By Phil Strazzulla
What’s employee generated content?
Employee generated content is exactly what it sounds like: your employees talking about what it’s like to work at your company. It takes the form of tweets, blog posts, their LinkedIn descriptions, conversations with friends… you get the idea.
The magic of EGC is that it’s much cheaper than what marketing puts together, but can be so much more effective!
Employees have the content talent cares about
Do you ever feel like you’re playing telephone when you’re describing a role? Are you recruiting engineers and trying to explain your tech team’s scrum meetings to a potential candidate? Are you hiring for sales and not 100% sure what solution selling is?
Your employees speak the same language as talent. They also know 100% of the content that talent cares about – what do you ACTUALLY do day to day, what skills will I learn, what are specific stories of career paths, what do you do after work as a team… Plus, they know what Node.js is, have funny cold calling stories, etc.
What’s more – your employees have already answered these questions 100x to their friend who was interested in your company, or during an interview.
Talent trusts employees
No offense, but HR has an incentive to sell people into a role. And, when marketing gets involved it’s quite obvious from the tone of the messaging. This makes talent a bit weary. Do you 100% trust sales people or commercials?
But, your employees are authentic. They don’t have much of an agenda when they’re sharing information about their backgrounds, their job, etc. I can trust an employee on a webcam, I can’t trust the video with background music and everyone smiling as they play ping pong.
Research has shown that an authentic video has a 2x higher engagement than a typical marketing video. That’s pretty awesome, especially considering the cost of the marketing video is 10x or more! Who doesn’t want to pay less for better results?
EGC and employer branding
Clearly, every time one of your employees talks/tweets/etc about you, it’s a reflection of your brand. As an HR professional, it’s your job to harness this power and focus it on accomplishing your goals of attracting top talent.
56% of your employees already talk about you on social. There are many more that could be activated if done in the right way. Stay tuned for part 2 to find out how to get your employees to actually generate content that is useful for your efforts, without bribing them.
