When it comes to talent attraction, some organisations have more work to do than others, particularly those in established institutions with lackluster brand perceptions. Two well-known brands have taken employer branding into their own hands with two effective strategies.
Employee advocacy as an employer branding strategy can have a huge impact on your talent attraction efforts. Ryan Erksine reporting for Forbes demonstrates how using video and LinkedIn’s employee engagement platform, Elevate, have worked in tandem to deliver impressive results for Wells Fargo and Delta.
Financial institution Wells Fargo has transformed public perception about what it means to work for them through employer branding. They began by reinstating their commitment to innovation in order to meet the demands of their increasingly online-focused customer base.
Online banking has seen Wells Fargo transition to mobile banking and cardless ATMs, which increased their need for digitally skilled talent. They started hiring less customer service representatives and more software engineers and IT security specialists. However, this was a challenge in itself, with other tech-focused organisations attracting their share of the demographic.
The problem led them to launch a new initiative:
“Wells Fargo started making videos for recruiters to use in their recruiting efforts. The videos highlighted the company’s benefits, commitment to diversity, community outreach and on-the-job training. It was a way for recruiters to show applicants what it means to work at Wells Fargo.
“The videos were a big hit… but eventually we [realised] we can only do so much storytelling ourselves. If we’re not going to leverage the power of our team members, we’re missing out on the biggest opportunity we have to let people know what it means to work here.”
The popularity of these videos led them to film staff members in their everyday work lives, creating employee advocates in the process. The content generated lots of interest on LinkedIn’s employee engagement tool, Elevate, increasingly their popularity with both employees and potential job applications.
Forbes explained how Delta utilises a similar strategy, intentionally creating great content and encouraging their employees to share it. The primary purpose of this is to recruit top talent:
“To do that effectively, Delta needs to project what employee profiles it will find most valuable in six, twelve, or eighteen months and develop a content and advocacy strategy to best attract those roles. We held contests for our recruiters to gamify effective employee engagement activities… Rewriting job descriptions, sharing content on LinkedIn, that kind of thing. It was equal parts social media engagement and gamification of the recruiting role.
“[This strategy] empowered recruiters to become brand ambassadors and armed them with the tools they needed to do their jobs more effectively in a digital economy. Delta’s goal is to give their employees the same competitive advantage.”
Results were tangible. By fostering employee advocacy, both brands increased their online engagement, attracted top professionals and made great hires.
In measuring their return on investment, Wells Fargo tracked data on Elevate to determine the people engaging with them, whether they applied for a role, whether they were hired, and which piece of content played a role in the process. New hires could then be directly attributed to their efforts.
Employee advocacy is not without its challenges. Organisations looking to replicate these employer branding initiatives must contend with whether to focus on content creation or a distribution platform, as one is not effective without the other. Even though organisations can generate company-approved content, it can still be risky to go from having a small number of brand representatives to hundreds. In the end, these two brands decided the benefits outweighed the risks.
How do you empower employee advocates? Let us know in the comments.
Source
How Top Brands Are Using Employee Advocacy To Rebrand Themselves And Recruit Top Talent
Ryan Erksine
Forbes