Employee Branding: Turn Your Staff Into Co-Recruiters

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Contents

• Find your brand advocates in your own ranks
• What is employee branding?
• What are the benefits of employee branding?
• How do job seekers feel about employee branding?
• Employee branding: there are drawbacks too
• Conclusion: everything in the right measure
• Frequently asked questions

TL;DR

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Employee branding turns your staff into authentic brand advocates who share open roles across their own networks. This feels more credible than paid influencer marketing, lowers your time to hire and usually brings in candidates who are a better fit. Studies point to a high response rate and a strong fit among the candidates you win this way. That said, employee branding should be used in moderation so it does not put the diversity of your company at risk.

!Employees share their employer's open roles across their own social networks. A picture for employee branding and referrals in recruiting.

Author: Dominik Becker · Published: February 16, 2022

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Have you heard about the latest trend in recruiting? Some companies bring in influencers to promote their employer brand. It might be a well-meant idea. But we ask ourselves: why pay for an expensive influencer instead of the brand advocates who can actually tell people something real about your company? Your own people! Through employee branding, they can turn into job influencers. How exactly that works, and what speaks for and against it, is what we will walk you through now.

As the provider of an HR software, we take a keen interest in current trends in recruiting. But one morning, while we were once again combing the usual HR blogs for new topics, one of them nearly made us spill our morning coffee in surprise. In an article that was genuinely interesting to read, the topic of influencer marketing in recruiting came up.

The idea: many influencers on YouTube or Instagram enjoy an above-average following, especially in Generation Z. So why should they only get young digital natives excited about fashion? Why not about an employer, too? The influencers would introduce a company and its people through videos and authentic images.

Find your brand advocates in your own ranks

We do not think the idea is bad in principle. After all, we also believe that recruiters should think like marketers when it comes to marketing open jobs. And part of that is engaging with the influencer topic. Still, you should not simply copy every idea from product marketing one to one into the world of recruiting. And in our view, that is exactly the case here.

Every digital native knows that influencers do not do their job for free. They get paid. And that leaves a bit of a bad taste. How authentic and believable is it still when an advertising pro praises a company for its employer branding, but cashes in nicely for doing so?

What is employee branding?

The idea of influencer marketing in recruiting is definitely not a bad one. But it works best when believable testimonials share a company's messages, for example on social media. Not for money, but because they are convinced through and through of what an employer stands for. And who could be better suited for that than the people you work with every day: your own team?

Okay, okay, they do not have the reach of a well-known influencer on social media, and they are not followed by millions of people. But they, too, have accounts on Instagram, Facebook and the like, and they can share job postings and impressions from the company across their networks just as well. Taken together, that adds up to considerable reach, too. The difference is that these posts come across as maximally authentic. Because here it is real employees vouching for their employer. That is how simple employee branding can be.

What are the benefits of employee branding?

Studies such as the Recruiting Trends by the University of Bamberg confirm again and again that employee branding in the form of employee referral programs comes with plenty of benefits:

• Because the recommendations carry so much credibility, the response rate on the posts is usually above average. Someone interested in a new job is happy to click on a job posting shared by an employee they know personally. That is not only better than paying an influencer for such posts. It is also better than pushing out job postings through the company's Facebook page, for example. People simply prefer talking to people over talking to brands.
• Since your employees share roles within their own circle, they recommend open jobs to a group of people they know and who tend to be similar to themselves. So candidates from your employees' circle usually fit your company well. Your colleagues thereby take on part of the pre-screening for you, and you can hire talent faster. The effect: your time to hire drops.
• On top of that, employee referrals reach more than just talent that is actively looking for a job. With their posts on social media, employees also reach people who may have been toying with the idea of switching jobs for a while, so-called passive candidates. And then your job posting arrives right on cue.

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How do job seekers feel about employee branding?

That employee referrals hold enormous potential and go down well with job seekers is also shown by a representative survey from the career portal Monster, for which a total of 2,103 people were interviewed together with YouGov. The result:

• Across all age groups, roughly four in ten (39 percent) of respondents have landed a job through personal contacts at some point.
• And in younger age groups, finding a new role through personal connections works considerably better than for older ones.
• In the survey, almost half (48 percent) of 25- to 34-year-olds said they had once found a job through their social circle. In the 55+ age group, that figure was only 33 percent.

Employee branding: there are drawbacks too

So it is clear: if you tap into the power of your employees' recommendations, you can quickly build on your recruiting success. To give your employees an incentive to share job postings or glimpses of your company even more, you can create social media challenges, similar to the Ice Bucket Challenge. You can find out more in the video above. On top of that, you can thank your colleagues with a special incentive for every successful hire. There is hardly a better way to show your appreciation.

But be careful. You should not overdo recruiting through employee branding, or rather employee referral programs. Because there are also drawbacks associated with them. For example: if you tap into your employees' personal networks unusually often, you end up recruiting from one and the same talent pool over and over. You keep reaching people with similar interests and hobbies. That undermines the diversity in your company, which is not a good thing when taken too far. Because organizations with a diverse workforce are demonstrably more innovative.

Conclusion: everything in the right measure

So our conclusion is this: employee branding, also known as employee referrals, offers big opportunities and is absolutely worth recommending in the right dose. There are no more authentic advocates for your company than your own workforce.

And the contract with the Instagram influencer? Steer well clear of it. Invest that budget in your own people instead. That way they feel valued, feel like part of the bigger picture and stay with your company longer. It is not only more effective and more authentic, but in the long run also cheaper. Because influencer contracts are usually not made to last forever.