Social media and employer branding go hand in hand nowadays. It affords businesses of all sizes the ability to showcase their culture, their people, and more importantly, their employer brand.
Don’t believe me? Here are 10 of the best employer branding practitioners around to explain why social media is imperative to your employer brand strategy!
Sarang Brahme
I am a big advocate of social media since I believe that it plays a critical role in listening, engaging and influencing target audience in the most effective manner as it’s a two-way communication platform unlike any other. We need to be active where our employees are and social is at the forefront of our digital lives. It is a fantastic opportunity to build conversations and authentic content-driven employer branding campaigns to attract and engage our talent.
Sarang Brahme, Global Social Recruiting & Talent Brand Manager, Capgemini
Jennifer Johnston
Social Media plays a huge role in employer branding because it paints an authentic and compelling picture of life inside your company. Crafted ad campaigns can’t come close to the connection people can get to our employer brand by searching our hashtag – #SalesforceOhana. Having a hashtag that helps your employees organically and spontaneously share is a marketers’ dream for 3 reasons.
- The impressions are FREE!
- And highly targeted because the people we want to hire are often in our employees’ networks.
- And when their friends like and comment, it amps up employee pride and loyalty.
Jennifer Johnston, Senior Director of Global Employer Branding, Salesforce
Jaclyn Campbell
It’s massive. I spend most of my day around content creation; whether it’s taking photos, interviewing employees for story ideas, or writing blogs, it’s all content that will live on our social media channels. I primarily focus on our corporate LinkedIn page as this is currently the best channel to reach and engage with potential candidates.
Jaclyn Campbell, Employer Brand Consultant, Optus
Ton Rodenburg
To reach and engage with people, social media is by far the best way to achieve this. There is no self respecting communications department nowadays that doesn’t harness the power of social media. It can leverage the social power of employees, connections and communities. Also, due to increasing possibilities in advertising it’s now way easier to target and reach a niche audience or even that one specific person that’s extremely talented. I also foresee a scenario in which social networks facilitate in building true talent pipelines and communities around brand and people, enabling future flexible talent in- and out flux super fluent and easy as never before.
Ton Rodenburg, Employer BrandingStrategy Director, ARA M/V Human Resource Communications
Audra Knight
Audra KnightSocial media is a very cost effective way to get personalized messaging to target audiences. No need to be on every platform that is trendy. Find out where your employees are spending time online (job hunting or not) and put effort into those channels. And get employees involved! Their networks are much larger than your brand channels and people believe other employees more than brand messaging.
Audra Knight, Recruitment Operations Manager, Tenable
Hannah Fleishman
Social media is one of my favorite employer branding platforms for a few reasons. For starters, it’s accessible. Creating content on social media is free, and it meets your audience where they already are: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It can also be a team sport; at HubSpot, we encourage employees to use the hashtag #hubspotlife when sharing an inside look into our culture on their social media accounts. But the best part about using social media for employer branding is authenticity. Social content typically isn’t over-edited or heavily produced; we film many Facebook Live videos with our iPhones and use Canva to create social graphics for free. That’s not only great for teams with limited resources, but it gives candidates a more authentic view of your workplace.
Hannah Fleishman, Inbound Recruiting Manager, HubSpot
Shaunda Zilich
Social media is the number one tool in our online presence that allows us to be transparent and real-time interactive with our direct audience. We are able to cast very specific ‘nets’ and have real-time conversations with the exact talent we are looking to engage. It also allows us to listen, understand, and measure behaviors and sentiment about our companies.
Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, GE
Jörgen Sundberg
Let’s start with the role social media does not play in employer brand; it’s NOT the destination. Rather it’s part of the infrastructure of employer brand activation. There’s a danger of relying too much on social media, marketing metrics are nice but what is the actual impact on your employer brand? Most quality hires will come from referrals, from your career site and maybe even job boards. Social is there and yes it’s good to have a presence but in terms of ROI, it’s not the golden goose the industry was hoping for. Having said that, do use social as a way to amplify your employees’ voices and project the culture on the inside of the business. Just don’t plough a hundred grand into Facebook ads and expect your employer brand to be a success overnight.
Jörgen Sundberg, Employer Brand Consultant & CEO, Link Humans
Carmen Collins
Sales people use something called the “Sales Funnel” to help them see what tactics to use at different stages of the buying journey. Our team uses this same funnel when looking at the role social media plays in our employer branding. The top of the funnel is “Awareness” – and social spends a lot of time in this area. Cisco had a lot of work to do here, because people thought we were a boring, corporate dinosaur. Through amplifying our employee voices in social media, we’re able to up our “trust” factor and make people aware of us as a great place to work. Then, on the “consideration” piece of the funnel, we look to drive interactions with our employee stories in social media. We’re telling the story, but are people listening? Remember, there are multiple interactions involved before someone makes the decision to apply. Social media plays a role there as well in the “decision” part of the funnel. If we’re not driving traffic to careers and applies through the pipeline, how are we to prove our worth to the business?
Carmen Collins, Social Media Lead & Talent Brand, Cisco
Estela Vazquez Perez
Social media democratizes opportunity. You do not need to arrive first, sign up first or be in the inner circle to learn and take advantage of what companies are offering. If we associate all the exciting things happening inside the company to the relevant conversation out there, we have a powerful formula for success. Social media helps employer brands be relevant and deliver information on time when it is most needed. If nobody is looking for the themes you are interested in bringing out to the latent market, you can still associate and contribute to the hashtags of the cool brands in the conversations – if not a trademarked option. Social media is the channel to communicate now days, providing you have a mature source of content to send your traffic to explore more.
Estela Vazquez Perez, Global Employment Brand Director, Royal Bank of Canada
