How to Turn Your Employees into Employer Brand Ambassadors
Wouldn’t it be great if you could hire people specifically to advance your employer brand, telling people why your company is a great place to work? Well, guess what – you already have.
Your employees can be the best advocates for your employer brand. According to the Harvard Business Review, job seekers trust the word of current employees over other recruitment communications. While it’s true that you can’t control what your employees think and say about your company, three things can help you encourage your employees to become active employer brand advocates:
1. Be Open and Honest
Who are you as a company – and who do you want to be? What kind of people represent your corporate culture? Are there adjectives that describe the experience of working there? What image and feeling should your work environment evoke? The answers will help you define your employer brand. Ask your team members what they think and feel. Listen to them and determine which perceptions to highlight, as well as whether any common perceptions could be a problem that you need to address. Likewise, be transparent about your efforts so that employees can feel part of the brand definition process.
2. Be Clear and Simple
As you talk to people throughout your company, you’re going to get a lot of input and information. Avoid the temptation of including everything they say. Encapsulate the identity you want to communicate as simply and clearly as you can. Use your top-line employer brand message regularly, so that it feels natural. And above all, clearly communicate the brand to team members so that it feels right to them.
3. Make it easy
Talk to your employees about the importance of bringing in the right people for your business – and the role that your employer brand plays in that effort. Create shareable content for social media that reinforces your employer brand, release it on a regular schedule and provide links that make it easy for employees to share on blogs and across multiple social platforms. Of course, these posts should include employment opportunities, but even when you don’t have open positions to share, develop content that reflects your employer brand, for instance:
- If your brand is about making a difference, take photos that capture employees doing that.
- Encourage storytelling with prompts and questions that help people share their experiences and encourage them to share those stories on employer review sites.
- Consider making an employer brand video that you can show at career fairs, as well as on your careers website.
- Think about what useful online tools you could offer to the kinds of people you would want to attract to your business.
Finally, include your employees in talent acquisition efforts through incentive programs and by involving them in the onboarding of new co-workers.
Engaging your employees as brand ambassadors does require ongoing effort, but the rewards are worth it. Attracting and hiring the right candidates becomes easier. Recruitment costs go down. Employee loyalty and engagement go up – and companies with high employee engagement have nearly four times the earning potential of companies that lack it. And both business results and customer satisfaction improve.
Download our employer branding guide or reach out to us anytime. We savor opportunities to help professionals make a difference in their talent acquisition and business results by improving their brands.
At Relish Marketing, our fusion of creative and strategy unlocks your brand and propels it forward.
Savor your brand. View our brand development client work. Work with us! Contact here.
The Employer Branding Journey: Beyond Talent Acquisition
Most HR and marketing leaders agree that investing in and nurturing an employer brand is essential, especially in today’s tight candidate-driven market. The error that many make, however, is thinking of their employer brand as talent acquisition only. The truth is that your employer brand only works when it’s present and thriving at every stage of the employee lifecycle - from candidate to employee to alumni.
Each stage of the employee’s journey has its own specific communication channels, challenges and opportunities. Skip or ignore any of them and you may miss critical chances to improve recruitment efforts, engage existing employees, increase productivity, strengthen long-term retention and reinforce your position as an employer of choice.
Employer Branding Journey
Stage 1: Awareness
Before you can attract candidates, they must become aware of your business. This often starts with the consumer experience – but awareness of your business as a potential employer comes from social media, word of mouth, your career website and recruitment events such as college and career fairs. Your employer brand should be deliberately infused through all of these communications media – including leveraging your employees as ambassadors for the employer brand.
Stage 2: Attraction
Once people become aware of your company as a potential employer, the next step is to make sure you’re attracting the right people. Enable candidates to see themselves reflected in the messages you weave through employee testimonials, videos, social posts and online content. Continually assess how your company is portrayed on LinkedIn, job search platforms like Indeed, Monster and CareerBuilder, and on review sites such as Glassdoor and kununu.
Stage 3: Recruitment
At this stage, candidates are solidly within your business ecosystem. Help key personnel within your organization understand, embrace and comfortably communicate the messages of your employer brand. This means training your HR team, but also anyone who engages with candidates from offer generation and hiring to onboarding and training. It’s also important to not stop advocating the components of your employer brand when you decide someone is not the right fit for a job. Maybe the first role isn’t the right fit but an upcoming position is. Even a single sour experience can turn candidates off and spread via social media and word of mouth.
Stage 4: Retention
If your awareness, attraction and recruiting efforts are generating successful hires, congratulations! Now, it’s time to continue finding ways to keep the components of your employer brand alive and well for your actual employees. That means actively listening to the things that are most important to them and making sure that your employer brand aligns with supporting HR policies, systems and internal messaging. How you communicate about career mobility and advancement, learning and development opportunities and performance management says a lot about your employer brand. Are employees crystal clear on how their performance is measured and their options for career growth? Do they know which skills are most important for success and can they easily access the necessary tools and resources? Is there ongoing communication about the company’s priorities and performance so that employees can support them? Are employees inspired by what the company does and are they empowered to make a difference? And most importantly, do they feel valued enough to stick around?
