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.

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