Recruitment Marketing Blog

When you’ve decided that you’re going to be intentional about communicating your employer brand through employee experience stories, the next step is to decide who will be featured in your first story. Remember that the objective of employee storytelling is to answer the “Why should I work for you?” question and the answer to that question is different for different people. That means that you have to go for diversity, but to get your first story all you need to do is pinpoint one person.

​Employee experience stories are huge trust builders in your recruiting process. When your employees talk about the value that your company brings to their professional and personal lives through their real life stories, you’re able to engage job candidates while providing them with answers to their “Why should I work for you?” questions. Because stories stimulate empathy, using them in a proactive recruiting process will build relationships with potential candidates, and stir up feelings of good will within your company.

You know a stock photo when you see one, don’t you? Authentic photos of a business and its people are much more effective at nurturing trust and building relationships with potential job candidates and prospects than a generic stock photo. Getting great employee photos, however, takes a lot more effort than just browsing through a library of stock images, and you need to take care to make sure that using real photos of your people will be a good experience for employees and that you’re not violating privacy concerns.

​Would you ever buy a house without walking through it first? Do you think you could make a confident purchase if you weren’t even allowed to peek through the windows? Probably not. Yet that’s what you might be asking your job candidates to do if you don’t use employee testimonials in your recruitment marketing. Employee testimonials give your candidates a window to peek through to see if your company is a good place to work, and if the job you want to fill is right for them.

Technology has made us predictable. We use the same behaviors to explore, discover and research job opportunities that we use when we’re shopping for the products and services we need for our personal and professional lives. We seek out answers to our own questions and by the time we’re ready to contact a business or walk through their door, we have a pretty good idea of what direction we want to go. Asking and finding answers to questions helps us develop confidence that we’re making a good decision.

Once you decide to start a storytelling initiative, it’s time to rally support within your company and get people excited to participate. You’ve already got buy-in from leadership, because they understand how the right talent enables their business strategy. Now you need to get everyone else in the company onboard. This is critical, because you can’t tell employee stories with your employees!.

HR professionals aren’t the only people thinking about recruiting. Recruiting is on the minds of business owners and executives who are tasked with implementing business strategy because they know that their ability to meet their business goals depends in large part on their ability to attract and retain the right talent. Recruiting is more difficult than ever in our low unemployment economy and traditional methods just don’t work like they used to. Part of the answer to getting better recruiting results is to change your approach and become proactive instead of reactive.

​If you have been involved with hiring for your company, you probably know how this scene plays out. You have a position to fill so you post the job. Applicants come in and you screen the candidates for a shortlist, and so on. You end up with a hire that may or may not be a good fit. Time will tell, and hopefully you don’t find yourself filling the same job a few months or even a year or two down the road. 

Think about the actions you take as you research and choose a product or service online. If part of your process includes reading about the experiences of other people, then you’re not alone. In the B2B world, case studies are the most effective content to convert and move prospects along on their buying journey. (Demand Gen) And in the consumer world, 88% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (Search Engine Land) Publishing proof that you’ll do what you say you can do should be in your content strategy. To get started, learn about the difference between case studies, success stories, testimonials and reviews.