Remind employees why they love working for you now more than ever. Because happy, engaged employees are more productive. Even when employees leave – by their choice or yours – your exit interview and alumni communications can keep them feeling positive about the kind of company you are. Ex-employees can become some of your best employer brand ambassadors!
Stage 5: Evolution
Your business is dynamic and your employer brand must keep pace. Assess your employer brand regularly against key performance indicators. Actively listen both internally and externally to what people are saying about your company and what it’s like to really work there. Examine how well your messages and objectives match the actual experiences of candidates and employees. Reinforce the positive components and determine where adjustments are needed for the employer brand to meet organizational objectives.
Put it all together and it’s easy to see why a successful employer brand encompasses so much more than talent acquisition. When managed across the continuum from candidate to employee to alumni, your employer brand can generate significant benefits – in the form of a better candidate pool, more successful new hires, and better engaged employees.
At Relish Marketing, our fusion of creative and strategy unlocks your brand and propels it forward. Savor your brand. View our client work. Work with us! Contact here.
It's the Most Pumpkin Spiced Time of the Year
It’s Baaaaaack…
It’s Fall, y’all. How do I know? Not by the calendar, although Fall did technically start on September 22 this year. Not by the colorful leaves and a nip in the air - it’s still hot, humid and green here in the ATL. It isn’t the spooky Halloween decorations in stores and scary movies on TV, either. No, you can tell it’s Fall by the ubiquitous return of the single biggest hit of Autumn: pumpkin spice.
It’s easy to see that the availability of pumpkin spiced flavored and scented items has exploded over the years. In fact, this blog post was inspired by a casual chat about this very topic one day in the Relish studio, and everybody has an opinion – and strong ones at that.
My curiosity was piqued, and I couldn’t help myself. I kicked into full on investigative mode to discover what I could about this autumnal wonder and how people feel about the pumpkin-madness.
WTPS?[*]
First, what is pumpkin spice anyway? Surprisingly the spice concoction doesn’t typically involve pumpkin at all, but the spices you would use to flavor your pumpkin pie or similar treats, including cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and ginger, and in some cases allspice and mace.
As for the craze, I think it’s safe to say that the pumpkin spice trend took off 14 years ago with the introduction of, you guessed it, the pumpkin spice Latte (PSL for you hipsters). It started in early 2003 when the Starbucks R&D team began working on a fall drink that they hoped might one day be as successful as their two winter espressos - the Eggnog Latte and Peppermint Mocha. Later that year, the PSL launched at 100 stores in the coffee giant’s Vancouver and Washington, DC test markets, with a complete US launch the following year. And what a launch it was – Starbucks is estimated to make about $100 million in revenue each fall from PSLs alone.
PSL Fun Facts:
- One of the original ideas for the name was “Fall Harvest Latte.”
- PSL was the original beverage code written by baristas on cups.
- The beverage is now sold in over 50 countries and 6 continents.
- Tweets with the #PSL average about 3,000 per day; PSL also has its own Twitter account.
What About Pumpkin Spiced Relish?
I was on a roll. And with all that history and trivia in my head, I had to know - is the Relish team for or against PSL?
Sorry Starbucks, the majority are anti-PSL. But how about pumpkin spice in other things?
A little more love for the pumpkin, generally speaking! True, 25% of us are a clear NOPE. But the rest enjoy the flavor in their pumpkin pie (60%), other baked goods (50%) and even their beer (20%)!
Is Pumpkin Spice EVERYWHERE?
In the words of Peter Dukes, the product manager who led development of the PSL, “Nobody knew back then what it would grow to be. It’s taken on a life of its own.” No kidding, and not just for Starbucks. The Pumpkin Spiced Latte inspired an entirely new market of pumpkin flavored and scented items.
My curiosity wouldn’t quit. I had to know more. A short jaunt through my local grocery store turned into a fun treasure hunt of sorts. It didn’t take long until I had a camera roll full of all things pumpkin (along with a couple of side-eye stares).
First, I found this Starbucks display. No surprise here:
But it didn’t stop there. Here’s just a small sample of all that I found:
And online, there was even more! The People’s Comprehensive Guide to All the Pumpkin Spice-Flavored Foods Out This Year lists more than 30 new pumpkin spiced products released this year alone. Then, there’s this entertaining (or for some, maybe disgusting) list: 65 Foods that have No Business being Pumpkin Spiced.
So why so much pumpkin spice? Is it the flavor alone? Is it the feeling you get knowing that your favorite autumn holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving are just around the corner? As consumers are we simply just drawn to things that are only available for a “limited time?” Or is it just smart marketing?
Whatever the answer, whether it delights you or scares you, pumpkin spice is here to stay.
At Relish Marketing, our fusion of creative and strategy unlocks your brand and propels it forward.
Savor your brand. View our client work. Work with us! Contact here.