. At Stories we believe in championing diverse perspectives by having weekly meetings in which each project manager gives feedback on client drafts.This allows our clients to benefit from the experience of all of our project managers, on top of the check-in meeting and unlimited edits we provide our clients. This makes certain that our pillar of excellence is upheld in every video we produce. 

3. Tunnel Vision vs. Scope

In-house teams are often too close to the target to provide a full and complete view of your culture content needs. An internal team tasked with creating a company culture video might do so with laser focus, but bring a narrower vision to the project. At Stories Incorporated we have better scope because we’re consultants, we will take time to pitch ideas back to our clients. 

Stories project managers are trained to view the bigger picture for you. Each client is assigned a project manager who will help your company fully strategize the content. Together, you might land on a content plan that differs from your starting request and better suits your company’s culture content and recruitment needs. All of our project managers are not only experts in employee and organizational storytelling, but they also have expertise in internal communications, employer brand management, talent acquisition, diversity/inclusion, and more. 

4. A Product That You Love

Low bandwidth, lack of niche expertise and tunnel vision can all result in products that aren’t compelling, high-quality content. You should have a product that you love. Why should you have to settle? At Stories Incorporated, we believe in pouring excellence into every product we produce. When your content needs meet our team’s dedication, expertise, and unique facilitated employee storytelling experience, the result is a professional product that’s love-worthy, and your employees, leadership team, and candidates will love it too. 

In summary, Stories Inc. has the resources and expertise that in-house capabilities can lack. Since joining the Stories Inc. Project Team,  I see the missed employee branding opportunities in my past role. I realize we could have curated additional content from footage we already had, and how our communications could have been more impactful.

In a time when company culture videos are more important than ever, and videos are often the first impression candidates have about working at your company, why leave anything to chance?

Feeling inspired to create content from employee stories? Get our guide to the top 10 recruitment marketing stories to capture now.