Creating Employer Brand Content that Moves People

Creating Employer Brand Content that Moves People What content pulls on the heartstrings and really moves people? This week we chat with Will Staney, founder and CEO  Proactive Talent all about creating engaging content for employer branding. Have a listen to our chat below, keep reading for a summary and dont forget to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast. What is your approach to employer branding content in recruitment? Its all about content. Its what feeds the engine. Its the fuel. Without great content, its harder for candidates to really select in or out of your hiring process. Its harder to attract top talent in your company, and engage your current workforce. Without content, you cant tell your story. It takes a mix of content as well. It needs video and  pictures to really give a transparent look at your company content, really good, authentic content is essential. But its not always easy to do. What is a  step-by-step guide to achieving success with employer branding? Tip 1: Is developing your content strategy. This is being very intentional about what kind of content is going to resonate with our audience. That includes building out talent personas, and doing some research, talking to your current employees. Where do they go to get their news? What are their interests? What bands do they listen to? All these interests help you to develop the kind of content, and the persona that does well at your organization. You can then take that data, and other  data like, what kind of roles are we hiring for? What are our high priority hiring initiatives right now? You take all that and you start to build your content strategy that helps fuel those initiatives. Employer brand and recruiting marketing strategies should tie into the actual business initiatives at your company. You align talent acquisition to the true strategic mission and objectives of your company, and you get proactive about it. You start to notice that talent acquisition and employer brandi ng starts getting more of a seat at the table because the business starts to understand. With content, you take this and then you start to build out an editorial calendar. Tip 2: Is to engage and build excitement. Your content should be something that is helping to elicit an emotional response, both internally with your own employees where it gives them that warm feeling of  pride when they watch that cool employee highlight video, or someone externally  learns something new about the company. When you can change perceptions or really engage and pull peoples heart-strings around the mission of your company, that is when you win. And so, Tip 3: Is providing accessible content and an experience. In other words, look at the different channels where youre posting certain content. Some content works well in other channels and not in others. For example blogs. People read maybe 28% of the words in a blog post. So you have to make sure that the content is very concise and that they can pull your key points in six seconds. Then you want to make your content really consumable. So maybe thats a video. Or maybe, you want to do a quick Facebook Live, or Periscope, or Twitter Video of a live, real event thats happening. That makes it really accessible  and youre giving people an experience like theyre right there watching it. Tip 4: Make it visual. People remember images six times easier than text. So whenever you can add really great, humanizing photos or videos in the blogs that youre talking about. Visuals are really powerful for helping to elicit that emotional response and to really give people an inside look. Tip 5: Is leveraging employee-generated content. The great thing is you have all these employees, especially if youre a bigger company and you have a lot of different offices. If youre an employer brand person, or a recruiter whos tasked with doing employer branding, you cant be everywhere at once.  So youve got to build an army of ambassadors, an army of employer brand agents that are out there capturing some content for you, and sending it in to you. This does two things. It allows you to get a variety of real content from real people, and your content starts looking like the other content that your friends see in their social feeds. It blends in, it doesnt look like marketing, it looks authentic. The other is that it empowers employees to be a part of telling what your employer brand and what their experience is. Employees love it. They like seeing the content they created being featured on a major corporate account, its really exciting for them. So leveraging employee-generated content is awesome. Have fun with it, create campaigns, and  competitions. When I was at SAP, we did this big selfie competition to really promote our new Instagram page when we launched it for life at SAP. And it was a huge hit. We did the same thing with our client GoDaddy where they did a #GoDaddylife. And now, there are hundreds of awesome employee photos about what they love about working there, all over Instagram. Tip 6: Is measuring your results. When it comes to employer branding, tracking your engagement rate is really important. What percentage of your audience thats following you on social, LinkedIn,  Glassdoor, are actually engaging with your content? That tells you how good and how engaging your content is.  Are your employees engaging with that content? Are they liking it? A  main goal of employer branding is to increase awareness of you as an employer. The total number of reach is good way of measuring this. Whats the number of people who have been exposed to our employer brand on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis? Overall shares are a really good metric to look at the quality of your content. If it was so good that they shared it with their whole network, then thats awesome. When it comes to the effectiveness of good employer branding and your organization, looking at things like retention rate is a really good indicator of the strength of your employer brand and your culture, that people are engaged, staying longer, and theyre enjoying the experience. That can be a really strong correlation. If the number of applicants go down, but the quality of each applicant is getting better, thats a good indication that youre doing a great job of employer branding, thats giving them enough information that they can really self-select in or out of your process. Youve probably seen some of the employer brand videos by our client GE.  They did one that went out on the Oscars. This is just a good example of a company whose corporate marketing and employer branding teams are coming together to help change the perception of them not only as a company, but change perceptions as an employer. They did a video that  was like imagine a world where female engineers and scientists were treated like movie stars. What if they were on the cover of the magazines and they were the ones that you see in the news. It really pulled the heart-strings when they announced they were committed to hiring 20,000 women in STEM by 2020. View this post on Instagram The women of #GE Aviation Headquarters in Evendale, OH are giving us major #SquadGoals. Currently, technical and #engineering sectors still have a significant gender gap. To meet future needs, improve productivity and transform the industry, a gender diverse talent pool is necessary. Join the GE squad on our journey to #BalanceTheEquation with 50:50 gender representation in entry-level technical roles by 2020. Lets sky-rocket the quality of #innovation. Head to our story to see what advice women across GE have for others interested in STEM. Happy #InternationalWomensDay. Photo by @seenewphoto A post shared by General Electric (@generalelectric) on Mar 8, 2017 at 8:59am PST Theres going to be a whole series coming out in a couple of months that we did for GE Digital, where its just real employees in a documentary style, talking about their experience, what they do, and how the products that theyre building has real world effect. I interviewed for a video, at GE Digital, an engineer who grew up in Haiti. And he was in high school when those massive tsunami and earthquakes happened. It was devastating. And after that happened, he was really interested in STEM and engineering, and he made a commitment to himself that he was going to go out there and try to use and build software that would help predict these disasters better in the future. Now  hes an engineer at GE Digital, building the IoT mobile platform that allows people in these third-world countries that have little access to electricity or internet to have better predictability of natural disasters. It was amazing. I cried interviewing this kid because hes telling me Im here and I built this. And he won this huge innovation award. And he got to go home to his parents and say, I went and I built something that will make life better for my family and friends in Haiti. I thought  Wow. I want to work here. I want to be a part of something like that. Its just amazing. Those are the type of stories that are real, and they exist in your company if you go out and ask the right questions. Pulling at the heart-strings is totally doable. Every human being has a great story. Follow Will on  Twitter @willstaney, and remember to subscribe to the  Employer Branding Podcast.