Your recruitment marketing secret weapon
Psst: it’s employee stories.
With the tight talent market and the swell of uninspiring content for candidates out there, there’s a real opportunity and need for all of us to get better at content and recruitment marketing basics:
- Understanding our audience
- Creating content that engages this audience
- Engaging that audience on a consistent basis
- Testing to see what works
- Repeat!
As recruitment marketers, we have a unique advantage over any other content marketer. We have easy access to the best source of material that allows us to achieve 1-5 effectively and in record time: employees and their stories. Employee stories are the key to becoming a great recruitment marketer (and fast). Here’s why stories are your secret weapon.
Employee stories help you understand your audience
Your audience: candidates who will be successful in your company. To target those people, you have to start by understanding what success actually looks like in your company. Interview employees who are thriving, get to know their motivations and backgrounds, and then create candidate personas based on them.
Secret weapon: You’re already talking to your high performers to create personas. When you add uncovering specific stories (not testimonials) about their experience at your company, you get double mileage for the effort: persona research and recruitment marketing content. Badge unlocked!
Employee stories are engaging content for your audience
Your audience wants real deal insight into what it’s like for your company.
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Your employees are the experts in what it’s like to work for your company
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Your employees also know what it’s like to be a working mother, a traveling nurse, a technology intern… personalizing your recruitment marketing content for your audience in a million different ways.
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Outsiders trust information from employees more than anyone else, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
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Employee stories are the most engaging content for potential candidates. Here’s more reasons!
Employee stories create consistency
It’s more than posting. It’s having a library of content at your fingertips that’s also cohesive visually and substantively. Creating said library sounds like too much work. Enter your secret weapon.
If you have one great story, you can switch the format, edit the length, and extend the life of your story while multiplying your content library — with minimal effort.
Dell took one great story that showed access to leadership and created several pieces of engaging content. Here’s one story four ways.
Stories are easy to test!
Change the format, change the channel, see what works as you build your audience.
Story hack: When you have a large variety of content that is versatile, you don’t need to recreate the wheel when something doesn’t perform the way you thought it would. You’ve got the most engaging content: get back on the social posting (horse equivalent, in this story).
There’s a ton of noise out there. To be an effective recruitment marketer, you have to be great at understanding your audience, creating engaging content for them, and keeping it consistent to build a following. It’s a lot of effort and expertise, but employee stories are your shortcut to success.